During the year we ring for various traditional things. Tong is a very pretty church in a pretty village, so we get a lot of weddings during the summer.

A lot of the couples getting married like to have the bells, so we ring before and after the wedding.

A tradition that we have in Tong is that we have a big Christmas tree on the village green and we switch the lights on right at the beginning of December. We have one Sunday in December where we come and ring the bells, and then we go and have a village gathering around the Christmas tree and sing carols.

We ring the bells, and then we have a couple of drinks and mince pies.

After the bells had been refurbished, nobody had heard the bells for something like 40 or 50 years, so when we rang them, it was very special.

So it created quite a lot of interest in the village when we rang the bells again, they were all clapping for us. It was really good.

It’s an unusual hobby. And for some of us it’s linked to being involved in the church. For other people it isn’t, you don’t have to go to church to be a bell ringer.

When we first started ringing here, there was a chap who used to come ringing and he had been a member of the bell ringers here 50 years ago. He used to come back and ring with us and it was lovely that he could do that.

I remember the first time I rang for a wedding I was really nervous because it’s someone’s special day. But, when we rang the bells and they sounded really nice, I was really proud of myself because I was getting to kind of participate in someone’s special day, doing something that I love doing.

If there are people in other churches who are missing a ringer or if you’re doing a wedding and you need a certain number of ringers, people will ask around and say, can you help me? And someone will step in. Or if you’ve got learners at other churches and they need some teachers, people will step in. I think it means a lot to the people for the bells to be rung in their village.

I think people have a stereotype of what bell ringers look like, and I think it’s a surprise that
not everyone is what people might think they are. I think you get a lot of different ranges from people from different walks of life. I think you get a mix of people who do come to church and who don’t. So not all bell ringers look the same and we all come for different reasons.

I think people would be surprised that the skill required to be really good at bell ringing, it’s an easy thing to learn but you have to have a good skill to be able to master it.

I quite enjoyed listening to bell ringing and I thought, I’d like to have a go at that.

I got the opportunity a few years ago, and I’ve been coming along ever since. The bells have got to be rung in a certain order. So there are hundreds and hundreds of methods, and you can’t look at a sheet of music. What you’ve got to do is know the method and you’ve got to know where the other bells are in that method so that you know when to ring. So you’ve really got to understand the method and ring in the right place.

You’ve got to learn bell control so that you’re not going to hurt yourself or hurt anybody else and then you’ve got to start to pick up the methods, it’s like learning to play piano, you’ve got to start to play simply. The tools are called methods, and then you just build up a little bit more knowledge and eventually you can ring a simple method. Then you’ve got to look at the rules for extending that method, which is what you call touches. You’ve got to persevere with it, because it’s not something you’ll do in two minutes.