Southwark.

[jim phillips]

DLC wrote:-
>St Andrew, Plymouth, I believe, remained in the undamaged tower - the 
>church being gutted.

They did indeed and had a remarkable escape. I rang there with Tom Myers 
and his dad G Harry Myers when the church was just a roofless shell with 
only the outside walls remaining. Tom told me that on the night of 21st 
March 1941 there was the most ferocious attack on Plymouth which followed 
one the previous night in which the church had been damaged. When the fire 
brigade reached the church it was well ablaze and they realised they could 
not save it. However, across the rear of the church, where it met the base 
of the tower, there hung a heavy dossal curtain to keep the drafts out. The 
fireman played their hoses on this curtain in a determined effort to save 
the tower and when the curtain finally went due to the intense heat, the 
fireman then played the hoses on to the wooden bell hole cover in the stone 
vaulting at the base of the tower. Fortunately the medieval craftsman who 
built the tower had constructed a stone vault at its base where it entered 
the church, and also had made the tower louvres of stone and close together. 
The morning after the raid Tom and his dad went up to the belfry and found 
all the louvres blocked up with burnt wood and ashes. St Andrew's was the 
mother church of Plymouth and meant a lot to the residents of that city.


>There is a photograph of the new 1911 tenor (then 50-0-21

I was told that after the war the bell was tuned from B to B-flat in order 
to compete with St Paul's. Is this correct?