I’m in my final year at Cambridge and I am in the nicest room I have ever had, and probably the nicest room I ever will have. A year of living in a basement has qualified me for a year at the top of a tower. I feel very aloof in my room, soaring above the rest of Cambridge save for one other building which surpasses my lofty perch: my tower is directly adjacent to the tower of Great St Mary’s Church.

During this year, I have become intimately acquainted with its bells.

Never before have I been so aware of bellringing. What once existed in my conscience as distant background clanging has become a relentless primordial force which ejects me from my bed, shaking my room at hours in the morning which strike me as unholy.

At first it robbed me of my sleep, nowadays it infiltrates my dreams. No small wonder, then, that I began to look for answers. Who is doing this to me? Why are they doing this to me? What does it mean? What’s the point?

For such a loud affair, where each performance is inherently public and, for some, unsolicited, bellringing has always seemed to me quite a faceless phenomenon. I spoke to a couple of bellringers, Charlie and Sam, to try and understand the nature beast.

Charlie is my gateway to bellringing. He’s a friend of mine who got into bellringing at home. I ask if he ever tried doing it at Cambridge.

‘I went along a couple of times but the crowd was so heavily comprised of mathmos, and I felt a bit embarrassed because I came in saying “Yeah I’ve done bellringing before, I know how to ring a bell”, but it was such a different weight to the ones I was used to.’

I know that my own grandma was banned from bellringing in her local church when she lost control of a heavy rope, which then knocked over other OAPs like tenpins. So I know it’s not an art to be messed with.

‘The biggest bells are massive. They can be the size of this room [my room is a decent size], even in a small church like the one back home. There have been instances where people have been caught and wrapped up in the ropes and fly up to the ceiling. Because your weight is completely negligible compared to the weight of the bell.’

“There have been instances where people have been caught and wrapped up in the ropes and fly up to the ceiling.”

You hear it all over town, but what’s it like to be there, underneath it?

‘It’s a different sound, because it’s coming down through the tower. It’s so loud. You can barely hear all of the calls. The tower captain calls everything.’

Charlie’s grandad has been the tower captain in his village for some time, which is how he got into it.

‘When I do it at home it’s a family thing, a good excuse to see my grandparents. It’s so historical, in the tower there’s a carving from 1560 [Charlie studies history]. It feels so artsy, in the summer you have the windows open over the whole village. And here In Cambridge, when I went along, for me, it seemed more technical. There was less a sense of heritage, all the towers were very made up and modern. And everyone was more into the mathematical side, the mechanical side of it.’

He tells me about how, in his village, the bells are used to mark special occasions, anything from a public holiday to a local’s birthday or retirement.

‘When I do it, I feel very connected to my family and the history of where I live. Because I like there’s a lot to feel ashamed of in England, and I think it’s nice to have this sweet aspect of village life with this history.’

So, what of bellringing in Cambridge? Sam is a member of the ‘Cambridge University Guild of Change Ringers’, the student body of bellringers in Cambridge.

He studies English, ‘which is comparatively unusual for bellringers. 90% are scientists I would say, it’s only a small slither of arts and humanities.’

Why do you think that is? Are people attracted to the mechanics, the patterns?

‘I think it’s for two reasons: there’s the physical mechanics of the bell, and then the “methods”, which is what we call the music that we do. It’s not conventional music with harmonies and suchlike, they are patterns which follow mathematical structures.’

Had you ever done any bellringing before Cambridge?

‘I’ve been doing it since 2018, at home in Sussex and then in Cambridge.’

A market town. In Cambridge, are a lot of people doing it for the first time?

‘Yes, we have quite a few learners, and a lot of the learners who started coming in October have only just started coming to our regular practises. We have sessions for learners which run before our normal ringing, they’re starting to become comfortable ringing in groups.’

I thought it must be quite hard to be a learner, because whatever you do it’s always very loud and public

‘We actually do our teaching sessions at Great St Mary’s and St Clement’s, and both of these places have a simulator. So, the bells are held in place and a computer replicates the noises they would make, so you can practise without disturbing people.’

[I wish they’d do that more often.]

‘I do more when I’m at home. When I’m in Cambridge I have more hobbies, and when I’m at home I don’t really. The thing about ringing is, unless you’re at Westminster Abbey, you can pretty much rock up and practise and you’ll be welcome.’

Sam got into bellringing through his local church. In Cambridge, does it feel slightly different because the attraction is so different, people do it who wouldn’t otherwise go to church, who are into the mechanics and music of it?

‘I think it’s reasonably common outside of Cambridge as well. There are quite a few places which don’t have enough ringers, and we have open days where we invite people to come up and see the bells, and that’s one of the main ways that people get recruited. In Cambridge, it’s a bit different because there’s the Freshers’ Fair.’

Is there a notable separation, then, between the people who use churches like Great St Mary’s and then the students who do their bellringing there?

‘We have a quite a good relationship with the local ringers, the Cambridge Youths, we help each other out. They’re always happy to help us with the more complex stuff which we can’t do by ourselves. And this is something which sets us apart from Oxford, because the Oxford students and the Oxford local societies don’t get along very well. But we have really good cooperation.’

Are they more expert then, the locals? How do you gauge that kind of stuff?

‘We have bellringing competitions, they’re called striking competitions, and the most well-known one is the National Twelve-Bell Striking Contest. The Cambridge Youths always send off a team, and they almost always get through to the final, they have won it sometimes. They’re one of the oldest bellringing societies in the world; they recently celebrated their 300th anniversary.’

‘There’s a website called Bell Board where you can post your ringing achievements. And we noticed that a band in Cambridge, Massachusetts had rung a method which had been invented in our Cambridge a couple years ago.’

Only a couple years ago? So people are still coming up with new sequences?

‘100 percent. There are infinite possibilities, so always new methods coming out.’

Is a method a sequence?

‘Yeah, I’ll show you a diagram [produced below]. Each number represents one of the bells. And the sequences change, but there are rules for how they change. In general, they don’t move more than one bell at once. For the way in which bells ring, it would be really tricky for it to move more often than that. You just learn to follow the line, and it’s the same line for every bell but it starts in a different place. The little numbers on the side tell you where on the line each bell starts. So if you didn’t know the method but knew you were going to ring the 3rd bell, you would look for the 3 on the line and ring it starting from there.’

I feign to understand.

‘How much maths do you know?’

Not much, but maybe some people reading will, so let rip.

‘Righto. An extent is what we call ringing every possible row. So factorials are how you calculate it. So, in the most basic case, with three bells, for every bell there are two more. If you follow this logic you see that there are six different rows on three, and you can repeat that process with higher numbers by doing multiplication. Do you know what a factorial is?’

Yeah [no].

‘So on 5 that’s 120, on 6 it’s 720, and on 7 5040, and on 8 4320. So, when we ring, we always want to do it with the most minimal repetition. So, an extent on 7, that’s 5040, that takes around 3 hours to ring. And that is the standard length for a peel. On 8 it takes all day, and it’s been done on a couple of occasions, which is truly ridiculous to think about. They can go wrong so quickly, losing all of your progress. A few weeks ago, we were ringing a peel attempt at Trumpington, which we lost after 2 hours 45 minutes, we were probably no more than 8 minutes away from getting it done, but that’s the way it happens sometimes. Peels are special because they’re really difficult to achieve.’

I’m in way over my head. I need to bring this back somehow. He shows me a website called Composition Library, where people post their own methods. I ask if he’s ever invented any of his own?

‘Yes, Ibycus it’s called. Once you’ve rung it, you can keep a record on the website of its performances online.’

What’s with the name?

‘The reason is a bit technical. There’s a method called Orpheus, a very old method. Orpheus is an extended method of Stedman, and mine is too, but with 145s instead of 123s. Ibycus was the poet who told the story of Orpheus in ancient Greek mythology, and I wanted to have a name which referenced the method’s origins as a derivative of Orpheus.’

With the ringing competitions, what are the main marking criteria? What makes good bellringing?

‘Good ringing is evenly struck. Many musicians like to make variations on their rhythm, but we don’t. We’re big on regular intervals between the bells. Perfect striking is impossible, but really good striking is achievable through team working, knowing the bells, knowing the situation. You really need to be on the same level as the other ringers. At Great St Mary’s there is a computer which marks striking. It’s not a perfect system; at competitions they often have both humans and computers marking. If one person is out of place, the computer may decide that they are right and everyone else is wrong, whereas a human won’t make that decision. But in a competition, you don’t mark good ringing, you penalise bad ringing. The group that has accrued the fewest faults will be the winner.’

Seems a bit brutal if I’m honest.

‘We have this thing called the SUA, the Southern Universities Association, Cambridge oxford, London, Bristol, Southampton, Exter. And we get together and do some ringing. There is a striking contest but that’s not the main focus, the main focus is to have fun. And the London team decided to do something really complicated, so they did. In a fun competition, that’s all well and good, you might as well have a go, but in a serious competition you wouldn’t do that.’

I ask again about the Cambridge Youths, the other guild in Cambridge. Why is it that the students and them get on so well?

‘Well it’s very important that we do. We share the bells with them, they let us do things which we on our own, as a university society, couldn’t. So, having that cooperation is really helpful. Especially when it comes to ringing in 10 or 12, because at Great St Mary’s is a place where you can ring 12 or 10 [bells, that is], and having the Youths to help us develop our skills on higher numbers is invaluable. A lot of the more complex methods on 10 or 12, we don’t have enough members in the Guild to do that every time, but with the Youth’s help we can get up to a really high standard.’

Installation of new bells at Great St Mary’s Church (2009) / Phil Orme

I feel like I now know a lot more about the cacophony which shoots out of Great St Mary’s and into my room, or at least can picture what might be taking place within. Any sound on Sunday afternoons and evenings is the Guild’s doing, anything else is best attributed to the Cambridge Youths, but I suppose the town/gown divide is less stark in bellringing circles than it may be elsewhere in Cambridge. Despite this, I can’t say that the ringing makes any more sense to me: I find its complexity slightly overwhelming; the graphs and diagrams say nothing to me. For the same reasons I was never into Math Rock, I can’t say bellringing has exactly chimed with me [haha]. But I find it really fascinating, the regular, a-musical form of music, balanced somewhere between a public function and a hopeless idiosyncrasy.

The thought of 3-hour peels still gives me the sweats though, I pray there will be some kind of exam season truce.

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