So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry | Hacker News Reader

So Long, Whitechapel Bell Foundry

spitalfieldslife.com

125 pointswell_i_never42 comments

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?

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 which has been mostly empty for almost 50 years despite being in the middle of Edinburgh.)

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).

Forestry can also have very long time lines.

In 2003 a Danish forester (or whatever the title is) reported to the "war ministry" that the oaks ordered 200 years earlier for the fleet were ready.

Article in Danish: http://www.trae.dk/artikel/ps-hr-krigsminister-egen-er-klar-...

Unix is almost 50 :)

BBC Radio Four has a short programme Bells on Sunday. 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

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

'Anywhere', there also are Royal Eijsbouts (http://www.eijsbouts.com/index.php) and Petit & Fritsen (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)

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

Plus there’s at least one bell foundry in France. (In Villedieu-les-Pouelles in Brittany: http://www.cornille-havard.com/ )

There's 8 active bell foundries left in Germany alone

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_von_Glockengie%C3%9Ferei...

British bells are quite different from those in most other parts of the world in that they can be used for change ringing, i.e. rung in a controlled manner. Not sure if that would be possible with bells from other countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Change_ringing

Absolutely. To clarify, by 'of this type' I meant change ringing bells - I'm sure there are plenty of people making bells - equipped to kit out a tower with a new frame of full circle bells must be less common.

Don't worry, there are lots of bell manufacturers in Russia at least - lots and lots of Orthodox churches to supply! ;)

The Whitechapel company is just moving, not going out of business.

I hadn't seen that. A lot of the stories about this state that they're going out of business.

Hm, being sold and the old foundry-master retiring. It may not even retain the name.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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...)

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...

[1]: https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-week/750-r...

[2]: https://www.ringingworld.co.uk/news-articles/this-week/520-r...

[3]: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/bell-ringe...

[4]: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/breakingnews/offbeat/bellr...

[5]: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/10/helen-springthorpe-...

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

[2]: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2507951/Elderly-bell...

[3]: http://www.anglicanjournal.com/articles/bell-tower-death-pro...

"pre-industrial revolution they were too big to move."

A ton isn't too heavy (heavier guns were moved), but it was often easier to build the oven to melt the metal to make them near the church.

An amazing story is how Filipe de Brito tried stealing the Great Bell of Dhammazedi, a (supposedly) 300,000 kg bell, in 1608 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bell_of_Dhammazedi).

I'm not sure what to believe of this story, but it would be amazing if such a bell were recovered from a river bed where it has been lying for four centuries.

An additional hazard of bellringing was lightning. As I learned from a biography of Benjamin Franklin, folks believed that ringing the church bells during a storm would protect the town. If the rope got wet, then, well, the bell ringer became part of the electrical circuit. Franklin's lightning rod was credited with saving lives in Europe because of this.

Somebody with EE or meteo experience may correct me on this, but the word "circuit" sounds wrong here. Isn't a lightning strike just a point-to-point current from charged clouds to ground (and in the other direction on the return stroke)?

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.

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).

A world away, but it is quite routine now for public sector organisations to sell centrally located and high value buildings and use the proceeds to finance a new building in a lower value location. For example: a number of further education colleges, many London based art colleges, and Birmingham City Council's disposal of Baskerville House some years ago and Newhall House soonish.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Is it possible that by selling the business and the building separately he is actually trying to ensure the business continues, by making sure the buyer is not just someone who only wants the building and will neglect or close the business or not know what to do with it?

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.

The Liberty Bell was made here.

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...

Best handbells in the world

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