[Bell Historians] Great Bells of Britain

[Chris Pickford]

Following Bill's helpful explanation (on the subject of RW references) of how he came to use RW issue numbers for citations in Peals.uk, perhaps I can also add an explanation of how "my" (it's actually a digest of a lot of other peoples' work) Great bells list.

It started as a relatively small job to creating a sortable list to determine the "ranking" of the great bell of Bradbourne (Kent) at the time of its installation. The idea was to be able to blank off / sort out heavier bells that didn't exist at the time in order to establish the position of that particular bell in the list in 1870 and in 1914 (dates from memory) when it was scrapped. I then started to expand the same list as a means of identifying the heavier bells (past and present) by individual founders (e.g. Rudhall bells over 25 cwt). Since then, a lot more information has been added.

The list was never intended to be definitive as far as places and bells was concerned and I have kept these brief to fit the space - so the descriptions in the place column are for basic identification only. The master list is a Word table (not an Excel spreadsheet). It's better for printing and has the same functionality in many other respects (e.g. searching and sorting), but copying the data into a spreadsheet for the Keltek site significantly reduces the file size. So, while the list is (I hope) a reliable source as regards founders, dates and weights, the descriptions are in an informal shorthand style only.

All corrections and additions welcome.  Martin Smith has been especially vigilant in pointing out possible errors and omissions and I am grateful for his input.

CP

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Bill Hibbert 
  To: bellhistorians at yahoogroups.com 
  Sent: Tuesday, November 14, 2006 6:35 AM
  Subject: [Bell Historians] Great Bells of Britain


  David:

  > I see that the 6th quarter bell at York Minster is now listed 
  as 'clock bell'. Is there a reason for this?

  Yes. I'm guilty as charged. When I updated the list for this year's 
  diary (with help from several members of the list, and especially Chris 
  Pickford's list of great bells on the Keltek website) my original 
  description of this bell was 'Clock bell no. 6' in line with Chris' 
  list. In editing the text to fit the space available, this ended up as 
  you see. I'll make a note to change it for next year. '6th quarter' has 
  a certain arithmetical charm about it in any case!

  If there are any more errors, please let us know at the RW and we'll be 
  happy to correct them.

  Bill H



              
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