The sound of centuries: Britain's last bellfounders

'Oranges and lemons,/Say the bells of St Clement’s.’ Those of St Giles speak of brickbat and tiles, those at Whitechapel of two sticks and an apple — and all this ‘ding dong’ talk isn’t in London alone. Ever since they arrived in the UK with early Christianity, bells have hailed celebrations and commemorations, raised alarm or simply marked the passage of time.

In a world that has changed massively even in the past two decades, they do exactly the same thing as the day they were first cast, often hundreds of years ago. ‘People have heard the same sound for generations, uniting them in their local soundscape,’ says Jonathan Humbert, who is steeple keeper at St Albans Cathedral, Hertfordshire, as well as principal auctioneer at Humbert & Ellis. The sale of 25 antique bells, running online until Wednesday, April 15, is, therefore, likely to pique plenty of interest —not least because it is a bit of a rarity.

‘In my 35 years as an auctioneer,’ says Jonathan, who is managing the sale, ‘I have been privileged to offer such diverse items as Princess Diana’s Ford Escort RS2000 and Churchill’s reading glasses; however, I’ve never been invited to sell a collection of historic bells before.’

The story behind this unusual sale has its roots in a Leicestershire market town and a bellfounder named John Taylor, who, in the mid 19th century, declared: ‘I flatter myself that I am at length come to the full knowledge of bell-casting. Master I may say of my Art. I fancy I can execute them in a manner to be excelled by none.’ The claim was bold, but deserved and Taylor’s name still graces the foundry he established in Loughborough in the late 1830s.

Bells are objects of heft and longevity: moulded from molten metal with the aim of resonating — literally — for generations, they require patience and unstinting labour. In Taylor, they found a devoted craftsman. He made his base in the Midlands by fate. As the son of a bellfounder, he had learned his trade early and worked in both Devon and Oxford before receiving a commission in 1838 to recast the bells of Loughborough’s ancient All Saints Church. There was, however, one stipulation: for reasons of tradition, the work needed to be carried out within the parish — so Taylor relocated to the town.

At first, he leased some vacant buildings to serve as his new premises, but, as the years passed by and his reputation continued to grow, he bought land on the outskirts of Loughborough and set up a larger, permanent bellfoundry. He didn’t live long enough to see it open, but the business passed down to his son, John William, and retained the same commitment to craft and quality — so much so that, some 165 years later, it’s still casting bells.

From the very place Taylor conceived, which is now home both to the UK’s last major working bellfoundry and the Bellfoundry Museum, have since come forth more than 25,000 bells, which hang not only along the length of Britain, but in more than 100 countries worldwide. The 16.75-ton Great Paul, the largest church bell ever made in the UK, was cast by John Taylor & Co in 1881 and still lives in the south-west tower of St Paul’s Cathedral. Another mammoth is Great Peter of York, made in 1927 for York Minster, which, although not the heaviest at 11 tons, is the record holder for Britain’s deepest clock chime.

The peals and bongs that resonate in the city hall in Cape Town, South Africa, St George’s Church in Ypres, Belgium, the Rainbow Tower Carillon in Niagara Falls, Canada, and St Andrew’s Cathedral in Singapore — among myriad others — also began life in Loughborough. Perhaps more surprisingly, Taylor’s was even called upon, in 1980, to make a custom ‘Hell’s Bell’ for the rock band AC/DC (tuned to E, if you’re interested).

Today, to visit the foundry, set on an unassuming street in the east of town, is to step back into another era. The casting hall is still a working industrial space of furnaces and 14ft-deep pits (bells are buried in sand as they cool, to ensure an even finish and prevent cracking). The joinery shop is busy bending ash into shape to make bell-ringing wheels and the tuning workshop sees metal shaved away from each bell’s interior, increment by increment, to produce the required harmonics.

‘The foreman’s been here for 40 years, too,’ says volunteer guide Geoff Dilks as we tour, gesturing towards a flat-capped man surrounded by tools and metalwork. ‘And look under your feet,’ he continues, pointing to the time-worn tiles that cover the factory floor. ‘They look like stone, but they’re actually made of oak. Much safer when you’re moving bells around.’

As well as oak tiles, bells need space, which brings us back to the auction and the reason the sale has come about. Despite occupying the same Grade II*-listed red-brick buildings since 1859, John Taylor & Co is now a tenant of The Loughborough Bellfoundry Trust, set up in 2016 with the charitable aim of conserving the bellfoundry, its archives and its museum. A recent, grant-funded refurbishment of the latter has resulted in a spacious modern visitor attraction — you’ll find some absorbing exhibits around the art and science of bellfounding — but a shortage of storage space. This, in turn, has led to the decision to put some of the bells in the collection up for sale, with all profits going back to the trust. Four of the pieces being auctioned were cast (or recast) at Taylor’s, but others were produced by former bellfoundries in cities as diverse as Edinburgh, Liverpool, Bristol, Chesterfield, Bradford, Dublin and Sheffield. All have their own stories to tell, ranging from the poignant to the religious.

One of the bells, dating from 1852, once called monks to prayer at Mount Saint Bernard Abbey, Leicestershire, these days home to the UK’s only Trappist brewery. Another is a former Second World War cast brass scramble bell from an RAF base, Manston in Kent, engraved ‘A.M. 1939’ and weighing some two stones. Complete with a hand-rung plaited rope clapper, it was tasked with summoning pilots to flight duty. The third has a much grimmer past: cast from iron in the late 19th century and weighing more than a quarter of a ton, it hung close to a jail in Christ Church, Staffordshire, and is thought to have served as an execution bell.

A couple more bells hail from the 18th century: one, inscribed with the date 1711, was cast in bell-metal (a bronze alloy) by Edinburgh bellfounder Robert Maxwell. The other was cast in 1771, then recast by John Taylor & Co in 1883, and is engraved with the company name. It once hung in St James’s Church, Little Raveley, Cambridgeshire — and although neither as sonorous as Great Peter, nor as big as Great Paul, it is a strand of the fabric of the British countryside