Bells ring out after ten-year silence

More than 150 people from the village came to the re-dedication service at St Gabriel's Churchm, held by the new Archdeacon of Worcester, the Venerable Roger Morris.

Together, the bells weigh well over a ton and the strain of regular ringing for 125 years meant that the frame holding the bells was in danger of collapsing.

At the same time it was found that the fixings for the church clock had perished, so that the four-foot-diameter cast -ron clock face was on the point of falling off the building. £24,000 was needed to restore the belfry and £3,000 for the clock.

The fund-raising project began in 2002 with a donation in memory of Bernard Spiers, former tower captain of the ringers at St Mary’s and St Gabriel’s. But, despite numerous village quiz nights, coffee mornings, collections points in Hanley Swan and a pound-for-pound matching scheme by Barclays Bank, by 2007 only £9,000 had been raised.

Then chief fund-raiser John Boardman had the bright idea of finding sponsors by dedicating individual bells to the memory of people who had lived in the village.

He started the ball rolling by dedicating the treble bell to his wife June. No. 2 was for the Clarke family, No. 3 for the Dovey family, No. 4 in memory of Jim Kitching, No. 5 in memory of Justin Moreton and the tenor bell commemorates the life of Max Peck, Nic Tavener’s father, who was church treasurer for 30 years.

Topped up by grants from the Worcester Change Ringers Association and Coutts's bell restoration fund, this allowed the project to go ahead. Malvern firm Berry and Co, specialist bell restorers, spent four months on the project, first installing lifting-beams to enable the bells to be lowered and, once restored, lifted back up again.

While the bells went off to the bellfounders Taylors of Loughborough for two months, Bill Berry strengthened the frame by putting steel brackets into the corners and inserting supporting rods. He remade the bell wheels using traditional woods – elm for the hollow rims or flanges that carry the rope, oak for the spokes and ash for the stays that enable the bells to be balanced mouth-up. New bearings were installed and metal headstocks replaced the old wooden ones.

Originally cast in 1872 by Warners of London, the bells needed to be retuned. Taylors used a vertical lathe to shave off pieces of the bell metal, an alloy of copper and tin, until the right tone was achieved. Each bell can emit any one of 150 different tones, depending on where it is struck, and so had to be checked electronically.

Meanwhile the clock face was shot-blasted, the dial re-gilded and the mechanism restored by local engineer Bob Chester-Lamb. The clock is dedicated to the memory of an ancestor of Roger Wookey, South Molton parish clerk Henry Thomas.

When everything was finished, the bells were hauled back into position and a team of bell ringers toiled for three-quarters of an hour to ring a celebratory quarter-peal, which involves 1000 changes of sequence. Afterwards, fittingly, 9-year-old Max Blance tolled the tenor bell in memory of his great-grandfather Max Peck.

The Hanleys’ bell ringers are always looking for new members. Because the bells rotate on ball-bearings, no great strength is need to ring them; some people start ringing as children and continue into their eighties. Anyone interested in becoming a ringer should contact tower captain Cathy Taylor on 01684 560256.