Bells in the colonies

[s.pilkington at DvBFZCL5a4isD0_x7emgoJC3Vy6mLBXvo9KiRLuEsj398ver5UG1HshvcZoGVCkG7o3gdtsZw_Y0qMdJuwX3wQs.yahoo.invalid]

Hello Everyone,

I posed this question to our tower during practice this week and I'm curious to see what others might say on the matter.

There are approximately (according to Dove's Guide Country Lists put together by Tim Jackson) 6700 rings in England, just short of 300 in the rest of the UK and 136 in Africa, Australia, Canada, the Netherlands, New Zealand, USA, Spain, India, Pakistan and the Windward Islands combined.

Why is it that there are so few rings outside of England? When the anglophone settlers moved around the world they took plenty of English customs and ethics with them, but bells seem somewhat neglected.

The theories discussed were:

 *
Prohibitive cost. I don't know much about other colonies, but in New Zealand during the first hundred or so years (until c. 1930) there was not a lot of money available for things like bells, and these were often purchased by lottery grants or by "ladies clubs" pooling their money and fundraising for the costs of the bells.
 *
Logistics. To reach the antipodies, until the First World War, a ring of bells would have to be lashed on deck of a ship for a three month journey across the ocean. Most of New Zealand's bells have come from ships or similar backgrounds.
 *
Availability of ringers. There were very few ringers present in New Zealand during the early period which hampered the ability to get enough to even ring rounds. Many bells spent a considerable number of years being chimed for lack of trained ringers.
 *
Modern equipment. By the time that New Zealand could afford to purchase bells (and could afford stone rather than timber buildings to install them into), there wasn't the same need per se for bells to call people to church in the morning.


Any thoughts on the matter would be greatly appreciated.

Kind Regards,
Scott Pilkington

Auckland, New Zealand
           
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ringingworld.co.uk/pipermail/bell-historians/attachments/20100805/cc56c65b/attachment.html>