Frank Derrett, Photographer
Recently I published Frank Derrett’s splendid photographs of the West End in the seventies which Paul Loften rescued from a skip and donated to the Bishopsgate Institute.
At first, these pictures appeared to be anonymous but when I examined the transparencies closely, I found several were annotated by a neat italic hand on the cardboard mount, including a name, F.L. Derrett, and an address, 56 Jessel House, Judd St, WC1.
These notes were upon a poignant set of images of interiors – that I assume are Jessel House – which I find especially fascinating. Taken at Christmas, they record an abundance of cards and festive decorations. Upon closer examination, they reveal an enthusiasm for ballet and there are letters from the Royal household framed upon the wall.
At this point, I called in Vicky Stewart, Spitalfields Life’s own private investigator, who famously discovered the location of Horace Warner’s Spitalfields Nippers a few years ago, to see what she could find about the mysterious F.L. Derrett.
Frank Lionel Derrett was born in 1912 and lived at Jessel House his whole life. Frank worked as a clerk at the British Museum from when he was twenty-seven years old in 1939. His father had been killed in Greece at the age of thirty-four, during the First World War, when Frank was only five. He and his mother lived together in Jessel House through the rest of the century, until Frank’s death in January 1995 at the age of eighty-two. It was shortly after this that Paul Loften saved Frank’s photos.
So now these photographs that Frank took in his sixties are all we have. There is a certain intimacy, even affection, in his colourful pictures, taken by Londoner to whom these locations were familiar. They reveal a delight in a London that was all local for Frank, living in Bloomsbury. It was natural for him to walk to work at the British Museum and then into the West End in search of entertainment. The photographs tell me that Frank loved London.
An enthusiasm for ballet and Lotte Lenya
Letters from the Royal household
Clint Eastwood at Christmas
Whidbourne St
London Wall
The Marie Lloyd in Hoxton
Windmill at Wimbledon
Frank’s florist, Annie in Marchmont St – where he bought flowers for his mother
Images courtesy Bishopsgate Institute
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Shakespeare’s Mulberry To The Rescue!
Click to look inside Shakespeare’s Mulberry as cultivated by David Garrick
Many readers will remember the unhappy day in September 2018 when Tower Hamlets Council voted to approve Crest Nicholson’s appalling London Chest Hospital redevelopment which damages the listed building and entails digging up the historic BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY.
After two years of bureaucratic rigmarole, that permission has now been formally granted which means we can challenge it in the High Court. Already, we have employed top Environmental Lawyer Susan Ring of Harrison Grant Solicitors who has established there are grounds for Judicial Review and we must raise £10,000 to proceed before November 20th or the ancient Bethnal Green Mulberry will be dug up.
We are doing this with the help of WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE’S MULBERRY. In 1610, the poet planted a Mulberry tree in his garden in Stratford upon Avon. Unfortunately so many tourists came seeking branches as souvenirs that the owners cut it down in 1770. But the great Shakespearian actor David Garrick rescued a cutting which flourishes to this day.
We are offering a cutting of David Garrick’s tree to everyone who contributes £100 or more to our legal fund. This is a once in a lifetime chance to acquire a scion of Shakespeare’s Mulberry and enjoy a living connection to the world’s greatest writer.
Click on the link below to contribute and then send an email to the East End Preservation Society (eastendpsociety@gmail.com). You will receive your rooted cutting next year and together we will Save The Bethnal Green Mulberry.
CLICK HERE TO SAVE THE BETHNAL GREEN MULBERRY
We are delighted to welcome Dame Judi Dench as patron of our campaign
William Hogarth’s painting of Huguenot David Garrick who began the Shakespeare revival by playing Richard III at Goodman Fields Theatre in Aldgate in 1741
My Staffordshire figure of William Shakespeare flanked by Sarah Siddons as Lady Macbeth and her brother John Phillip Kemble as Hamlet
Our logo by Paul Bommer
Click here to read my feature in The Daily Telegraph about the scandal of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
Read more here about the Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Fate of the Bethnal Green Mulberry
The Reckoning With Crest Nicholson
Jemmy Catnach’s Cries Of London
Jemmy (James) Catnach of Monmouth Court was celebrated for publishing ballads, penny awfuls, and children’s farthing and halfpenny chapbooks. As publisher, compositor and poet, he established the Seven Dials Press in 1813.
Notorious for playing fast and loose with the truth, he published a sensational pamphlet in 1818, claiming that a butcher in Drury Lane was selling sausages made of human flesh, and ended up in the Middlesex House of Detention in Clerkenwell.
Such was Catnach’s love for ballads, he kept a fiddler on the premises at one time so that ballad singers could come in and audition their compositions for publication. Of all the Cries of London I have published these are most modestly produced and crudely wrought images, yet I love them for their strong images and graphic vitality.
Clothes Pegs, Props & Lines – Come buy and save your clothes from dirt, they’ll save you washing many a shirt!
Filberts – I sell them for a groat a pound and warrant them all good and sound!
Sweep – If you rightly understand me, with my brush, broom and my rake, such cleanly work I’ll make…
Peas & Beans – Come buy my Windsor beans and peas, you’ll see no more this year like these!
Toys for Girls & Boys – only a penny, or a dirty phial or bottle
Strawberries – Strawberries & cream are charming and sweet, mix them and try how delightful to eat
When Good Friday comes, Hot Cross Buns!
Oranges – I sell them at two for a penny, ripe, juicy and sweet, just fit for to eat, so customers buy a good many
Milk Below! – Rain, frost or snow, or hot or cold, I travel up and down, the cream & milk you buy from me is the best in town for custards, puddings, or for tea, there’s none like those you’ll buy from me
Crumpling Codlings – Come buy my Crumpling Codlings, some of them you may eat raw, of the rest make dumplings
Cherries – Here’s round and sound, black and white heart cherries, twopence a pound!
Toy Lambs to sell – If I had as much money as I could tell, I never would cry young lambs to sell!
You may also like to take a look at these other sets of the Cries of London I have collected
More John Player’s Cries of London
More Samuel Pepys’ Cries of London
Geoffrey Fletcher’s Pavement Pounders
William Craig Marshall’s Itinerant Traders
H.W.Petherick’s London Characters
John Thomson’s Street Life in London
Aunt Busy Bee’s New London Cries
Marcellus Laroon’s Cries of London
William Nicholson’s London Types
Francis Wheatley’s Cries of London
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana of 1817
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana II
John Thomas Smith’s Vagabondiana III
Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
More of Thomas Rowlandson’s Lower Orders
Adam Dant’s New Cries of Spittlefields
CLICK TO BUY A SIGNED COPY OF CRIES OF LONDON FOR £20
14 Whitechapel Bell Foundry Poems
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INQUIRY
Dan Thompson wrote these fourteen short poems about the Whitechapel Bell Foundry and its bells, as part of his project to write one hundred poems about one hundred places in England. These are complemented with photographs by Charlotte Dew.
The Whitechapel Sound
I
The clapper strikes the place-bell’s rim,
a 1930s tune by Mears and Stainbank.
Down in a spireless church on the coast –
Captain Sophie Littlechild leads the band
in a Kent Treble Bob Major,
ringing a Kentish rag.
The changes are heard up in the Cinque Port.
Eight still bells hold the peace
they’ve kept since before the Great War:
but the bells of St Clements sound,
‘Oranges and lemons, oranges and lemons.’
II
In the Arundel Tower at Canterbury.
Dunstan’s Bell sounds the hour
for pilgrims at the site of the martyr.
Thomas gave his will
to find freedom in the will of god.
He has been killed for his faith:
so we mourn –
he has been elevated to the company of saints:
so we rejoice.
He has been killed:
the bells will be silent for a year.
‘It is only in these our Christian mysteries that we can rejoice and mourn at once for the same reason’.
III
An old signalling-station,
a tower that flies the White Ensign,
the Prime Minister sung in the choir
as the bells brought by boat,
floated down the Estuary,
pealed over war graves
and Bones’ fields.
IV
Along the Estuary, on the hour,
promenaders at Herne Bay,
and pleasure-trippers boarding Thanet wherries,
ghost figures on a ghost pier,
set their watches by the bell in
Mrs Thwaytes’ Clock Tower.
The hour drifts on the tides
to sea forts, pirate radio stations,
across the windfarms.
V
On the line between English and Danish,
Christopher Wren built a church,
German thunderbolts destroyed it –
the spire burning like a candle-
the Royal Air Force restored it.
Sign and countersign, fall and rise –
‘They held out their arms for you to pass under’
The man who burnt
Hamburg and Dresden
stands outside.
‘Lord, do you want us to
call fire down from heaven
to destroy them?’
VI
Two Sticks and Apple,
Ring the Bells at Whitechapple
When I am Rich,
Ring the Bells at Fleetditch
We were made in this place
Ring the Bells at Boniface.
VII
Big Ben in
The Elizabeth Tower,
St Paul’s, Westminster Abbey –
London rings.
The bells in Wren’s
St Mary-le-Bow
would have been heard
six miles to the east,
five miles to the north,
three miles to the south,
four miles to the west.
In St Andrew by the Wardrobe,
the bell rings by itself
when the vicar in Avenbury dies.
VIII
Be not afeard,
the isle is full of the
noise of bells –
Work No 1197:
All The Bells.
The wide bell
rings low and so loud,
nine hundred million people
can hear it.
IX
Before each service,
the tenor rings seventeen times,
once for each of the Lewes martyrs:
one ring more than
the years of protestant
Thomasina Wood’s life.
X
Target 53.
The Kampfgruppe dropped marker flares
at the corners of the city.
From 20,000 feet, a cathedral looks like a factory.
St Michael’s burned, a magnesium flame
melting lead, catching in the oak roof.
The water ran dry before midnight.
Churchill stood on the
Air Ministry roof, waiting
for bombs that never fell on London.
The old Pack & Chapman bells,
‘each bell of good, bold and pleasing tone,
a very fine peal of ten’, recast,
rang as the bombs fell.
XI
Habemus vicarium at Granchester –
‘we have a vicar, we have a vicar’
XII
Wind the handle,
a turn for each day of the year,
and Great Tom will mark the hour.
Cover the fire.
Two bells call the curfew,
one hundred and one rings.
Cover the fire.
Cover the fire.
XIII
The edge, the Borders,
St Andrew’s in Penrith,
where Kathleen Raine
sat out the war.
‘Write
me a piece about the
grave, James Joyce’.
Ken Twentyman will
show you the Fire Bell,
the Market Bell,
the Curfew Bell –
the Morta Bell for death.
XIV
After each round of bells
is a moment of silence,
change, before the bells
ring round again. In the
peace after and before
you can hear Whitechapel.
___________
Footnotes
I St Mary’s, Walmer, Kent: St Peter’s, Sandwich, Kent (where the bells last rung in 1913), St Clement’s
II Quote from TS Eliot Murder In The Cathedral.
III St Peters in Thanet, Broadstairs: the local farmer is Mr Bones.
IV Herne Bay Clocktower
V St Clement Danes, the RAF church. Quote from George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four and Luke 9:54.
IX St Thomas, Lewes
Dan Thompson, Peace Poet
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Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Great Tom At St Paul’s
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INQUIRY
Like bats, bells lead secluded lives hibernating in dark towers high above cathedrals and churches. Thus it was that I set out to climb to the top of the south west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral to visit Great Tom, cast by Richard Phelps at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in 1716.
At 11,474lbs, Great Tom is significantly smaller than Great Paul, its neighbour in the tower at 37,483lbs, yet Great Paul has been silent for many years making Great Tom the largest working bell at St Paul’s and – now Big Ben (30,339lbs) has fallen silent during renovations – Great Tom has become London’s largest working bell.
To reach Great Tom, I had first to climb the stone staircase beneath the dome of St Paul’s and then walk along inside the roof of the nave. Here, vast brick hemispheres protrude as the reverse of the shallow domes below, creating a strange effect – like a floor of a multi-storey car park for flying saucers. At the west end, a narrow door leads onto the parapet above the front of the cathedral and you descend from the roof of the nave to arrive at the entrance to the south west tower, where a conveniently placed shed serves as a store for spare clock hands.
Inside the stone tower is a hefty wooden structure that supports the clock and the bells above. Here I climbed a metal staircase to take a peek at Great Paul, a sleek grey beast deep in slumber since the mechanism broke years ago. From here, another stone staircase ascends to the open rotunda where expansive views across the city induce stomach-churning awe. I stepped onto a metal bridge within the tower, spying Great Paul below, and raised my eyes to discern the dark outline of Great Tom above me. It was a curious perspective peering up into the darkness of the interior of the ancient bell, since it was also a gaze into time.
When an old bell is recast, any inscriptions are copied onto the new one and an ancient bell like Great Tom may carry a collection of texts which reveal an elaborate history extending back through many centuries. The story of Great Tom begins in Westminster where, from the thirteenth century in the time of Henry III, the large bell in the clocktower of Westminster Palace was known as ‘Great Tom’ or ‘Westminster Tom.’
Great Tom bears an inscription that reads, ‘Tercius aptavit me rex Edwardque vocavit Sancti decore Edwardi signantur ut horae,’ which translates as ‘King Edward III made and named me so that by the grace of St Edward the hours may be marked.’ This inscription is confirmed by John Stowe writing in 1598, ‘He (Edward III) also built to the use of this chapel (though out of the palace court), some distance west, in the little Sanctuary, a strong clochard of stone and timber, covered with lead, and placed therein three great bells, since usually rung at coronations, triumphs, funerals of princes and their obits.’
With the arrival of mechanical clocks, the bell tower in Westminster became redundant and, when it was pulled down in 1698, Great Tom was sold to St Paul’s Cathedral for £385 17s. 6d. Unfortunately, while it was being transported the bell fell off the cart at Temple Bar and cracked. So it was cast by Philip Wightman, adding the inscription ‘MADE BY PHILIP WIGHTMAN 1708. BROUGHT FROM THE RVINES OF WESTMINSTER.’
Yet this recasting was unsatisfactory and the next year Great Tom was cast again by Richard Phelps at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. This was also unsuccessful and, seven years later, it was was cast yet again by Richard Phelps at Whitechapel, adding the inscription ‘RICHARD PHELPS MADE ME 1716’ and arriving at the fine tone we hear today.
As well as chiming the hours at St Paul’s, Great Tom is also sounded upon the death of royalty and prominent members of the clergy, tolling last for the death of the Queen Mother in 2002. For the sake of my eardrums, I timed my visit to Great Tom between the hours. Once I had climbed down again safely to the ground, I walked around the west front of the cathedral just in time to hear Great Tom strike noontide. Its deep sonorous reverberation contains echoes of all the bells that Great Tom once was, striking the hours and marking out time in London through eight centuries.
Above the nave
Looking west with St Brides in the distance
Spare clock hands
Looking east along the roof of the cathedral
Up to the clock room
The bell frame for Great Paul in the clock room
Great Paul
Looking up to Great Paul
Looking across to the north west tower from the clock room
Looking along Cannon St from the rotunda
Looking south to the river
Looking across to the north west tower
Looking down on Great Paul
Looking up into the bell frame
Looking up to catch a glimpse of Great Tom, St Paul’s largest working bell
Great Tom cast by Richard Phelps in Whitechapel in 1716, engraved in 1776 (Courtesy of The Ancient Society of College Youths)
Great Tom strikes noon at St Paul’s Cathedral
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A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
CLICK HERE TO SIGN THE PETITION
Benjamin Kipling, Bell Tuner
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
CLICK HERE TO WATCH THE INQUIRY
Benjamin Kipling
One Sunday morning, I joined Benjamin Kipling and his bellringing pals for a congenial breakfast in Waterloo Station after they had rung the bells before the service at St John’s church across the road. Once we had finished our chat, I accompanied Benjamin who could not resist returning to Francis Octavius Bedford’s handsome bell tower of 1822 to ring again after the service. Working now in Somerset from Monday to Friday, Benjamin commutes back and forth by car each weekend to fulfil his bellringing commitments in the capital. Even when we shook hands to say goodbye and he climbed into his sports car, Benjamin was setting off to judge a ringing contest in Cranford as a detour on his journey to the West Country – such is the passion of the man for bells.
The Gentle Author – How should a bell sound?
Benjamin Kipling – A nice bell should have a crisp, clear strike note, followed by the hum coming through underneath, and the hum should be stable and long-lasting.
The Gentle Author – What does the job of a bell tuner consist of?
Benjamin Kipling – Well, the basics involve mounting the bell, mouth upwards, on a very big vertical lathe and taking metal out of different areas inside to alter the partial tones within the mouth. A bell does not just produce a single frequency, a bell has lots and lots of different modes of vibration, and each mode of vibration produces a different frequency and therefore a different note. The standard for bell tuning for the last century has been to aim towards what we refer to as Simpson tuning, so the five lowest notes in the bell strike a minor chord.
The Gentle Author – Why cannot a bell be cast to make the right sound?
Benjamin Kipling – The thickness of the wall of a bell has to be precise to get exactly the right note and – to be perfectly honest – casting techniques just are not that good, they never have been. So to get a bell absolutely precise, the only way is to cast it deliberately too thick and scratch a bit off.
The Gentle Author – Once a bell has been cast, are you the next person to work on it?
Benjamin Kipling – The people in the loam shop dig the newly cast bell out from the mould, removing the core of bricks and loam, and doing a little bit of tidying up on the inscription. Then the bell is passed to me and I do a bit more work to the inscription just to make it looks as nice as possible. I start by putting the bell mouth down on the lathe and skimming across it to give a flat surface on the top before I turn the bell over, bolt it to the machine, and tune it.
The Gentle Author – How do you assess a bell in order to tune it?
Benjamin Kipling – This has been one of the limiting factors in the development of bell tuning. It was only in late Victorian times with the advent of the calibrated tuning fork that it became possible to accurately record the frequencies within a bell. Calibrated tuning forks were the normal way of doing things up until the nineteen seventies and Whitechapel’s tuning forks were still in use until the end – we used them sometimes to double check.
Today, we have other ways of doing it. An electronic stroboscope tuner employs a microphone attached to a light which shines through a spinning wheel, and you can adjust the speed so that if there is a frequency in the sound that corresponds to the spinning wheel, it will appear to stand still. This is the method I use for finishing tuning bells because it is reliably accurate, but there is also a quicker – if slightly less accurate way – of pitching bells using a laptop computer and Fourier Transform software which instantly reads the main partial tones.
The Gentle Author – So it is a question of striking the bell and then bridging the difference between what it is and what you want it to sound like, do you expect to get there immediately or is it a long process?
Benjamin Kipling – Bell tuning is a job of many stages. Calculating what I am aiming for in a particular bell gives me the size of the gap. Usually, I try and make a series of cuts that will get me halfway between where I was and where I need to be, so I can check the bell is responding as I expect it to. Then I will go half as far again, and half as far again, and gradually close in, which theoretically means I never get there. Yet, in practice, this is engineering not mathematics and if I overshoot by a fraction of a semitone then nobody is going to notice. I try and tune a bell to within a cent, which is 1/100 of a semitone, but nobody is going to hear if it is two or three cents out.
The Gentle Author – Are there different kinds of cuts you make to a bell?
Benjamin Kipling – Only in terms of shallow cuts or deep cuts, but they are in different areas of the bell. For instance, if you cut metal out of the shoulder of the bell, the second partial tone flattens more quickly. In the middle of the bell, it is the hum note, the lowest one, that flattens the most quickly. Towards the lip, it is the nominal tone which flattens most quickly. Generally, wherever you take metal off a bell all of the partial tones will move – so it is a juggling act.
The Gentle Author – What is the minimum number of cuts?
Benjamin Kipling – One! But if you are tuning a bell and you are getting very close, you might make one little scratch and test it again, and make another scratch and test it again – it could take dozens.
The Gentle Author – Do you rely upon your ears or instruments?
Benjamin Kipling – The ear is always the final arbiter as to whether a bell sounds good or not. The instruments are there to tell me what is wrong and by how much. I can hear if something is wrong with a bell but I may not necessarily be able to tell exactly what is wrong or by how much, and that is where the instrumentation comes in.
The Gentle Author – Tell me some bells that you are proud to have tuned.
Benjamin Kipling – Absolutely. The five largest at St James Garlickhythe and also all ten of the new bells at St Dunstan-in-the-West on Fleet Street. The tenor bell there is the only bell where I have ever managed to get it to exactly where I want within a fraction of a 100th of a semitone. On paper, that is the best bell I have ever cut. In practice, bigger bells always sound better than little bells. They have more presence and more power, and so the best of all would probably be the largest bell I have tuned, which was for a carillon in the United States. It was cast at 43 hundredweight – a little over two tonnes – and finished at 37 hundredweight, after I tuned six hundredweight out of it. You could hit the bell, walk away, come back a couple of minutes later and still hear it humming.
The Gentle Author – Is there an element of subjectivity in this work?
Benjamin Kipling – There is more than one way to skin a cat. You get differences in character of bells and that can be down to how the tuner approaches the bell. Also, the shape of a bell varies according to who cast it. There are subtle differences between the profile of a Whitechapel Bell, the profile of a Taylor bell or a Gillett & Johnson bell.
The Gentle Author – How did you become a bell tuner?
Benjamin Kipling – At school, I did not like music very much which was maybe because I did not want to learn to play an instrument. I had an interest in music theory, but the teachers did not think it was worthwhile teaching me music theory if I was not going to be learning an instrument. So I dropped music at the earliest opportunity.
Then, in sixth form, a friend of mine who was a bell ringer said, ‘Why don’t you come along on Wednesday night and learn to ring bells?’ So I did and I found it very addictive, and bell ringing became my hobby and I did a lot of bell ringing at university. I studied Physics, then I dropped out and started Computer Science, until I dropped out of that as well. I spent quite a long time at Nottingham University without getting a degree. Possibly, that was because I was spending too much of my time ringing bells rather than getting any work done.
The Gentle Author – Yet you have managed to fit all those things together in your career, how did you enter the industry of bell making?
Benjamin Kipling – There was a bell hanging company in Nottingham at the time, Hayward Mills. I got a holiday job with them and stayed for a couple of years. However, I discovered I was not keen on site work but I did like the theory behind the tuning of bells and, although Hayward Mills did not have a bell tuning machine, they were considering getting one. So when I dropped out from university, they took me on full time, doing admin and occasional bell hanging, with a view to me being the one who would do the tuning when they got a bell tuning machine which – a couple of years later – they did.
The Gentle Author – Are you a self-taught bell tuner?
Benjamin Kipling – Partly. I found some tuning graphs on the internet showing how the different partial tones respond according to where you take metal off a bell. But I had to teach myself how to drive the machine and how much metal to take off, which obviously is nerve-wracking and involves taking off tiny amounts to begin with and checking. Then you find the sound of the bell has hardly changed and so you take off a bit more, until you realise you actually have to take quite a bit of metal off to make any significant difference.
The Gentle Author – Did you ever take too much off?
Benjamin Kipling – The simple answer is ‘No.’ If you are gradually homing in on what you want, that should not be a problem. In practice, with four of the five partial tones, it is possible to go back up again if necessary. Generally, you are thinning the wall of the bell and making it more flexible so it vibrates at a lower frequency. Each time you take a little off, the notes go down. However, by taking more metal off the lip of the bell, it is possible to get four of those five to come back up. So there are usually ways of sorting these things out.
The Gentle Author – Do you find this rewarding work?
Benjamin Kipling – Oh absolutely, it is a lasting legacy. Hopefully my handiwork will be there for centuries because bells do not go out of tune. A lot of old bells were never in tune to begin with, they would just try and cast a bell as close as they could to the right note and, if it was a long way out, they would take out a hammer and chisel and try and chip bits off until it was bearable. That is the reason why old bells are retuned.
The Gentle Author – Is retuning a major part of your work?
Benjamin Kipling – Oh yes. At Whitechapel, probably half of the bells I tuned were old ones that came in for retuning.
The Gentle Author – How is that different?
Benjamin Kipling – The difference is that, whereas a new bell has been cast with enough metal in the right places to be able to do what you want, in an old bell the chances are there may not be enough metal in the places you need. You just have to try and push it in the right direction as much as you can. In the last few years, we tended to do more tuning of old bells on the outsides as well as on the insides and I found you can get much better results by doing that.
The Gentle Author – What are the oldest bells you have retuned?
Benjamin Kipling – Bells over a certain age tend to be listed for preservation.
The Gentle Author – They cannot be retuned?
Benjamin Kipling – It means there is a presumption against tuning, but different dioceses have a different interpretation of what that means. In some dioceses, you will never get permission to tune a listed bell, while in other dioceses – as long as you put a sensible case forward – they have no problem with you retuning anything of any age. The diocese that I have found which is most likely to give permission for tuning old bells is Bath & Wells. There were some bells in Bath & Wells diocese from the fourteenth, if not the thirteenth century, that I have tuned. The profile of bells and the composition of the bell metal has changed remarkably little in all those years.
The Gentle Author – Does bell tuning make you happy?
Benjamin Kipling – Absolutely, when people ask me what my job is, I like to see the expressions on their faces, ranging from disbelief that there could be such a job to complete fascination.
The Gentle Author – Tell me about the Royal Jubilee bells.
Benjamin Kipling – These were cast for St James Garlickhythe but first they were installed in a barge to go down the Thames as part of the Royal Jubilee pageant in 2012.
The Gentle Author – Where were you on that day?
Benjamin Kipling – I was close to St James Garlickhythe, struggling to get to the water’s edge to catch a view of them going past from the bank of the Thames, along with umpteen thousand other people, but the crowds were so deep that I missed them. The framework was fabricated at an engineering company in Edenbridge, so I did hear them and got to ring them on the frame in the works even if I never got to hear them on the river or see them in the barge. The sound of bells tends to bounce off water in a pleasing way. Certainly, I know the bells at St Magnus the Martyr at the northern end of London Bridge sound at their best if you stand just the other side of the river and I think the same is probably true of the Southwark Cathedral bells if you stand on the north bank. People told me my bells did sound very nice on the river.
Transcript by Rachel Blaylock
Click here to sign our petition to Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
You may also like to read about
The Opening Of The Public Inquiry
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry
The Secretary of State steps in
A Letter to the Secretary of State
Rory Stewart Supports Our Campaign
The Fate of the Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry
A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
A Visit To The Bow Bells
The Bell Foundry Public Inquiry continues at 10am today, with live-tweeting at @savethewbf.
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These are the bells of St Mary-le-Bow in the City of London which have good claim to be the most famous set of bells in the world, known as the Bow Bells. These are the bells that Dick Whittington heard in the fable, which seemed to call ‘Turn again Whittington, Thrice Lord Mayor!’ as he ascended Highgate Hill to depart the capital in 1392, inspiring his return to London to seek his fortune with the assistance of his celebrated cat. These are the bells that are so beloved of Cockneys that you must be born within the sound of Bow Bells to call yourself one of their crew. Naturally, these bells were cast at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, the most famous bell foundry in the world.
Simon Meyer, Steeplekeeper at St Mary-le-Bow had to ascend Christopher Wren’s magnificent tower to change the clock to British Summer Time, which afforded me the opportunity to accompany him and view the bells for myself. When we arrived in the belfry, Simon leapt happily around upon the frame as if it were second nature to him yet I found it necessary to place my feet a little more deliberately as we negotiated the famous bells. ‘They’re about to ring,’ he announced at one moment, which filled my head with alarming thoughts of bells rotating in their frames but in fact turned out to be a clock chime which did not entail any movement of bells. Occasioning a reverberation within the belfry as powerful as the sound itself, this is not something I shall forget in a hurry.
The earliest record of the Bow Bells is from 1469 when the Common Council ordered a curfew rung each night at 9pm, marking the end of the apprentices’ working day. In 1588, Robert Greene compared Christopher Marlowe’s poetry to the sound of Bow Bells when he wrote, “for that I could make my verses jet upon the stage in tragical buskins, every word filling the mouth like the faburden of Bow-Bell, daring God out of Heaven with that Atheist ‘Tamerlaine.'”
After the Great Fire, Christopher Wren rebuilt St Mary-le-Bow and the association with Whitechapel began in 1738 when Master Founder Thomas Lester recast the tenor bell. In 1762, he recast the other seven bells and added two more to make a set of ten that were first rung to celebrate George III’s twenty-fifth’s birthday.
In the twentieth century, the bells were restored by H. Gordon Selfridge, the department store entrepreneur, yet these were destroyed within eight years when the church was bombed during an air raid on May 10th 1941. Climbing the tower today, you are immediately aware that it is a reconstruction since the internal structure is of concrete, creating the strange impression of utilitarian bunker clad in seventeenth century stonework.
The current set of twelve bells were cast in Whitechapel in 1956 by Arthur Hughes, and Alan Hughes, the current Whitechapel Bell Founder, recalls being taken out of school for the day by his father to witness the casting. Every bell has an inscription from the psalms and the first letter of each spells out D WHITTINGTON.
It was the use of a 1927 recording of Bow Bells by the BBC during World War II that took them to the widest audience, broadcasting their sound to occupied countries across Europe as a symbol of hope. Even today, the sound of Bow Bells is broadcast globally as the interval signal by the BBC World Service, making these the most familiar bells on the planet. Bow Bells are the definitive London bells and the signature of the capital in sound.
FOUNDED BY ALBERT ARTHUR HUGHES OF THE WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY 1956
THE WHITECHAPEL BELL FOUNDRY LONDON
“‘I do not know,’ says the great bell of Bow’
The ringers’ chamber
St Paul’s viewed from the tower of St Mary-le-Bow
Erected in 1821, the Whittington Stone commemorates the spot on Highgate Hill where Dick Whittington heard the Bow Bells in 1392 and decided to return to London and seek his fortune
This sculpture of the cat was added in 1964
Sculpture of Dick Whittington and his cat at the Guildhall by Lawrence Tindall, 1999
St Mary-le-Bow, Cheapside, c.1900 (Courtesy Bishopsgate Institute)
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A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry
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