US AirWays Attache' Magazine

May 2002

By Tom Dunkle

Photos by Cade Martin

Hours before the fireworks celebration in Washington, DC, last July Fourth, downtown revelers were craning their necks skyward, shielding their eyes from the sun, and pointing toward the top of the stately Old Post Office building. An unexpected and intoxicating sound was emanating from up where the pigeons normally roost.

“h, the bells!,” a woman passer-by cooed to two lady friends.
“Somethin’ must be goin’ on,” mused a tourist in a baseball cap.

The nation’s capital was being treated to a rare, celebratory ringing of the Congress Bells, ten bronze bells that hang inside the Old Post Office Tower. The city was awash in the joyful noise that is only heard on major holidays and special occasions such as presidential inaugurations.

It’s a signature sound that’s hard to come by in these days of pre-recorded church peals and mechanical carillons. You can’t produce that kind of heavenly harmony by blaring a tape recording through loudspeakers. It takes real bells, rung by people tugging on ropes—a phenomenon you’re more likely to hear in England, where the British are passionate about the tedious art of tower bell ringing, than in the United States, where only a handful of operable towers exist, among them the Washington National Cathedral.

“There is no team sport that is as difficult as this, I guarantee you,” says Rick Dirksen, of the National Cathedral School, who has been ringing bells in his spare time for more than 40 years. “You can hang yourself or break an arm or leg without any problem. You’ve got, say, a 1,000-pound bell swinging through a full circle, attached to a 40-foot rope. We’re talking about a serious problem if the bell’s out of control.”

Dirksen has a point. These cathedral bells are not the dainty sort. They weigh anywhere from several hundred to several thousand pounds. The tenor bell is a 3,588-pound whopper, the largest swinging bell in North America. (England’s Liverpool Cathedral boasts the largest bronze peal bell in the world, tipping the scales at more than 4 tons.)

A little applied physics is needed to move objects that heavy. Thus, the bells Dirksen and his colleagues ring are each attached to a side wheel that has a long rope coiled around its grooved circumference. (A variation of this coiled-rope principle is used to pull-start many lawn-mower engines.) The bells are mounted on frames that allow them to swing back and forth through an arc of about 360 degrees. They ring in the “mouth up” position, the clapper striking with every downward pull and release of the rope. For those doing the ringing, it’s a bit like holding a monstrous tiger by the tail. The vertical thrust of a swinging bell is more than four times the weight of the bell itself.

But you don’t have to be built like Quasimodo to get the job done. The science of using a kind of pulley system to ring the bells helps to offset their weight, allowing even the slightest of size to ring them. In fact, the typical bell ringer bears little resemblance to, say, a weight-lifter. For decades, teenage girls from the nearby National Cathedral School have helped ring at Washington National Cathedral. The current crop of apprentices includes Dirksen’s daughter, Jennah, who heads the school’s ringing team, The Whitechapel Guild, named after the London bell foundry that cast both the cathedral and Congress bells.

“You can literally pull the bell with your pinkie,” she says. “The key is knowing how to properly control the bell.”

A medieval couplet that offers a tip toward gaining this control became the unofficial bell ringer’s creed: “Feet steady, eyes wide, watch the rope with tongue tied.”

It takes about a year to learn the ropes, figuratively and literally. Many more years of practice are required to develop the finesse and concentration needed to endure ringing sessions that can last for hours or to perform well under the pressure of high-profile events such as a presidential inaugural parade, a major holiday gathering at the cathedral, or a special service such as the one held last September in memory of those who died in the terrorist attacks. “It’s a listening thing and it’s experience,” says Greg Hinson, a Washington ringer who has rung bells for 14 years. “It’s rhythm you’re going for. You don’t want any slack in the rope. You want to find a groove.”

Ringers are all business inside their winding-staircase towers. They tend to be cerebral by nature, maybe because an affinity for math is more useful than musical acumen. Bells can take as long as two seconds to swing back and forth, too slow a pace to generate anything approaching a melody. But even subtle and sustained variations in tone are pleasing to the ear. What has evolved over time is a system called “change ringing.” Imagine, for example, six bells arranged in an orderly row from lowest to highest pitch: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Shuffle the sequence to, say, 2, 1, 4, 3, 6, 5, and you create a different tone row or “change.” The underlying logic of change ringing is based on a set of primary rules (grounded in tradition, not music theory): Bells can move only one position from one change to the next, and a given change can never be repeated in a series. A dizzying number of permutations are still possible, which increase geometrically as more bells are added. Consider that 10 cathedral bells can be rung 3,628,800 times without repeating any 10-number sequence.

A series of bell changes strung together comprise a “method.” It usually takes about 15 minutes to ring 360 changes using 10 bells. Five thousand or more changes earn special designation as a “peal,” the bell ringer’s equivalent of running a marathon. It takes approximately three hours of continuous rope pulling to do a peal. As in soccer, no substitute bell ringers are allowed. No cheat sheets either: Ringers must commit to memory the methods used for ringing the myriad changes. “Everybody is one finger on a 10-finger trumpet,” says Ed Donnen, a computer specialist at the Treasury Department who regularly rings at the Old Post Office and National Cathedral.

What Kentuckians are to thoroughbred racing, the British are to bell ringing. While there are only about 40 operable tower bells in North America, there are more than 5,000 in England, with more than 30,000 ringers. The origins of their infatuation are murky, but it is known that in 1668 an Englishman named Fabian Stedman published a tome titled Tintinnalogia, or, “The Art of Ringing.” The first peal was recorded in 1715. By that time American colonists had developed a taste for more than English tea. Bells were being hung and rung in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston, South Carolina. Years before his famous lanterns were lit in Boston’s Old North Church, a teenage Paul Revere belonged to the band of ringers who tolled its tower bells.

American interest in change ringing died out after the Revolution. There was, after all, a republic to nurture, and baseball and hot dogs waiting to be invented. Bells made a small comeback in 1850, when the first-ever peal in North America was rung at Christ Church in Philadelphia, only to fall silent again. The passion never cooled in England. In the 1800s, successfully completed peals were listed in the sports pages of British papers. Virtually every university had a bell-ringing guild, most of which remain active. A few energetic Englishmen currently have 4,000 peals to their credit, and counting. As Donnen notes, “If you’re born in England, you’re almost born with a rope in your hand.”

In the 1960s the ringing flame was rekindled in America, due in part to the installation of the bells at Washington National Cathedral and at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts. But St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia has witnessed perhaps the most remarkable and symbolic turnaround. “In 1876, somebody took the church to court over the bells ringing at 6:30 in the morning on a Sunday, and they won their case,” explains Bruce Butler, president of the North American Guild of Change Ringers.

Not a peal was heard out of St. Mark’s for more than a century. About three years ago, Butler, a transplanted Englishman working as an assistant principal of a Philadelphia high school, and a few like-minded ringers decided to do something about that. Not bothering to ask the mayor or city council for assistance, they simply climbed the stairs to St. Mark’s bell tower and once the bells were restored, as Butler puts it, “just started ringing.”

Some would say that Butler has bats in his belfry. Last summer he spent his vacation over in England ringing church bells. Lots of them. Ninety-one different towers in 14 days. Butler has been doing this for 11 years. Since most towers are equipped with six or more bells, and since most people have fewer than six hands, he piles about a dozen rope-pulling pals into a minibus for these whirlwind, If-it’s-Tuesday-this-must-be-North-Yorkshire-Cathedral tours.