BELLS OF ENGLAND.

Auckland Star, Volume LXII, Issue 102, 2 May 1931, Page 1 (Supplement)

BELLS OF ENGLAND.

JOYOUS CHIMES, THEIR, MEANING AND HISTORY (By CONSTANCE COTTERELL.) We.have three bell foundries left in the United Kingdom—one at Loughborough, where St. Paul's twelve belle were cast, one at Croydon, and one at Whitechapel. The firm in Whitechapel, Mears and Stainbank, was founded in 1570 by a Robert Mott who was, it is a tradition in the firm, trained before the Reformation ;by Saunders, the famous bejl founder of Reading. And from then till now the same family has owned the foundry, which has passed either from father to son or by a kind of knight's move of the family, strain' to some sort of relative, and I tifirtk there have been only three names, or perhaps four, in these more than three and a half centuries. ' , '. Larger Sheep Bells.

A couple.of hundred years ago Mears and Stainbank cast the bells of St. Lawrence Jewry, which ring out each autumn to let'the City of London know its new sheriffs have : been • properly admitted to the shrievalty in the Guildhall, with the proper sweet savours of herbs and spices of the East. The city doesn't hear, of course, if the buses rage and are forced back into a great flock of beating motor hearts by a policeman's little arm. Big Beri was cast in 1858, and his '13J tons needed both furnaces. And it was Mears and Stainbank who made, at the end of the seventeenth century, the oak frame with its corners pointing north, south, east, a,nd west (a perfect brace for a tower),.for the bells of St. Olave's, in Hart Street. It carried the old bells, which the Great Fire didn't crack, and it hasn't a beetle in it, though the roof above is full of' them, and will, I suppose, be one of the next things we shall have to save.' The famous bells of . St. Clement Danes Church in the Strand, which have given their name to' a children's game known all over, the English-speaking world, were cast -in 1693. The church birilding has a very ancient history, and it is believed that the bones of King Harold lie beneath it.

Bow Bells, which called back Dick Whittington (they never did, only human 'beings insist on having legends;, were lost, in the Fire. Till the tenth century church bells were merely outsize sheep bells—and in its essence, of course, a church bell still is a sheepbell^—each ringing the note its accidental'form obliged it to sound. In Edinburgh and Dublin they still.keep some of the queer old things, but there are few to be found in England. The bells still ring in London that rang for the victory of Agincourt in 1415 (at St. Andrew's in Holborn) and there's a bell in Yorkshire of ■ 1210. I think that is our oldest. Early in the tenth century bells became relations, they were hung in families—peals, if you'd rather say peals —and now the relation of bell to bell is exquisitely true and sure.

History in Bells.

Long ago bells were used for spreading news. The Oven bell, for instance, told the tenants when the lord of. the manor's great oven was hot and ready to bake their bread. Others gave information, warning you, Calling you to arms, calling you out. driving you in, and everybody knew what they were saying, just as all gentles and many simples could once read heraldry though they didn't know their ABC. Bells a'nd blood belonged together for centuries. Now to us for the most part they are romantic, beautiful things, throwing out music into the air. But here and there the old bell is rung for the old reason, and here and there somebody recognises it. The Mote bell that calls town meetings is silent, so is the market bell, the seeding and the harvest bell, the gleaning bell, too, but still in a good number of parishes they ring curfew, which wasn't rung originally in order that fires should be covered over in the -wooden houses, but to send home Saxon and British persons who might be conspiring against Normans in the night. The great seven-ton bell in Tom's Tower, Oxford, at the entrance to Christ Church, has sounded curfew for town and gown since- 1684. Every night it rings 101 times, giving, the closing gate signal to Oxford,