mystery bell

[Ben Willetts]

Hi all,

I'm hoping someone out there can help identify the founder of a bell 
we have in our ring of six at Stoke-next-Guildford, Surrey. The back 
three are Eldridge, 1620, and the treble and third are G&J, 1954. No 
problem with those. The difficult one is the second of the ring of 
six.

In 1884 (according to Stahlschmidt) there were just the three 
Eldridge bells in the tower. Sometime between then and 1911, when 
the Victoria County History was published, another bell was added. 
It wasn't a new bell - it has the date 1790 on its shoulder. 
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to have any other identifying markings 
at all.

I've uploaded a few photos of the bell to the "Photos" section on 
YahooGroups - they're in a folder called "Stoke-next-Guildford".

Confusingly, this mystery bell was recorded (accidentally?) by G&J as 
having the date 1700 inscribed on it. Their "bell details" notice 
gives it as 1700 by James Bartlett. I don't know how they discovered 
it was a Whitechapel bell (perhaps they just assumed it was, but I 
thought Whitechapel bells always had founder's markings on them?).

Just to confuse things even further, the article on the augmentation 
in the 1954 volume of The Ringing World (p460) gives the bell as 1700 
by Richard Phelps.

I contacted Whitechapel, asking if they had any further record of the 
bell from the 1954 augmentation to six, but they said they had no 
information other than what was written on the bell details notice.

Can anyone help me make sense of this lot?

Ben