[Bell Historians] G&J business practices

[Anne Willis]

charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

Clearly there were very strong emotions about G&J at Whitechapel and not
without reason. Johnston's business practices were very dodgy to say the
least. There are many sets of G&J handbell around acquired by Tower
Captains who promoted the case for G&J to get the job to their Parishes even
if their quote was worse than the competition. Yes we would now call it
bribery and so it was then.

There is a story that when it was decided to put a ring of 8 in at Christ
Church, Bradford on Avon, Sam Hector (a Trowbridge ringer and gardener to
the donors) went round the various foundries asking how much they would
offer him to put the contract their way. G&J installed the bells, and
included a very indifferent set of handbells. I think Johnston paid for the
tea after the dedication.

Just think, we could have had an L&J eight!

Anne Willis
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ringingworld.co.uk/pipermail/bell-historians/attachments/20040703/fa019bec/attachment.html>