Do they all know each other? Because otherwise that is unexpected.
Cool fact, though.
I hope you meant “got to know” !
I used to ring church bells. We had a tower captain.
Yeah they do, but that’s not how we met them. I apologize for the complexity of what follows, not helped by anonymization. All of this relates to one specific church.
J&L we’ve known for ages through cricket, but we only recently found out that one of their sons had been a bell ringer (and he knew D)
J&N are friends of J&L - they were involved in bell ringing (and are the parents of D)
M&M are my allotment neighbors. One M was a bell ringer (and so knew D) and the other is the church musical director and organist.
Our pals C&E’s wedding photographer was D.
So we knew or had met all these people apart from D (who was, of course, a bell ringer, and who we knew of through everybody - very strange. He seemed oddly central to my life for somebody I had never met.)
You’ll be pleased to know we have since met him on numerous occasions, and he’s very nice.
j
Sigh. That’s what happens when I post on my phone.
And - see? I keep meeting bell ringers! 
j
Do British bell ringers still do physical work when ringing the bells, like pulling a rope? Because here in Germany, almost all church bells have been automated for a long time.
Yes !
Apparently there are some automated rings, but I don’t know of any.
That’s interesting. I guess there may be some small chapels here where the bells are still rung manually, but all major churches are automated.
Robots are taking over all the best jobs!
The church in question is ancient - bits of it are over a thousand years old, and there are records of bell ringing there going back way over 300 years. For all I know it might not be possible to automate something that old. I suspect many British churches where the bells are rung manually are also very old.
j
Well, we have churches that old as well, but I still think the ones that are still actively used for services have automated bells, too.
Does automation swing the bells and thus use the clapper, or are they just struck with a hammer of some sort?
j
I can’t answer this definitely, maybe both methods are used, but I saw bells (on TV) with clappers moved by electrical motors, controlled for rhythm and time by a computerized PLC.
Interesting. I wonder if there’s something about ringing a bell by pulling on a rope to physically swing the bell, which produces a different set of sounds. (Any insights, @pjd ?) That could be an important factor for those campanologically inclined.
(Interesting fact: campanological is a word (thank you, Merriam-Webster); so I guess campanologically must be also.)
j
The tower where I did most of my ringing had a bit of both..
Normal bellringing with ropes works by swinging the bell which then
hits the clapper which is suspended inside the bell.
There was also a second set of (thinner) ropes in a cupboard within
the ringing chamber (where the ringers stand) which could be used to
operate hammers (like a simple carillon); I don’t remember, but i
suspect these hammers were the same ones used by the clock chimes.
(otherwise it would get very complicated up there !) … it was very
important to disengage these before ringing, or they’d be
ruined !
I don’t actually remember there being much difference in the sound produced
by these methods - except for when the clappers were muffled (eg for funerals.)
Someone in Birmingham, England once told me that their father was the bell ringing tower captain who was one of ten tower captains who came to Washington D.C. in 1963 to assist in the dedication of the bell in the National Cathedral.
Might there be a difference between English change-ringing and whatever they do in Germany that makes automation more or less likely? I suppose a computer could handle programming changes just as well as human memory, but I guess campanologists are too proud of their skills to give in to machinery.
Computers can be programmed to play the piano, but that doesn’t mean that humans no longer play pianos.
The difference should not be in the sound but in the rhythm: when you swing the whole bell the clapper hits like a double pendulum, i.e., it gets a chaotic element. If the bell stays put and you only swing the clapper you control the frequency of the sound much more precisely.
Yes, I agree it is not a classical double pendulum, but I hope what I mean is still clear. It is not a chaotic ringing of the bell, it is a complicated, quasi-chaotic time lag in the way the clapper hits the bell when both rotate with a different frequency. The mechanisms for ringing a bell (Hello, Chuck Berry! Say hello to Johnny B. Goode!) are swinging (the oscillating movement of the bell, which causes the clapper to move at the same rhythm, striking the instrument and producing a binary sound, but with an irregular time lag), turning (the complete rotation of the bell, with a yoke with counterweights that produces a tertiary sound) and manual ringing (in which the bell is fixed and rung manually by moving the clapper with a rope). As I see it, only in the last case you have precise control over the moment the clapper hits the bell and thus the rhythm.
If you want the bells to rotate full circle you have to swing them higer and higher with each pull of the rope until they do rotate and hit the clapper.
Hm. I am not making myself clear, am I? Playing a guitar ain’t easy either.
Also, the sound does not propagate from a bell equally in all directions. By changing the orientation of the bell itself, you’re spreading out the sound more (at least, on average): At any given moment, some directions are getting more sound than others, but the directions that are getting more sound are constantly changing.
Of course, nowadays, a lot of automated systems don’t even involve actual bells at all, just big loudspeakers that play a recording of bells.
I suspect that is the most common solution to a traditional bell developing a crack. Loudspeakers are cheaper than bells.