
So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry - well_i_never
http://spitalfieldslife.com/2016/12/02/so-long-whitechapel-bell-foundry/
======
vic-traill
The article relates the example of the sales cycle for the 'church in Langley'
\- it took a hundred years from the first recommendation to replace the bells
to actual installation! That's remarkable!

Is there any other industry with these sorts of time lines? I can't think of
one.

What would software built to last/be useful for a hundred years even look
like?

~~~
pjc50
A lot of UK infrastructure is rather old; hundred-year-old rail, Tube and
sewer systems need active maintenance. There are more than a few "national
treasures" that are stuck in limbos awaiting maintenance or renovation for
decades. I can easily imagine that 98 of those 100 years were taken up with
meetings saying "we ought to replace the bells, but we haven't the money".

(Pet example:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Royal_High_School](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Royal_High_School)
which has been mostly empty for almost 50 years despite being in the middle of
Edinburgh.)

~~~
arethuza
Interestingly enough Edinburgh's Royal High is where the term "high school"
was first used in the UK (in 1505, when the school had been operating for
nearly 400 years).

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DanBC
BBC Radio Four has a short programme _Bells on Sunday_.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh/episodes/player](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006sgsh/episodes/player)

Sadly, there's no way to search the BBC site to find specific churches.

Here's Sheffield Cathedral, which is a set of Whitechapel bells. "one of the
finest products of Whitechapel foundry". Yorkshire Surprise Maximus.
[http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wgy69](http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03wgy69)

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ElliotH
I believe this will leave only Taylor
([http://www.taylorbells.co.uk/web/](http://www.taylorbells.co.uk/web/))
casting bells of this sort in the UK, possibly anywhere.

~~~
Someone
'Anywhere', there also are Royal Eijsbouts
([http://www.eijsbouts.com/index.php](http://www.eijsbouts.com/index.php)) and
Petit & Fritsen ([http://www.petit-fritsen.nl/en/index.php](http://www.petit-
fritsen.nl/en/index.php)), which I think are in the same market (Petit &
Fritsen looks to be an Eijsbouts subsidiary, judging from the 'contact' email
address on their site)

~~~
ElliotH
Interesting, there seem to be a couple of change ringing towers with Ejisbouts
bells in the US. Thanks for sharing!

------
Animats
San Francisco's well known holdout: Edwin Klockars, Blacksmithing.[1]

[1] [https://goo.gl/maps/DanouArmzHn](https://goo.gl/maps/DanouArmzHn)

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london888
Whatever the guy's decision I don't blame him - it's his heritage and I trust
him to do what's best. Someone like that will have put a lot of thought into
it.

------
grabcocque
I imagine it's been a difficult few decades for bellwrights. Bellsmiths.
Bellers. I don't know. Sleep well.

~~~
david-given
Bellfounder.

Fun fact: big church bells are so huge, weighing a tonne up, that pre-
industrial revolution they were too big to move. So they were frequently cast
in temporary moulds outside the church where they were going to be installed;
archaeologists have found the furnaces. Bellfounders were itinerant and travel
from site to site.

Another fun fact: bellringing is dangerous; people have died from it. Before
the peal is rung, the bell is rocked from side to side until it eventually
balances in an unstable position, mouth up; to ring, you pull it off balance,
help it go round, and then check it, mouth up again. Except... it's a tonne of
metal. Once it starts moving, it's going to keep moving. Get the rope looped
round your neck, and it'll quite happily hang you as it goes.

For everything you ever wanted to know about bells, bellringing,
changeringing, and the Fens of England, read Dorothy Sayers' _The Nine
Tailors_ ; and the non-bell-related content is damn good, too.

~~~
pja
Not _that_ dangerous. I don’t think there’s been a bell-ringing death in my
lifetime, although I have heard of the very occasional nasty accident.

(My partner has rung church bells all her life & is very plugged in to this
world. I’ll have to ask her...)

~~~
jamessb
The most serious bells related accident I can find is a blast in a French
foundry injuring 46 in 2009 [0].

Another hazard is that, with the exception of some ground-floor rings, most
bells are rung from a ringing chamber in the tower accessed by a spiral
staircase or ladder. This makes it difficult to remove a patient after a
medical emergency (or an accident), and the easiest solution may be for a
stretcher to be lowered through the trapdoor in the ringing chamber used to
install the bells (there have been a couple of articles about drills [1, 2],
and I know of one instance when this was done locally).

There have been a couple of cases where people have been knocked unconscious:
Tony Merrry at Charlbury in 2008 [3], and Helen Springthorpe at Bathampton in
2012 [4]; commenting in 2012, a CCBR spokesperson said that "I know of only
one fatality in the past 50 years" [5].

[0]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/231-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/231-rw-5128.html)

[1]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/750-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/750-rw-5258.html)

[2]: [https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/520-r...](https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-
week/520-rw-5197.html)

[3]: [http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bell-
ringe...](http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bell-ringer-comes-
a-cropper-in-church-tower-accident-829313.html)

[4]:
[http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/bellr...](http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/bellringer-
rescued-after-accident-28919594.html)

[5]: [http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/helen-
springthorpe-...](http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/helen-springthorpe-
bell-ringing_n_2103954.html)

~~~
jamessb
There have also been a few cases where bells have fallen out of their frames,
including at Kilmersdon in 2013 [1,2]. In Canada, this resulted in a fatal
accident in 1999 [3].

[1]:
[http://treblesgoing.org.uk/kilmersdonaccident.html](http://treblesgoing.org.uk/kilmersdonaccident.html)

[2]: [http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly-
bell...](http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly-bell-ringers-
run-cover-bell-crashes-Somerset-church-tower.html)

[3]: [http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death-
pro...](http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death-prompts-
inspections-449)

------
toyg
Note that the business itself is on sale and will hopefully carry on, albeit
in a different place. The saccharine post seems to tiptoe around the real
issue: Alan Hughes is retiring _and is cashing out_ by selling the building
separately from the business. Because of the London property market being what
it is, that building is likely the largest asset the business ever had. It
would be trivial for Hughes to sell the building, relocate and carry on; but
he's only doing half of that, and if a buyer for the business can't be found,
"well that's too bad".

Alan Hughes might be a man who "embraced the patterns that prescribe his
existence", but he's clearly decided to cash in, tradition be damned. In that,
he's more consistent with his generation than the umpteen that came before
him.

~~~
corford
A little harsh. Presuming his children don't want to carry on the business
(if, indeed he has any) then he's left with two choices:

1). Sell the building and business together. Given the location, the sale
would inevitably be to a party that has zero interest in the bell making
business and they'd dispose of the business (or just shut it down) as soon as
they received the deeds for the building.

2). Split the sale in to building and business. Doing it this way at least
gives Alan Hughes some control over who the business goes to (and enables the
sale price for said business to be within range of a potential buyer in the
same line of work/industry).

~~~
toyg
I think it would be more honest to realize the sale of the building, inject
most of the resulting cash in the business (which, after all, would be only
just), _then_ try to sell on a healthy business with a good runway for any new
owner (or the workers, or creditors, or whoever). That doesn't seem to be the
case here, since he's clear the business will just close unless it gets bought
- where is the real estate cash going, then?

I'm probably a bit harsh, but real estate in London has turned plenty of good
men evil, so to speak; this wouldn't be the first nor the last time it
happens.

~~~
maxerickson
Potato potato?

If he owns the building and the business, what difference does it make how he
sells them?

If he injects some hypothetical large amount of real estate cash into the
corporation, he will probably want to get at least the value of that cash in
the sale of the corporation.

~~~
toyg
He is the heir to a 400-year-old business his family bestowed on him.
Shouldn't the moral and ethical priority be to keep such business afloat and
bestow it on the next generation in turn? (Not necessarily of his family.)

If that were the case, injecting any real estate windfall in the business
would be the right thing to do regardless of his personal ROI. Let the
business put to good use the money, which is money the business itself
accumulated in hundreds of years looking after the building. Get someone else
in charge, be an absentee owner, and let it run.

Of course, if you treat it as a business like any other, such imperative does
not exist. That, I think, is where his insistence that he's not a particularly
good or interesting person comes from: he knows he's killing a piece of
history for his own short-term economic benefit. His insistence that "it's
just business" is a way to deflect the moral implications of his actions.

~~~
maxerickson
So do it for him. Set up a non profit. Collect the funds necessary to be an
absentee owner. Buy the business. Run it for posterity's sake.

~~~
toyg
If only I had a building to sell in central London...

~~~
maxerickson
Enthusiasm for running the business for posterity is probably more important
than having a building to sell.

~~~
toyg
I don't disagree, but I'd probably have more enthusiasm for it if I were
sitting on a pile of real-estate cash.

------
bogomipz
How come this isn't being protected? Shouldn't this go to the National Trust?
Big Ben as well as America's Liberty bell came from this foundry. As I believe
did the Bell of Bow(to be true Cockney you had to be born within hearing
distance of them)

It's kind of sad that is survived the Blitzkrieg but not hyper real estate
development.

I'm glad I got to visit while is was still an operating bell foundry. I
remember the folks that worked there were very friendly to me considering I
had wondered in off the street and it was a working foundry and not really a
museum.

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spilk
The Liberty Bell was made here.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Amazing! From the below link:

    
    
       "Speaker of the Pennsylvania Assembly Isaac Norris first ordered a bell for the bell tower in 1751 from the Whitechapel Foundry in London."
    

However that bell immediately failed! No warranty I guess? Maybe we can
contact WhiteChapel quickly before they're gone... Anyway it was recast
locally. Ultimately that one failed too (after 90 years) so I guess well done
local boys?

[https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-
libert...](https://www.nps.gov/inde/learn/historyculture/stories-
libertybell.htm)

------
basicplus2
Best handbells in the world

