Staplehurst Bellringers Report July 2026

Why I became a Bellringer

Something a little different this month.  What follows is a transcript of a talk I gave to All Saints’ church congregation on Bell Sunday.

Whenever I confess to anyone that my hobby is bellringing, I nearly always get the same response.  They stare at me with a perplexed expression, murmuring bellringing under their breath as if it would be much more normal of me to collect boa constrictors or other such niceties.  I see images of Christmas card bells and monk cartoons going through their minds as they wonder what on earth I find to interest me in bellringing.

I consider going on to explain how much more there is to it than they think, but usually I leave them to regard me as vaguely odd instead of completely mad, as they surely would do if I went on to explain some of the things I and other ringers do for enjoyment.

For instance, the only way of spending a Saturday morning for some ringers is to ring a peal.  In short, this means that you stand at the end of a rope for about three hours while your arms go up and down more than 5,000 times and you can’t stop concentrating for a second in case you lose your place and cause a “fire-up” (a non-technical term of which anyone living near a church can guess the meaning!).  By the time you finish, your knees are locked solid so that you do not dare move for fear of them collapsing.  Some people do this several thousand times during their ringing career, so they must get something out of it.  I’ve rung 54 peals during my 50 years of ringing and believe me the best part is quenching your thirst in the pub afterwards!

Then there is “tower grabbing”.  Staplehurst is just one of over 5000 churches with bells in the UK, each with their own characteristics and peculiarities.  It makes a nice change to ring on bells other than one’s own, but for some ringers it almost becomes an obsession with people travelling hundreds of miles to ring on rarely available or newly installed or renovated bells.  This is normally done by means of an open day where all the churches in a particular area are available for a separate 45-minute period, and with careful planning it is possible to mop up around 30 new towers in a day.  The locals must find it highly amusing seeing carloads of people rushing around their normally quiet lanes trying to find that tower that you can see from miles away but you’re going round in circles to get to it.  I wouldn’t admit to being a tower grabber, but I have rung at 1680 churches out of a total of the 5000, including the most northerly and the most easterly.

A far more relaxing way of doing it is to have a day’s outing with just 5 or 6 towers and a leisurely pub lunch.  When organising a day outing, the secret is to find a good lunchtime pub first and then organise the towers around it.

As a bell ringer you are part of a huge extended family.  You can turn up at almost any tower on their practice night or for Sunday morning ringing, and you would be warmly welcomed.  Many is the time I have simply dropped in to a strange tower whilst on holiday. Bellringers even have their own esoteric vocabulary which would totally baffle a non-ringer. “Tittums”, for example, is an onomatopoeic word for when the bells are in the order 15263748 or ti-tum, ti-tum,ti-tum, ti-tum. When the conductor shouts “Bob”, he is not shouting at another ringer but is giving a command to change the order of the bells.  In the pub you might hear some of the more fanatical ringers talking about “Q-sets” – don’t ask me what that means because I have no idea.  In fact there is a book available which has a glossary of literally hundreds of such ringing words and phrases. Yes, all part of that mysterious world of bellringing. We even have our own weekly magazine entitled, appropriately, The Ringing World.

So why did I start this weird and wonderful hobby of bellringing?  Well, I was brought up in South East London, and our local church didn’t have any bells.  In the mid 70s I moved with my parents to Kent and joined the choir at Yalding church.  Eager to make new friends in the area, I enquired of one of the choristers what the social scene was like in the area.  The bellringers are a sociable bunch, he said (turns out he was the Tower Captain and was looking for recruits).  Why don’t you come along?  So I did. I found it a bit of a struggle at first, but I enjoyed the beer in the pub afterwards.  I soon learnt that, like rugby and cricket, beer was an important part of the ringing environment. 

However, it wasn’t long before the bellringing bug bit me and the rest, as they say, is history.  I have now been ringing for 50 years and, at a rough calculation, would guess I’d pulled a bellrope around 2 million times. I have had many great times along the way, rang at many beautiful churches (and visited many good – and not so good – pubs).  I have met many wonderful people through ringing, including my lovely wife Sallyann, who was a ringer at Headcorn.  Our son Richard is an accomplished ringer; he married a ringer who is herself the daughter of a ringer.  What are the odds on their son becoming a ringer?  Pretty high, I would guess!

Yes, ringing has truly shaped my adult life.  All I can say is, ringing is an experience you have to try before you can believe what fun and enjoyment there is to be gained from it.

Roy Barclay
Tower Secretary