Back in the 70s when I used to go to the Lebanon Community Library, I would sometimes hear the ringing of church bells as I approached the library door.
But these were not ordinary church bells. The weren’t just pealing an announcement that the service was about to begin or end, nor were they in any way tapping out anything like a recognizable tune.
Rather, they sounded something like this:
I knew what it was because I knew my Dorothy Sayers. I had read her whodunit, The Nine Tailors, featuring Lord Peter Wimsey, and I had also seen the British four part dramatization of that book which was shown on PBS’s Masterpiece Theater. That teleplay was quite good except for one brief scene where Lord Peter is unnecessarily, and uncharacteristically, cruel to a woman.
This was Change Ringing, where a series of tuned bells, each controlled by one individual, was rung in a particular sequence of mathematical variations.
Here is how Isaac Asimov described change ringing in his essay “Exclamation Point!” from the July 1965 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (reprinted in the 1966 collection of his essays From Earth to Heaven as well as in a couple other of his collections):
Did any of you ever read Dorothy Sayers’ Nine Tailors? I did, many years ago. It is a murder mystery, but I remember nothing of the murder, of the characters, of the action, of anything at all but for one item. That one item involves “ringing the changes.”
Apparently (I slowly gathered as I read the book) in ringing the changes, you begin with a series of bells tuned to ring different notes, with one man at the rope of each bell. The bells are pulled in order: do, re, mi, fa, and so on. Then, they are pulled again, in a different order. Then, they are pulled again in a still different order. Then, they are pulled again—
You keep it up until all the possible orders (or “changes”) in which the bells may be rung are rung. One must follow certain rules in doing so, such that no one bell, for instance, call be shifted more than one unit out of its place in the previous change. There are different patterns of shifting the order in the various kinds of change-ringing and these patterns are interesting in themselves. However, all I am dealing with here are the total number of possible changes connected with a fixed number of bells.
I had no idea where the changing ringing was coming from, or even whether it was being done live by individuals or by some mechanical means, and for some reason I never bother asking. But I had to admit that it was nice to know that the art of change ringing, which originated in the Old Country, was still alive and well in some form in Lebanon, PA.
I wonder if it still is?
Meanwhile, The Nine Tailors remains the one and only Sayers novel that I’ve ever actually read, although I’ve watched all the other dramatizations of her books that the BBC has done over the years. I much prefer the ones with Ian Carmichael as Wimsey.
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