THE BELLS at one of Edinburgh’s most recognisable landmarks will ring again after a fundraising drive raised the required £15,000 for repairs.
St Mary’s Episcopal Cathedral, in the West End, the mother church of the Diocese of Edinburgh, is known for its striking Gothic Revival style, triple spire, and magnificent harmonies – performed by an experienced team of bell ringers.
St Mary’s celebrated chimes, which ring out every Thursday and Sunday, have been on hold for weeks, however, as essential repairs are being made to safeguard the cathedral’s twelve bells into the future.
The Church was quickly able to raise the £15,000 required thanks to generous donations from congregants and locals.
With repairs nearing completion, West End residents missing the St Mary’s peal can expect to hear its return as early as Tuesday.
Some of the bearings, which support the bells, had not been changed or repaired since the 1930s, and had begun to seize up.
Geoffrey Farquharson, 68, a veteran change ringer at St Mary’s explained: “Bells, particularly here at St Mary’s, are heavy.
“The heaviest one is two tons, and they swing right round almost 360 degrees, so they’re very heavy items with a lot of movement involved, and they swing on these ball bearings.
“And because they’re heavy and because there’s a lot of movement, the bearings wear out. The bearings that they currently swing on were installed in 1935 when things were refurbished, and it’s over 90 years since they were last looked at.
“Bells become more difficult to ring as the bearings seize up, or the ball bearings get scratched, or even if the grease hardens in the ball bearings.”
He added: “So essentially, one aspect of what we’re doing is lifting the bells off their oak framework and exposing the bearings.
“We’ve got two professional bell hangers from a company called John Taylor and Company in Loughborough, which is Britain’s only surviving large bell foundry, looking at the bearings and cleaning them, inspecting them and deeming whether they’re good for the future or whether they need to be replaced. What they do is a specialist art indeed.”
He added: “The other aspect is the clapper that hangs inside the bell that rotates as it hits against the bell, and the pivot at the top of the clapper, again, over the years that loosens, and the clapper had too much sideways movement.
“The clappers have all been rebushed so that they only swing in one direction, and this all helps make the bells easier and better to ring, so that we can ring more accurately.”
Six months ago, the cathedral started a large fundraising drive to raise the money required for the specialist repairs, with donations flooding in from congregants and local residents, for whom the peal is an essential feature of West End life.
St Mary’s set up a fundraiser on Stewardship – a platform for Christian fundraising causes – and sent out notices and leaflets to locals and churchgoers about the appeal.
On the fundraising efforts, Geoffrey said: “We’ve had donations ranging, you know, from 10 pounds through to £2000, so people have been very, very generous.
“We haven’t done any actual fundraising activities, as it were, but we have said that for donations over a certain size, we will actually ring a dedicated ringing for a Sunday service.”
Bell ringing is a specialist craft that can take years to learn. Voluntary ringers learn to handle the bells based on combinations of numbers and vectors, rather than based on notation of melody.
This is made even more challenging because of the weight of the objects involved and the fact that this must all be done from memory, without visual aids.
Churches across the country have struggled to convince youngsters to give up large amounts of their time to learn the art, with bell-ringing largely becoming the domain of the elderly.
Geoffrey says St Mary’s has bucked this trend, however, and said that the number of youngsters they’ve been able to bring on-board, combined with the successful fundraising campaign, has created a sense of gratification at the cathedral:
“That’s been one of the really great things is that, as bell ringers, it makes us realize and appreciate that what we do in ringing the bells is appreciated by the by the congregation and the local residents.
“So that’s really gratifying, and it spurs us on to become better bell ringers and to train up youngsters to do it.
“And we do have we are actually quite unusual here in the cathedral that we have quite a number of youngsters who are keen and come up for practice nights and for Sunday ringing and are learning the skills needed.”
The bells have been out of commission for weeks now, but the various parts have now been returned after being sent away for restoration work, and contractors are at work in the church to have everything reinstalled.
Tuesday is the date set for the first re-ringing, but Geoffrey said that they could be ready even before that, depending on how the works turn out.
He said that locals can expect the bells to keep ringing for decades to come:
“There was a time a little while back, we did a piece of ringing, and somebody realized that – I think there were eight bells ringing – and there were seven decades of age represented. There was a teenager, a 20-year-old, 30-year-old, 40, up to a 70-year-old.
“There’s a satisfaction in doing what we can to keep the bells ringing for another 25-50 years.”
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