The Guild's First Days: A Reminiscence

 

The bells were actually put in while I was living in Germany, where my father had been stationed, but they were not dedicated until I returned in 10th grade. I was immediately intrigued by the notion of change-ringing. I remember that Mr. [Wayne] Dirksen, who prepared us to sing the hymns for Friday chapel, introduced it to us and I wrote my first Plain Hunt on the back of a set of yellow bus tickets.

 

We used to go up in groups of four to be taught by Mr. Fred Price of Bournemouth, who had something like 80 pupils. He would serve us tea. I remember some of the advice we received: "Don't grip the sally as if it were a serpent," and "Don't look up. There's no help for you there." There was great camaraderie among us and great nervousness as the date approached when our second teacher, Mr. [Rick] Dirksen, had to select a certain number of us, because he couldn't teach us all; for some reason, we ended up with 19. Once the selection was made, I recall making a list of members on a sheet of paper soaked in tea to look ancient. I also had a little notebook in which I listed all the quotations in the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations which were about bells. We were presented with a set of handbells at the very beginning by the ringers who rang the first peal, a select band of Englishmen. Those handbells (after various epic struggles between the Music Department and the Whitechapel Guild as to whose bells they were) are still in regular use.

 

In those early years the Whitechapel Guild was the backbone of Cathedral ringing. We were quick learners and there were lots of us. We used to laugh at the notation at the end of the service bulletin, "Bells rung by the men and boys of Washington Cathedral." There were St. Albans boys at the beginning, but they tended to drop out. At that time everyone at NCS could contribute to their team's total points by doing "curric," or an extracurricular physical activity, and it was decreed that ringing satisfied this requirement.

 

Because of the nature of the exercise, as change ringing is called, one often bumps into old Whitechapel girls in ringing chambers all over the world, and I am still a close friend of many of those girls who learned to ring back at the very beginning. It is exciting that members of those early bands are now teaching a new generation of Whitechapel ringers.

 

I met my husband as a result of Whitechapel membership. For our first assignment in senior year, our English teacher Miss Hicks asked us to write about anything that interested us, so of course I wrote about ringing. She liked the essay and showed it to Dean [Francis] Sayre. Eventually some of it was read out at graduation, and it was also published in The Ringing World, the official journal of change ringers. (Their publication criteria were not too rigorous!) I received a bunch of letters after its publication, one from my future husband, a ringer in Leicestershire. You can never be too careful about your English assignments.