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CHURCH BELLS
Now for the really good news

By Rosalind Gorton

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The Church has at last attracted sufficient money to pay for the work in restoring the Church Bells.

Work will include the restoration of the Church clock, inserting a new steel frame to hold the bells, casting three new bells welding cracks in two old bells and making sure that the new peal of eight bells sings true when they are put back into the tower.

Money has come in the form of three large donations amounting in all to £32,800, grant of £ 6,050 as well as many gifts and fund raising events. Work has now started and progress so far is summarised in this short article.

Messrs. Eyer and Smith sent a Bell Hanger down from Derbyshire. He is not only an expert in putting bells up but he is also an expert in taking them down. He needed the assistance of two willing men and these were provided in the form of John Boocock and Philip Gorton. The first thing to do was to strip out all of the old metal stays, dismantle the rope guides, take apart the bell ringing wheels, and remove the bearing caps. The two amateurs were given this task whilst the bell hanger fixed up the chain block and tackle to start lifting the bells.

Lifting and lowering great hunks of metal weighing about a tonne is much more difficult and much more dangerous than at first appears. The expert made it look easy and most certainly taught his assistants a great deal about safety. This is of course quite important when you think that the series of trap doors open from the top of the tower to the very bottom and one slip would have very unpleasant consequences!

It is difficult to imagine how dirty everything was. For more than 100 years enthusiastic Tower Captains have been oiling the bearings of the bells. At certain points within the bell frame there are long stalactites of black oily grease hanging to catch an unthinking moment. The space for working is not very large so that, as you look at the smear of grease on your left shoulder, you smear oil from the other side of the frame on your right shoulder.

It took two full working days to get the job done. There must be several days of work left in the tower to clean everything up. It takes not a great deal to imagine 100 years worth of bird nests, droppings, dust and mess that has to be removed.

Of course taking the bells down to the ground was only part of a problem. The next task was to devise a method of removing the bells themselves from under the tower and putting them on to a lorry. This had to been done in two separate operations. The first pair of bells had to go for welding to Messrs Soundweld who work from Lode in Cambridgeshire. Len Jarvis kindly helped and what Len doesn't know about moving heavy weights with rollers and levers isn't worth knowing...

The bells were uninsured whilst they were not in a locked building and Johnny Johnson kindly took them to his barn and stored them safely there until Len Jarvis could take the first two over to Lode. The next four bells were moved due to the kindness of Tony D'Alton and Mr Kitchener. Tony provided four hard working and enthusiastic men for the task. Johnny Johnson lent us a really wonderful fork-lift tractor and suddenly a very difficult task was made easy. Even so it was a full morning's work before the bells were safely on the lorry. It was very kind of Mr Kitchener to take them all the way to Derbyshire on one of his lorries.