A Floating Ring

Here is another way to celebrate Her Majesty`s Jubilee:

Pageant bellringers hope they won’t be sunk by floating belfry challenge

Valentine Low

February 16 2012 12:01AM

The bells that will peal out from the Thames for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee are being cast tomorrow, and the man in charge of ringing them is doing his best to sound confident. “I think the whole idea is totally bonkers,” Dickon Love said. “That is partly why I like it.”

If he is sounding nervous, it is for good reason: no one has ever tried ringing church bells from a floating belfry on the river before, a challenging exercise made more nerve-racking by the fact that the bells do not belong to the pageant at all, but to a church in the City of London . The £180,000 bells were commissioned by St James Garlickhythe, which has agreed to lend them before they are installed.

“If they end up at the bottom of the Thames , someone somewhere will have to provide the church with a new lot,” Mr Love said. “But they won’t end up at the bottom of the Thames ,”he added swiftly. “It is a very big boat.”

At the moment all that exists of the bells is a few large lumps of sand, clay, goat hair and horse manure. That is how the moulds for bells have been made for centuries: sand and clay to make the shape and take the heat of the molten metal, goat hair and manure to burn away and provide a network of tiny air passages so that the gases from the hot metal can escape.

This week, Nigel Taylor, head tuner at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, has been applying the finishing touches to the moulds, stamping the inscriptions that will go on the outside of the bells letter by letter. There will be eight bells, the largest weighing almost half a tonne, and each one named after a member of the Royal Family: Elizabeth, Philip, Charles, Anne, Andrew, Edward, William and Henry.

The foundry has been in Whitechapel since 1570 and, before that, can trace its ancestry to a foundry run in Aldgate by one Robert Chamberlain since 1420.

Despite this heritage, no one has any idea of what it takes to ring eight bells on a floating platform. The boat will be as steady as they can make it. An Olympic-class barge called the Ursula Catherine, capable of carrying 250 tonnes, it will be pushed by a tug at the head of the flotilla of 1,000 boats taking part in the pageant on June 3.

However, Mr Love, a former master of the Ancient Society of College Youths, a bellringing society founded in 1637, said: “Our bellringers can detect movements in a belltower of a few millimetres. It upsets the movement of the bells. They will have to be very skilled in order to manage it. But you have to be able to take risks sometimes. Whoever thought this up is quite visionary. It is so English, so London . It will be something to behold.”