What a ringer needs most is not strength but the ability to keep time. Everybody must be dead‐on with their pulls. Nobody must be uneven. You must bring these two things together in your mind and let them rest there for ever – bells and time, bells and time. When I first started the young men were so keen to ring that they would be lucky to get five minutes’ practice each – so many of them wanted to have a go. We would think nothing of walking six or more miles just to have a five‐minute practice ring in a good tower. And I have walked between twenty and thirty miles in a day to ring a peal of 5,000 changes. All the ringers were great walkers and you would meet them in bands strolling across Suffolk from tower to tower. Many of the old ringers couldn’t read or write, yet they turned out to be really famous bell‐composers and conductors. They could get hundreds of rows of figures into their heads and put them all into practice when they reached the belfry. They could set all the bells ringing wherever they went and bring them all back to 1–2–3–4–5–6–7–8.
The bells tolled for death when I was a boy. It was three times three for a man and three times two for a woman. People would look up and say, ‘Hullo, a death?’ Then the years of the dead person’s age would be tolled and if the bell went on speaking, ‘seventy‐one, seventy‐two…’ people would say, ‘Well, they had a good innings!’ But when the bell stopped at eighteen or twenty a hush would come over the fields. People were supposed to pray for the departed soul, and some of them may have done. This practice was continued up until the Second World War, when all the bells of England were silenced. It was never revived. The sexton got a shilling for ringing the death‐bell.
I left the village when I was eighteen and went into the guards, which meant Windsor and London. I met the ringers in these places and became very accomplished. I think I can say this without being boastful. I have been a regular ringer ever since. It is such a fascinating art, you see. I know all the bells in Suffolk – and other counties, too, for that matter. I think I have just passed my two thousandth tower. Cathedrals, minsters, priories, abbeys, churches and the secular bells at Windsor Castle, I have rung them all.
Ringing requires a lot more mental than physical application, particularly now when the modern bell‐composers create such wonderful changes and the bells are hung so beautifully they don’t need great strength to move them. But of course you have to be fit to be able to swing a bell for two or three hours at a stretch and ‘put it in its place’, as we say. You also have to be bitten by the bug. You have to be smitten. If you are a real ringer you think about bells morning, noon and night, and you only live for the next time you can have a go at them. You have your ringing books and a lot of study at home. An old ringer at Hasketon told me, ‘You must learn it at home and ring it in the tower.’
One of the fascinating things about ringing is that there are about 5,500 peals of bells in the British Isles, ranging from rings of five to peals of twelve. So, you see, you can travel to the towers all your life and still find something new. The towers have a great effect on the sound of the bells which hang in them. The tower here is soft red brick and it absorbs the strike notes, whereas in a modern tower made of concrete and steel you would get a harsh bell note. The old bricks soak up the sound and sweeten it. The taller the tower, the quieter the bells in the village itself. The shorter, the louder. Nowadays, the tendency is to hang the bells about twelve feet lower than the louvres in the belfry windows, so that the noise can come up and then go out across the land. The notes of the bells are distributed evenly. Some towers ‘burl out’, as we say, and it can be most unpleasant. If you want to stop burling you have to board or brick the windows up until only a small opening is left at the top.
The average weight of a bell in Suffolk is about eleven hundredweight – as against the tenor bell in St Paul’s Cathedral, which is sixty‐two hundredweight. When we say ‘ring of bells’ we mean towers where there are peals of five, six, eight, ten and twelve bells. An eleven hundredweight bell would be the largest of these. People are very attached to old bells because they have spoken for the village so long and are its angel voices, or because they listened to them when they were courting and were young and happy. But I have to reluctantly say that, for those who understand bells, modern bells are best because they have been scientifically tuned. Much of the old bell‐making was a hit‐or‐miss affair. The bell‐makers were like a woman with a cake who could turn out four or five passable efforts to every one which was perfect. It was just the same with the bell metal. If it was poured too hot it would split the bell, and if it was too cold it would spoil it. But with a thermometer the modern bellman knows exactly when to pour his metal. He also has instruments to tune his bell 100 per cent perfect. A new bell today is in tune with itself as well as with the other bells in its peal. A bell can be in the key of D but it will still contain many other tones and a bell‐founder of today will know how to get rid of these other tones. In the old days a man would cast many bells of the same dimension and yet no two would be alike. It was rule of thumb. And it is just a myth that a silver coin was put in the bell metal because all bell metal, now as then, is about two‐thirds copper and one‐third tin – and nothing more. Tuning was then done by chipping at the inside of the bell to flatten the tone and chipping at the edge to sharpen it. But it was all very hit and miss. Too many chips might come off – or not enough – and the bell‐founder had only his ear to guide him. Now we trim the bell to agree with a tuning machine. The old bell‐founders were itinerate workers. When a village wanted bells they would bring their tools to the churchyard, dig a pit and make a furnace. The bell core was baked whole and then the outer cope was made. More metal was poured into the space between the inner core and the cope. When it was cool, the top was either lifted off or broken off, and there was your bell in its crude state. Then came the tuning and the hanging. It was a great business. One of the finest bells in the world is in Suffolk. It is the Lavenham tenor which Miles Gray made in 1625. It is known to be the sweetest bell in England.
Most of the bell‐frames round here are between four and five hundred years old but if they are replaced iron and steel is used, not wood. A bell‐frame must be absolutely rigid otherwise it will affect the swinging of the bell and hurt the ringer. The towers sway a lot during the peals. Most of the Suffolk towers sway tremendously, particularly St Mary’s at Woodbridge. The vibration of the bells is said to fracture the towers but architects will laugh at this and say it is rubbish.
Before change‐ringing came in, bells were used just to make great grave sounds on important occasions, or simply jangled. Then Fabian Stedman evolved a system by which they could be used to make real music. His method is still the most popular today. It is one which is rung on odd numbers of bells – on five, seven, nine or eleven bells. But there has to be an even number of bells to ring it, which sounds rather paradoxical. In other words, you ring ‘Stedman’ on the front five bells with the largest bell, called the tenor, covering. It would be 2–1–4–3–5 with the tenor bell coming in behind. It produces the best music. After Stedman died, the country people amused themselves by making variations on his method until, all over England, there was a great rage for ringing. The names of men who made important attempts to ring Grandsire Triples, Bob Major, Stedman Caters, Tittum Bob Royal, etc. were painted on boards and hung up in the towers. The great Suffolk ringers were the Chenerys from Wilby, the Banisters from Woolpit and the Baileys from Leiston. The Baileys were eleven brothers and they were ringing in the towers round here just before the Great War. Six other brothers, the Wightmans from Framsden, were ringing at the same time. They rang a seven method Minor peal at Monewdon on March 18th 1914. They had to take their father with them to do this, of course.
The maximum number of changes which can be rung on eight bells is 40,320. This is called ‘accomplishing the extent’ and it was accomplished on the foundry bells at Loughborough. It took seventeen hours, fifty‐nine minutes. It presented a challenge, you see, just as Everest presented
a challenge to our friend Hillary. If you are the conductor of a peal you have in your mind a picture of how those bells have to be kept going without one single change repeating itself. And so at intervals the conductor has to make a call which changes the work of the bells.
The ringers are now able to do far more than what was possible forty years ago or more. Some of their sons have been to the university and have applied their mathematical brain power to the art. My youngest son is a most brilliant ringer and probably one of the greatest ringers in the world. He is a mathematician and he was getting things out on paper when he was five years old. He went to the village school, then to the grammar school and then to the university. Nothing ever came difficult to him. He conducts and composes. Where bells are concerned there is nothing he cannot do.
There are new ringing methods composed all the time but people who are not ringers do not hear the tunes. I should say that ninety‐nine per cent of the people just hear ‘bells ringing’. That is all. Many first‐class ringers are tone‐deaf and the bells to them are just a noise. It is all figures to them. But when I hear the bells I think, my goodness, how beautiful! How wonderful! The combinations of sounds delight me. If you read the peal boards in the Suffolk towers you will be reading the names of many happy men.
Christopher Falconer · aged thirty‐nine · gardener
I went to Lordship’s when I was fourteen and stayed for fourteen years. There were seven gardeners and goodness knows how many servants in the house. It was a frightening experience for a boy. Lord and Ladyship were very, very Victorian and very domineering. It was ‘swing your arms’ every time they saw us. Ladyship would appear suddenly from nowhere when one of us boys were walking off to fetch something. ‘Swing your arms!’ she would shout. We wore green baize aprons and collars and ties, no matter how hot it was, and whatever we had to do had to be done on the dot. Nobody was allowed to smoke. A gardener was immediately sacked if he was caught smoking, no matter how long he had worked there.
We must never be seen from the house; it was forbidden. And if people were sitting on the terrace or on the lawn, and you had a great barrow‐load of weeds, you might have to push it as much as a mile to keep out of view. If you were seen you were always told about it and warned, and as you walked away Ladyship would call after you, ‘Swing your arms!’ It was terrible. You felt like somebody with a disease.
The boy under‐gardeners had to help arrange the flowers in the house. These were done every day. We had to creep in early in the morning before breakfast and replace great banks of flowers in the main rooms. Lordship and Ladyship must never hear or see you doing it; fresh flowers had to just be there, that was all there was to it. There was never a dead flower. It was as if flowers, for them, lived for ever. It was part of the magic in their lives. But the arrangements were how they wanted them and if one of the gardeners had used his imagination, Ladyship noticed at once and soon put a stop to it! The guests always complimented her on the flowers and she always accepted the praise as though she had grown, picked and arranged them herself. It was logical because servants were just part of the machinery of the big house and people don’t thank machines, they just keep them trim and working. Or that’s how I look at it.
As the years went by, we young men found ourselves being able to talk to Lordship and Ladyship. ‘Never speak to them – not one word and no matter how urgent – until they speak to you,’ the head‐gardener told me on my first day. Ladyship drove about the grounds in a motorchair and would have run us over rather than have to say, ‘get out the way’. We must never look at her and she never looked at us. It was the same in the house. If a maid was in a passage and Lordship or Ladyship happened to come along, she would have to face the wall and stand perfectly still until they had passed. I wouldn’t think that they felt anything about their servants. We were just there because we were necessary, like water from the tap. We had to listen for voices. If we heard them in a certain walk, we had to make a detour, if not it was, ‘But why weren’t you listening?’ and ‘Be alert, boy!’ and, when you had been dismissed, ‘Swing your arms!’
The garden was huge. The pleasure grounds alone, and not including the park, covered seven acres. The kind of gardening we did there is not seen nowadays. It was a perfect art. Topiary, there was a lot of that. It was a very responsible job. You had only to make one bad clip and a pheasant became a duck. The gardeners usually made up these creatures themselves. We were tempted to cut out something terrible sometimes, so that it grew and grew… but of course we never did. Even when we went on to mechanical hedge‐trimmers we still kept on topiary. There was a great pride in it, and in hedge‐cutting of every sort. It was the hedge which set the garden off and all the big houses competed with each other. Fences were marvellous things, too; there were more than two miles of them round Lordship’s and not a pale which wasn’t exact. The hedges had tops like billiard‐tables. It was get down and have a look, and stand back and have a look. No hedge was left until it was marvellous. There were so many things which really had no need to be done but which we did out of a kind of obstinate pleasure. The asparagus beds in winter were an example. We’d spend hours getting the sides of the clamps absolutely flat and absolutely at a 45° angle, although an ordinary heap of earth would have done just as well.
None of the village people were allowed into the garden. Definitely not. Tradespeople came to their door and never saw the main gardens. Work in front of the house had to be done secretly. About seven in the morning we would tiptoe about the terrace, sweeping the leaves, tying things up, never making a sound, so that nobody in the bedrooms could hear the work being done. This is what luxury means – perfect consideration. We gave, they took. It was the complete arrangement. This is luxury.
Of course, they spent a terrific amount of money on the house and garden. It was the machinery they had to have in order to live. So they kept it going, as you might say. A bad servant was just a bad part and was exchanged for a good part as soon as possible. I thought of this when I was doing my National Service as a fitter in the Tank Corps. It made sense. Yet I got so that I didn’t know quite what to think about it all. It was obviously wrong, yet because Lordship and Ladyship were old and had never known any other kind of life, I suppose I felt sorry for them. I always had to give more than was necessary. I couldn’t resist it. It was exciting somehow. But when I got home I would be angry with myself. The butler would sometimes come to the pub and imitate them. Laugh – you should have heard us! But I would feel strange inside, pitying and hating at the same time. His favourite joke was:
LADYSHIP: ‘Shall we ask the So‐and‐Sos to luncheon, Bertie?’ Silence, then, ‘Can they play bridge? Will they like my garden?’
LADYSHIP: ‘No, I don’t think so.’
LORDSHIP: ‘Then don’t have ’em.’
Lordship was a friend of King George V. He was a terribly nice man – a real gentleman. A lot of royalty came down from time to time and Lordship and Ladyship were sometimes at Sandringham. The Queen (Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother) came. She treated us very well and loved the garden. She would tell us boys what they ate for luncheon and then we’d all laugh. The Princess Royal was just the same – easy. But Members of Parliament always imitated Lordship and Ladyship and treated us like fittings. I was amazed by the Royalty. I imagined a bigger kind of Ladyship, but definitely not.
It was strange coming back to the big house after the Tank Corps. I was married now and we had an estate cottage without inside water, a bath or electricity, although it was very pretty and we were very happy. At first, that is. Until Ladyship said that my wife must work in the big house. My wife didn’t understand what it would mean. She came from Ilford and had never seen anything like it. She got worried and then she got migraine. The doctor told her that she must leave her work at the big house because it was making her anxious and ill. I told Ladyship, who said, ‘But she must come.’ I told her what the doctor had said but she just drove to the cottage and told my wife, ‘You
must come back to the kitchen – do you understand? You must.’ So that is why we went away. I felt sorry for my wife and for Ladyship; they had no way of knowing each other.
The big house helped me in my life and changed me. Being in private service has educated me. I can talk to anybody. There is one thing about Suffolk folk and that is that they find talk terribly difficult. I don’t. I have learned to talk. But working for Lordship made me a foreigner in the village. Those who remain with their own calibre in the village stay in the village family. I belonged to the big‐house family and it was hard to leave. I saw the last of the big house while it was self‐supporting. Everything, milk, cream, butter, game, fish, flowers, chicory, endive, melons, they were all there behind the hedges. Whatever Lordship and Ladyship wished for, they asked for, and it was brought.
I had a great training as a gardener and acquired all my knowledge completely free. Although I was often horrified by the way we were all treated, I know I got a terrific amount out of it. It is a gardening background which few people now have, and scarcely anybody of my age. In a great garden you grow from the seed and then you see the plant growing where it will always grow, but in a nursery garden it is just produce and sell, produce and sell. Nothing remains. A private gardener like myself would never get on in nursery work because I have had the fine art of tidiness drummed into me. I work privately and could have a choice of twelve or fifteen jobs, all with houses. There is no kind of gardening I can’t do. I am not boasting, it is a fact.
How can you describe this anxiety we have about our gardens in Suffolk? I have been to Scotland and they don’t have it there. Are gardens our pride? I think so: it is a breeding in the Suffolk people. I have never thought about this before but now I would like to get to the bottom of it. We are all obviously urged to do it as a great necessity in our lives. It is my life. I would die in the attempt to produce a plant, a flower, and bring it to perfection. You take my employer. She never goes abroad. All her holiday imagination is put into her garden. She prefers this to a seven days’ wonder. Another thing, I think, which you can put the gardening urge down to is simply ownership. It is wonderful to realize that a beautiful plant is yours. Suffolk people love you to go and boast their gardens. If people want to be polite, the first thing they say is, ‘What a beautiful garden’. If a man is clipping a hedge, you must compliment him on it. Hedges have to be praised. This is where the old employers went wrong, they didn’t understand about praise. If there had been more praise for gardeners there would still be plenty of good gardeners around. An industrial worker would sooner have a £5 note but a countryman must have praise.
Voices of Akenfield Page 4