Spitalfields Life

Today I introduce Benjamin Kipling, former Bell Tuner at the Whitechapel Bell Foundry

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

You can help save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry as a living foundry by submitting an objection to the boutique hotel proposal to Tower Hamlets council. Please take a moment this weekend to write your letter of objection. The more objections we can lodge the better, so please spread the word to your family and friends.

HOW TO OBJECT EFFECTIVELY

Use your own words and add your own personal reasons for opposing the development. Any letters which simply duplicate the same wording will count only as one objection.

1. Quote the application reference: PA/19/00008/A1

2. Give your full name and postal address. You do not need to be a resident of Tower Hamlets or of the United Kingdom to register a comment but unless you give your postal address your objection will be discounted.

3. Be sure to state clearly that you are OBJECTING to Raycliff Capital’s application.

4. Point out the ‘OPTIMUM VIABLE USE’ for the Whitechapel Bell Foundry is as a foundry not a boutique hotel.

5. Emphasise that you want it to continue as a foundry and there is a viable proposal to deliver this.

6. Request the council refuse Raycliff Capital’s application for change of use from foundry to hotel.

WHERE TO SEND YOUR OBJECTION

You can write an email to

planningandbuilding@towerhamlets.gov.uk

or

you can post your objection direct on the website by following this link to Planning and entering the application reference PA/19/00008/A1

or

you can send a letter to

Town Planning, Town Hall, Mulberry Place, 5 Clove Crescent, London, E14 2BG

You may also like to read about

A Bell-Themed Boutique Hotel?

Nigel Taylor, Tower Bell Manager

Hope for The Whitechapel Bell Foundry

A Petition to Save the Bell Foundry

Save the Whitechapel Bell Foundry

So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry

On Valentine’s Day, I cannot help thinking back to the days when we had Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green to make the East End a more colourful place, before she was ‘socially cleansed’ to Uttoxeter

Viscountess Boudica of Bethnal Green confessed to me that she never received a Valentine in her entire life and yet, in spite of this unfortunate example of the random injustice of existence, her faith in the future remained undiminished.

Taking a break from her busy filming schedule, the Viscountess granted me a brief audience to reveal her intimate thoughts upon the most romantic day of the year and permit me to take these rare photographs that reveal a candid glimpse into the private life of one of the East End’s most fascinating characters.

For the first time since 1986, Viscountess Boudica dug out her Valentine paraphernalia of paper hearts, banners, fairylights, candles and other pink stuff to put on this show as an encouragement to the readers of Spitalfields Life. “If there’s someone that you like,” she says, “I want you to send them a card to show them that you care.”

Yet behind the brave public face, lay a personal tale of sadness for the Viscountess. “I think Valentine’s Day is a good idea, but it’s a kind of death when you walk around the town and see the guys with their bunches of flowers, choosing their chocolates and cards, and you think, ‘It should have been me!'” she admitted with a frown, “I used to get this funny feeling inside, that feeling when you want to get hold of someone and give them a cuddle.”

Like those love-lorn troubadours of yore, Viscountess Boudica mined her unrequited loves as a source of inspiration for her creativity, writing stories, drawing pictures and – most importantly – designing her remarkable outfits that record the progress of her amours. “There is a tinge of sadness after all these years,” she revealed to me, surveying her Valentine’s Day decorations,” but I am inspired to believe there is still hope of domestic happiness.”

Take a look at

The Departure of Viscountess Boudica

Viscountess Boudica’s Domestic Appliances

Viscountess Boudica’s Blog

Viscountess Boudica’s Album

Viscountess Boudica’s Halloween

Viscountess Boudica’s Christmas

Terry aged four sitting on a cow named Tom

When he was evacuated from Bethnal Green at four years old, Terry Bay rode a cow through an orchard in Cambridgeshire but these days he rides a taxi around the London streets. In between these peregrinations – each delighting him with their ever-changing perspectives – Terry became a boxer and a compositor, exercising the breadth of his talents by adopting new professions to suit the varying demands of his life. Yet a pair of boxing gloves hangs from the rear-view mirror of Terry’s cab as an indicator of his true passion and, if any passenger should ask – as they often do – Terry brings out an envelope of boxing pictures that he always carries, eager to share his reminiscences with any fellow enthusiast.

I visited Terry in Barkingside where lives today, but I discovered his was a story of Bethnal Green and, in the hallway of his comfortable flat, he has an extraordinary gallery of sepia portraits of members of his and his wife’s families who all lived in Bethnal Green through many generations.

You would not automatically characterise Terry as a fighter, such is his gentle and self-effacing nature. Though when he told me his story and revealed that his father died when Terry was twelve, just before he started boxing, I understood how it became necessary to find the courage to stand up for himself. In fact, Terry discovered he was blessed with a natural talent as a boxer, yet although he won most of his fights he never became a champion. Instead, Terry shared an enduring camaraderie with his fellow boxers, benefiting from a wealth of friendships that has sustained him through the years and which he still enjoys today.

“If anybody asks, I say I come from Bethnal Green. I was born in Cranberry St off Vallance Rd in 1937 – but a bomb fell there in 1940 and we moved out, first to Corfield St and then to Middleton St where I lived until was twenty-six. But, in 1941, at four years old I was evacuated to Chatteris with my brother Albert and my sister Rita. My mother Connie – she was born in Russia Lane – she wouldn’t let us be separated. My father Bill – he was a fireman during the war – he came from Menotti St, and he died when I was twelve. He had TB and didn’t go for treatment. He worked in the Docks before the war and that’s how my brother got into the Docks. Later, me and my brother and my sister, were put under observation for TB because we were so skinny. We had to go the children’s clinic in Underwood Rd and they gave us spoonfuls of cod-liver oil which I hated.

The man we were sent to in Chatteris was a farmer, and he had an orchard out the back where he kept the chickens and pigs. He cleared out the chicken house and we stayed there, and my mum came to visit too. She used to wring the chicken’s necks and pluck them, and shoot the pigs with a pig gun. She did everything, she worked in bottle factory and she was a cleaner, and she lived for her children. Later, my cousins came down to join us and we all stayed in a cottage, and then my mum and dad came to visit us – and when the war was over, they came down and took us back to Bethnal Green.

I went to infant school in Teesdale St and then at eleven years old I went to the Mansford St where they had an after-school boxing club. There were all these boys standing in a circle and there was one kid who looked like a boxer. He was deciding who to box and – as I was thin and I didn’t look as if I could box –  he picked me. It went a couple of rounds and he was supposed to be boxing me, but I was boxing his head off and he realised I had a natural talent –  and he got the hump. So then I went off to the Mansford Boxing Club with Terry Staines and Georgie Whaiter and I had a couple of bouts there. The Repton Boxing Club was going strong and they poached Terry and Georgie, so I tagged along and became a Repton boy. They took me to the London Federation of Boys’ Clubs Competition and I won my first fight but got beaten in the semi-final. That was the story of my life, there was always somebody better than me! I boxed seventeen times as a junior and lost five. Then I gradually fell away from it, I was a teenager and I got distracted.

I left school and did a six year apprenticeship and became a compositor and got married and wanted to better myself and I went to work in Fleet St. At first, I worked for the Evening News where I got a holiday frame, covering for people on leave, but then I applied for a permanent job the next year and they kept me on. And I thought I was a millionaire, I was getting fifteen pounds before but at the Evening News I got thirty-seven pounds a week! This was in 1969 and I was thirty-two. You worked with hot metal and you had deadlines to meet. Firey Fred was the head printer and he used to be always on your back when you were working on a page, ‘Hurry up! Quick as you can, mates.’ There was a metal frame for the page and stories came in hot metal, and you had a graph of how it was supposed to be. The journalists came and told you where they’d like their stories and, if it was too long, they’d cut it down. Finally, you had to plane the plate down and that’s when I got my finger permanently bent. There was two of us working on a single page. One worked at the top and the one that worked at the bottom was the assistant. He was planing the finished page down to make it smooth and we were in a hurry because Firey Fred was making us sweat. It used to be a bit crazy. Then it’d all go quiet – and you’d go off and have breakfast or a beer until the next edition.

My wife and I moved into a flat in Cressy Mansions in Stepney when we got married but six months after our son Fraser was born in 1970 we moved out to a house in Chigwell. Eventually, after twelve years at the News Chronicle, I was made redundant when it closed in 1981. Then I did ten years at the Daily Mirror until computers came in and I was made redundant again, after Robert Maxwell took it over. I worked at Tower Typography in Holywell Lane, Shoreditch, doing general typesetting for a while, but I didn’t like it after the excitement of the newspapers. When I finally left printing, I bought a pub, The Dolphin on Redchurch St, but that didn’t suit either, the life of a publican. That’s when I became a cab driver, and that’s what I’ve done ever since, for the past twenty-four years.

I was never a famous boxer. My father loved boxing, he would have liked what I did but he died before I started. And although my mother never liked me doing it, I made a lot of friends and I had a fun-filled time with my pals. I was brought up in a rough area and people got into trouble. I was in a car once with some friends, and the police stopped us and found wax impressions and tools for making keys in the boot. They took us back to the station and I was remanded in Brixton for two weeks, even though I was never a villain or a thief.

The only thing I’ve done that I’m really proud of is my boxing life. Once I overheard the headmaster at my school talking to a class and he said, ‘I watched Terry Bay sparring in the playground and he’s very good.’ I didn’t know I was good. And for him to have said that meant everything to me.

I didn’t try to be a tough guy but you had to take care of yourself. I wasn’t brave, I was scared of being scared.”

Terry at the Repton Boxing Club.

Terry is on the far right of this picture of the Mansford St School Boxing team 1951.

Terry as a schoolboy.

Terry and his friend Bobby in Petticoat Lane, 1954.

Terry enjoys a drink with his mates at the Westminster Arms on the corner of Old Bethnal Green Rd.

Terry with pals outside departures at London Airport on the way to a holiday in Jersey.

At Strakers & Sons, Hackney Wick, where Terry was apprenticed as a compositor in 1956. Terry can be seen in the distance on the right in a white shirt.

Mr Souter, the press man, and Nobby, the overseer. Terry is on the extreme left.

Terry & Eileen at their marriage in 1969.

Terry with his good friend Terry Spinks, the famous boxer who won a gold medal in the 1956 Olympics and died this year, also shown as a younger man in the inset.

Terry Bay has a pair of boxing gloves hanging in his cab and always carries his boxing photos in an envelope in case he meets a fellow boxing enthusiast.

You may like to read these boxing stories

Sylvester Mittee, Welterweight Champion

Ron Cooper, Lightweight Champion

Sammy McCarthy, Flyweight Champion