Here in the UK, a centuries old tradition of church bell ringing is under threat. There isa shortage of new recruits. A BBC local radio survey suggests it’s getting more and more difficult to persuade new comers to take on the task. So how do you attract a new generation? Joe Tillie is a tower captain at St Dunstan’s in Stepney in east London. What first lured him to bell ringing?

I think part of it was just curiosity because you hear the noise and behind stain glass windows you can see shadow if figures moving around, and you think, oh what is it that they are doing. So yeah I suppose it’s just curiosity really and then once I got in the tower and found out what the mechanics of it, that’s really what motivated me to do it. And I think what I found was when you first try it, you think it looks really easy. And it’s actually much harder than it looks as most things are. And so you get a real motivation to try and perfect your technique and to do it correctly.

So share some of the skills you found out you needed in case any of our listeners also have a dream to be a bell ringer.

So you are doing an activity that has maybe six, eight or ten people. So your communication has to be very good. You can’t really talk whilst the bells are ringing. So a lot of it is to do with listening. So you are listening for other people’s bells and your bell in relation to that but also the visual clues. So you are looking to see where they are looking, to see where you should be ringing. Or perhaps you might go a bit wrong and someone will turn at you and smile. And you’ve got to pick that up and think “ah, right, what am I supposed to be doing? Am I ringing after that person? Are they telling me to ring more quickly?” And the other aspect of it would be the physical strength. So ringing that requires quite a lot of energy. And so you are perfecting your technique to get the bell up to the balance which with something that big can be quite difficult.

You don’t look like the hulk. So is it the way you pull the bells down cuz usually it’s a big rope, isn’t it or it’s a technique rather than strength?

Yeah, so it relies a lot on I suppose gravitational potential energy. So the bell is, we call it “up”, so it’s balancing. And you just need a tiny pull for it to swing on a wheel. And so that’s where the skill comes because if you pull it too hard, it will spinround too quickly and potentially break. And if you don’t pull it hard enough, then it’s not going to go anywhere. But we have a ringer and I’m sure she wouldn’t mind me saying she is quite petite.