Dear Friends,
Whether you consider the Millennium begins at midnight on 31st December 1999, or more properly at the end of 2000, we will certainly reach a significant date in human terms as the New Year is ushered in, customarily in many places with the ringing of our Church bells. We are grateful to all who have worked hard on our behalf to meet the challenges raised by the “Ring in 2000” initiative with its implications for recruitment, training and retention (duly addressed in the “FTK” courses arranged by our Education Committee earlier in 1998). I hope all our plans go well, and that we shall indeed manage to ring all our bells come 1st January 2000.
A new Millennium inevitably causes us to be forward looking towards an as yet unknown future; we cannot even guess at what lies ahead, whether in terms of technological development, climatic change, natural disaster, or further examples of man’s inhumanity to man. The bells are there to mark the passing time; our times of joy, as well as times of sorrow and tragedy, and long may they do so.
The year 2000 is likely to be as mundane and ordinary as many that have gone before it; after all who remembers anything about the years 1000 or 1001; for the English 1066 is a more memorable date in that particular century. So once the hype of this particular milestone is over, our Guild and we ringers will still have our particular mission and witness to fulfil, and similar tasks and challenges to meet if our ancient art is to be passed on to the generations yet to come in succeeding years and centuries.
To my mind one cannot look to the future without looking to the past, to our roots and our history, to where we have come from. Our Guild was founded in 1879, and much has been achieved in our 120-year history. 2000 marks those many years since the birth of Christ, an event we as Christians look back to and celebrate each Christmas, and every time we thank God for the Annunciation, Incarnation, and Nativity of Jesus, and for the victory of the Cross, and the hope of the Resurrection.
There were no bells at Bethlehem that year of Christ’s birth and precious few by the year 1000. Our own 120-year history has seen tremendous strides in the installation and augmentation of bells in our towers, and their proper maintenance in an efficient and safe condition. This trend has continued with the plans brought to fruition in time for the Millennium, with augmentations planned or achieved at Whitchurch, Hurstbourne Priors, Shorwell and anticipated at various places elsewhere, and a new ring of six at Purbrook. Much to give thanks for; much to look forward to; and much more still to do!
I often enjoy The Ringing World feature “From the archives ...”, relating items from The Bell News from one hundred years before. Two such items concerned the will of the Earl of Winchelsea, who seems to have been a major benefactor with regard to the Church and in completing the peal of ten bells at Ewerby in Lincolnshire. Anxious to become a change ringer himself, he had got so far as to be able to cover (and indeed to become a member of the Society of Royal Cumberland Youths), before death intervened. However, he left capital to provide an annual income to the Ewerby ringers provided the bells had been regularly rung for divine service in the preceding year; a further sum if they had practised and done their best to acquire the art of change ringing; and £1 a year for a sermon to be preached on St Andrew’s Day commemorating the restoration of the Church and bells, etc. “and shall exhort the hearers that they do in their time and generation hand down so beautiful a monument of Christian heart and worship in as good a state as they received it”. Well, I doubt that you would get much of a sermon for £1 now, but The Bell News added “May we venture a hope that this benefaction may be imitated in time to come”. An earlier entry had noted “... when Nero and Caligula are forgotten the memory of Lord Winchelsea will still be clanging and reverberating upon the tortured tympanum”.
At the 1899 Henry Johnson Commemoration Dinner, nine years after the great man’s death, the chairman, J. S. Pritchett, applied this simile to Mr Johnson’s connection with the ringing Exercise - “He found brick and left marble”. As we prepare to enter the new millennium I hope the same can be said about us as a Guild and as individuals by those who come after us.
Barry