Archived report · 4 min read · Set in Brannock ·
The Tower That Rings a Fifth
The parish bells of Brannock are found to sound one quarter per hour beyond any service book's permission, and the discrepancy is entered, not answered.
- filed: "at the ringing year end"
- reference: "BR/BT/02"
1. This report concerns the ringing conduct of the tower of St Caddow, Brannock, in the ringing year now ended, as compiled from the ringer's book, the service ledger, and interviews held in the vestry on three afternoons in November.
2. The tower carries six bells. The service book permits, on any given night, a full peal on appointed feasts, a quarter peal on Sundays, and a single toll at the ringing of the hours. Nothing in the book, nor in the diocesan copy held at the registry, permits a fifth quarter: that is to say, four struck passages to the hour are the custom, and a fifth has no standing.
3. Nevertheless, on certain nights, five are counted. The pattern is consistent enough to be entered here without embarrassment. At one minute past the hour's appointed minute, the tower gives four quarters in the usual manner, spaced and true. Then, after a pause that witnesses place variously at eight seconds and at thirty, it gives a fifth. The fifth is lower than the fourth. No bell in the tower is lower than the fourth except the tenor, and the tenor has not been rung by hand on any of the nights in question.
4. The captain of ringers, Mr Harold Fenwick, six-and-fifty years of age, rang that tower for thirty-one years and reports that he first heard the fifth in the autumn two years gone, on the night the church clock was stopped for cleaning. He says the pause before the fifth was long enough that he took up his coat, thinking the ringing done, and was still holding it when the note came. He says he did not ring again that night and has not since, though his name remains first in the book.
5. The wardens' position, taken jointly, is that the tower rings as the tower rings, that the book governs what men may ring and not what is heard, and that no fault of the mechanism has been shown. Mr Samuel Odrick, who oils the bearings and reads the escapement, was asked to inspect. He found the striking train in good order and the count of quarters governed by a pin-wheel with twelve stops. He counted the stops twice. There are four that serve the quarters. He writes in his own hand, appended: the fifth does not pass through the train, and I cannot say what passes it instead.
6. A nail was taken to the census of nights. Between Lammas and the filing of this report, the fifth was counted on forty-one nights, all of them nights on which no service stood appointed for the morning. The vestry cannot find meaning in this and does not wish one found. It is entered as a factor of the tower, like damp, like the drop of the south wall, to be watched and not repaired.
7. The vicar, the Revd Mr Elphinstone, declined to be interviewed a second time. His first statement is recorded in full: the bells are told the hour before we are; that is the whole of the arrangement, and I see no cause to disturb it. Asked what he meant by told, he said he meant what he said, and asked to be excused, as the Thin Hour was coming on and he did not keep the vestry lit past it.
8. A suggestion from the registry that the fifth quarter might be struck from the record, as a matter of tidiness, was considered and refused. The wardens' answer, read into the minutes: the hour is what the tower says, and the tower has lately said more of it than the book provides for. If we enter five where the book allows four, the book is corrected in the direction of the nights, which we hold to be the honest direction, though not a comfortable one.
9. There remains the question put to this office by the youngest of the ringers, Mr Tom Bleasdale, who kept the book on the nights in question and wrote down each fifth in pencil. His question was this, and it is entered last because it was asked last, at the vestry door, with his coat already on: on the nights when the fifth rings, which of us is it telling the hour to, the parish below, or the ten of us standing in the ringing chamber with the ropes at rest and no hand upon them.