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As the Christmas season approaches, we get out our set of hand bells and begin practicing for the concerts that have been booked up, many of them several years before. In days gone by the bells were taken around to the big houses of the parish. Now we take them to groups all over the county. We even appeared a couple of times on Larry Grayson's Generation Game on the television. We ring in a very simple way and do it totally for fun, so you may hear the odd ding when it should have been a dong. We certainly don't get hung up about it - we save that for the tower bells! we ring by numbers because that is how the church bells are rung. We ring tunes on the hand bells but we also ring some church bell sequences on them as well.
© 1999 Aston Campanological Enterprises Thirteen of our handballs were cast in 1829 at Hertford by John Briant. These were tuned (one being recast) and added to, to make twenty eight bells by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1976. The Whitechapel Foundry bought out John Briant round about 1830 or so. The five large bass bells were added, again by Whitechapel in 1986 in memory of David Chalkley, our late Master of the Bells. The secret of the bells keeping their tone is not to polish them and to give the odd squirt of WD40 to the knockers. We hope that you enjoy the sound that we make - we do. For details of our availability for concerts, please contact our conductor:
Revised: October 23, 2000. |
