We rang a quarter peal tonight! And better, it was a first for Andrew conducting a quarter peal!

Let me back up. For the past few weeks, Jane has been teaching Andrew how to conduct longer length compositions, mostly by talking about “Bobs at Home and bobs at Wrong”. I am not going to explain all that (I barely understand it myself). But I just wanted to say that Andrew has been working on this.

So tonight we were three – Andrew, Jane, and Randy. Randy was on the trebles, Jane on 3/4, and Andrew on the tenors. Jane announces that Andrew is going to conduct a longer length composition by ringing (let me see if I get this right) “Wrong, home, wrong, three times, single, and do it all again”. This will result in a 720 Bob Minor. If all goes well, we will do it all again, resulting in a 1440 Bob Minor, more than enough for a quarter peal. As Andrew is a new conductor, this was easier than trying to learn a 540 Bob Minor to append to the 720.

So we started, and crashed very early on (essentially at the second Bob). There was some discussion, and we started again. This time things went fairly smoothly (some bobbles, but we recovered from each). After 720 changes, we came round, and Randy paused until Jane said, “Continue!”. So we did. The second 720 was a bit rougher than the first, especially at the beginning. But after 45 minutes we had rung the complete 720 Bob Minor twice, for a quarter peal. Andrew’s first. Recorded for posterity here.

We finished with a simple plain course of St. Clements College Bob (same bells as the quarter). Wow, that goes fast when you have just spent 45 minutes ringing a quarter peal! But it was fun to remember that we could ring that.

And to repeat (because it bears repeating): We rang a quarter peal tonight!