I’ve been chair of the Fabric and Finance committee at Holy Trinity Church in Barrow upon Soar for over a decade and have assisted a number of churchwardens in the early years before being elected as a churchwarden myself in 2020, a position I’ve remain in since. My professional background is engineering, specifically electronics and software, but I’ve always had an interest in everything mechanical too. Naturally, the engineering mind leads me more the practical side of fabric upkeep within the church and we’re lucky that our team of churchwardens at Holy Trinity (we are three, because we also cover St Mary’s in Walton-en-le-Wolds) have very complementary strengths which allow us to cover the wide range of responsibilities this post requires.

Until 2023, we had a committed tower captain who we’d worked closely with over a number of years. The upkeep of bells, bell frames and associated bits and pieces wasn’t really a thing on our radar – only occasionally would I need to venture above the belfry to tend to a flag, sweep up a bit or fix up a bit of bird-netting in the louvres, and as long as we’d arranged for bells to be down I had no real engagement with the bells themselves – I literally wouldn’t have known a stay from a slider! In 2022, I oversaw the refurbishment of the bell frame at St Mary’s in Walton-en-le-Wolds following concerns raised about its condition in the previous quinquennial inspection but still my focus was on paint specifications and coverage rather than the bells hanging within the frame.

As we came further out of the pandemic years and looked forward to a coronation in 2023 for HM King Charles III, my focus still wasn’t on bells despite the huge push to recruit for “Ring for the King!”. Instead, I was focussed on music in the church, helping develop our recently formed worship band and assisting one of our other churchwardens, Kath, in her organisation of a grand coronation concert in church showcasing local musicians, school groups and other performers in a celebration of British music and culture. Involving our band of bellringers in this and other festival events at Holy Trinity has always been important to us; our annual Christmas Tree festival always starts with ringing before the grand opening. We’d both been musically involved in a performance of Carl Jenkins “The Armed Man” earlier in the year and Kath was keen to include excerpts from this into the coronation concert. For those familiar with this magnificent composition, you might remember that the end movement Better is Peace features the choir singing “Ring, ring, ring, ring!” in a melodic bell like fashion. Kath had the idea that it would be great to have our actual church bells joining in this jubilant finale and I was tasked with the technical delivery of this which included relaying the sound of the church bells into the nave (like many churches, they are not loud in the building), working our what our ringers could actually make the bells do, what pitch bells would compliment the music and finally, how on earth they would be signalled to start at the right time! After a lot of trial and error we pulled it off for the concert and got to know a bit more about bells and bellringing in the process.

A few months later, in the summertime, we heard that our tower captain and his family of ringers would be leaving the village before the end of the year. This created a gap in our capacity to keep the bells ringing for services on Sundays, let alone any of these special events and festivals. At this stage I still had no intention of learning to ring, but did conclude that learning to handle a bell, so it could be safely lowered, would be a useful skill as I would need to extend my remit as churchwarden to include the upkeep of the tower. In parallel, one of our senior and experienced ringers in the band, Andy Boston, had also decided to start teaching in order to rebuild the gap in the band, and had engaged the support of Sally Brown in doing this. I came along to join the learning at the beginning of November and have since progressed through to LtR Level 2 and my first QP in mid-March. Kath also started learning at the same time, also now at LtR Level 2 and first QP imminent!

All the fun of learning to ring aside, the responsibility of tower upkeep was still very much in my mind as we came into this new-year and I was nominated as “steeple keeper” at the ringers AGM. Consequently, I was excited to see that Taylor’s bell foundry were organising a course entitled “How to look after your bell tower” which was going to be held in early February. It was a perfect match and I enrolled immediately! Kath also got a last-minute place on the course and so we headed up to Nottingham on the train to see what it was all about.

The course, which was supported by Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust and the National Lottery Heritage Fund, was presented by Simon Adams from Taylor’s and Paul Mason who is the tower keeper at St Mary’s in the Lacemarket, where the course was hosted. The presentation topics covered subjects such as bell frame maintenance and inspection through to maintenance and monitoring of bells, clappers, wheels and stays. We looked at a number of cases of poor bell rig maintenance which had resulted in costly and difficult repairs to the bell frame as well as the actual tower fabric, a lot of which can be avoided by spotting simple signs in the rig early on such as corrosion and movement. The following session looked more at the bells and associated simple maintenance checks on the components from the stays and sliders through to play in the clappers and lubrication of bearings.

Beyond the formal course content, the breaks provided an opportunity to meet other people who’d travelled from all over the UK (as far as Cumbria and Devon) who also are interested in the upkeep of church bells and towers. It was good to see so many people passionate about the upkeep of our nation’s bell towers and learning new skills along the way. Many of us were keen to show one another pictures of “our” belfries, discussing various nuances and challenges of each of them, while building our networks of like-minded people to call on in a future dilemma!

A final highlight of the day was getting a tour of the tower at St Mary’s, including accessing the belfry and tower roof. The space, lighting and cleanliness of all the spaces is something to aspire to in the upkeep of our own tower for the pleasure of our own band of ringers, visiting bands and all those who love the sound of the bells to enjoy for future generations to come.

Jez Bowman