[r-t] Composers of popular maximus methods

[Alan Ainsworth]

I rang in, and suggested the name for, the first peal of Cantuar which was
at  Canterbury Cathedral.  It is my understanding that Rod Pipe was the
deviser of the method.
  I still have the grid work which Peter Border gave me from which came the
methods, Newgate , Eldon etc.

Alan Ainsworth

On 25 October 2016 at 18:30, Richard Smith <richard at ex-parrot.com> wrote:

>
> There have been a couple of interesting discussions on Facebook recently
> about maximus methods.  Following last month's peal of Snow Tiger at St
> Philip's, Mark Davies commented how hard it is to get a new method accepted
> into the canon of standard maximus methods, and that only a tiny number of
> method designers had succeeded.  Then a few weeks later someone asked why
> we only record the authorship of compositions and not of methods.  The
> answer is doubtless that until method design and composition came to be
> considered part of the same process, each feeding into the other -- the
> process Philip Earis called architecting -- method design was trivial and
> the designer was not considered worth recording.  This makes it hard to
> assess how many method designers have succeeded in getting their methods in
> to the maximus canon.
>
> Since the war, only 20 methods have accounted for more than 1% of the
> single-method peals of maximus in a decade, with three methods being far
> ahead of the others.  In decreasing order of popularity, they are:
>
>   Cambridge
>   Bristol
>   Yorkshire
>
>   Lincolnshire
>   Plain Bob
>   Superlative
>   Newgate
>   Avon
>   Orion
>   Pudsey
>   Londinium
>   Swindon
>   Kent
>   Cantuar
>   Rigel
>   Barford
>   Zanussi
>   Ariel
>   Strathclyde
>   Prittlewell
>
>   Phobos
>   Albanian
>   Lyddington
>
> I've appended Phobos to this list, despite it not being one of the 20 most
> popular single methods: for good reason, it's almost never rung as a single
> method (it's only been pealed seven times), but is nevertheless rung in
> well over 1% of peals of maximus these days.  I lack the data to know
> whether any other methods may have fallen into this category last century,
> but very probably Albanian and Lyddington did, and I have included them on
> that assumption.
>
> The name of the designer of Plain Bob is lost in early history of
> ringing.  (Some attribute it to Robert Roan, but there's no evidence he
> contributed more than just the WHW calling used in minor.)  Several other
> methods -- certainly including Kent, Cambridge, Yorkshire, Pudsey and
> Bristol -- are such obvious continuations of an extension series that it's
> meaningless to talk about a composer for the maximus version.  In the case
> of Britol, Bankes James designed bot the major and royal version, so if
> anyone is to be credited with the maximus version it should probably be
> him, regardless of whether he was first to actually write it out.
>
> What of the other methods on the list?  I'm fairly sure David Pipe
> designed Phobos together with Deimos specifically for use in what has
> become his classic 11-part cyclic 6.
>
> In 2000 Rod Pipe wrote a introduction to a collection of Peter Border's
> peal compositions which says that Border produced Newgate, Barford and
> Avon, and the underwork of Orion, Rod Pipe having already supplied its
> overwork.
>
>   http://www.ringing.info/peter-border-frames.html
>
> That's about where my knowledge ends.  Can anyone else supply some of the
> missing names?
>
> RAS
>
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