"Look two! Treble's going! She's gone!"
Sue calls the start of the Rounds on Six and gives her rope a gentle pull. In the belfry above, a 300-kilogram bronze bell named Our Lady rings a resounding high E. Tan! it sings. On the next beat, Jan, the sweet-looking elderly woman at Sue's side, gives the rope of the next larger bell, St. George, a tug. Din! it calls. On the third steady beat, Eleanor rings dan! on St. Andrew, followed in turn by John on St. Bartholomew (bim!), Judith on Holy Trinity (bam!), and Nick the ringing master on St. Paul (bom!).
"OK, slow it down a bit," prompts Nick, tugging St. Paul's rope on the backstroke.
Tan, din, dan, bim, bam, bom! call the bells.
Wednesday evening is beginner-level change-ringing practice at the Cathedral Church of St. James on King Street East, and there's a lot more to bell-ringing than yanking on a rope. These tintinnabulating beginners are learning how to ring up, hunt down, run in, double dodge, make places, treble bob -- while avoiding hanging themselves in the process.
Change ringing is a quirkily recondite discipline invented in England more than 400 years ago. Before that, sets of church bells were rung at random or in plain sequence. "Around the end of the 1500s, people began to get bored just ringing down the scale," says tower captain Derek Sawyer. "So they started ringing the bells in simple patterns. This change ringing was fully developed by Fabian Stedman in the middle of the 1600s and has remained pretty much the same ever since."
Change-ringing bells are massive creations, weighing from a few hundred kilos to several tonnes. They're hung in stout frames that allow the bells to rotate backward and forward, the clapper striking each time the bell turns upside down. Since each large bell takes almost two full seconds between rotations, the bells cannot be made to play a tune per se, but they can be made to follow one another in sequence, or to change places with adjacent bells. This constant, subtly changing sequence produces a rich cascade of mathematically perfect sound patterns: change ringing.
England has 5,205 churches with change-ringing bells. The U.S. has only 31 (most notably the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.) and Canada a mere eight. Nowadays, most North American church belfries are equipped with carillons, sets of stationary bells struck by hammers. St. James is the only church in Toronto with a set of real bells rung by a team of bell-ringers, and it's the only cathedral in North America with a full ring of 12 bells.
Ten of the bells of St. James were originally hung in a church in Bermondsey, England. Cast in 1828 by the Mears & Stainbank foundry, responsible for such famous pealers as the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia and Big Ben in London, the Bermondsey bells were brought to Toronto in 1997, along with two new bells to fill out the full ring.
The ringing chamber at St. James is halfway up the 100-metre spire. It's a bland, Sunday-school-like room full of discarded pews and ecclesiastical smells. Through 12 small holes in the ceiling, the sturdy white ropes dangle like ribbons from a maypole. After ensuring firm grips on the unpadded, looped ends of their ropes, the bell-ringers pull down on their sallies (tufted woolen handgrips that lie about eye level). As the unseen bells rotate high above, the ropes shoot upward, and the bell- ringers' arms are stretched high. The bell-ringers pull on the ends of the ropes and catch hold of the sallies again on the way back down.
"Eleanor, a bit quicker," coaches Nick. "Pull down, grab the sally!" Then, like the leader of a square dance, he calls a change in sequence: "Two to three!" In the heat of the moment, the rope almost gets away from Jan. "Jan! Finish the pull! Get that right hand back on! That's good."
Many of the St. James bell-ringers are members of the congregation. It takes about four to five years of practice before beginners are deemed ready to attempt a full peal. The noble Stedman Triples, for instance, puts eight bells through more than 5,000 changes and takes an exhausting three hours to perform. Maximus, played on all 12 bells, is more formidable. Even the most expert bell-ringer would shrink from attempting to play it from start to finish. With a potential of 479 million changes, it would take a dozen people 35 years of continuous bell-ringing (and a few bats in the belfry) to complete. At St. James, changes of sensible duration are rung every Sunday morning at 10 o'clock and on special occasions.
"We ring them in times of great celebration, like New Year's Eve at midnight," says Sawyer. "We rang for an hour to celebrate the passing into international law of the Ottawa treaty for banning land mines. In the opposite vein, when Princess Diana died, we rang them with muffles on so it was a very mournful sound."
Before their twice-weekly practice sessions, the bell-ringers close the acoustic louvers of the belfry and place rubber mutes on the bell clappers. Muffled in this way, the bells sing a mournful song -- a forlorn tolling that belies the cheerful bonhomie in the little ringing chamber halfway up the tower.
Nick continues to call the changes ("Five to four! Two to five!") until everything gets comically out of whack. Din, tan, bim, dan, bom, bam! In bell-ringing terms, they've "fired out."
"Stand!" Nick calls, and the bells come to a halt. Everyone bursts into laughter. "All right, once again -- long, slow, thumbs in line...
"Look Two! Treble's going! She's gone!" says Sue.
Tan, din, dan, bim, bam, bom!