Thinking allowed

ringing Stedman

After some hints at last Wednesday’s prac­tice at Hem­ing­ford Grey, I have spent a while get­ting to grips with Sted­man, a meth­od (or rather a prin­ciple) devised in the 1670s. A couple of things helped me. First, when I began to learn to ring, Sted­man was the first meth­od that I learnt to ring a cov­er bell to, and one of the things I did was to learn the pat­tern in which pairs of bells come to the back. In a note­book I had sketched this out, writ­ing out a plain course of the last two bells — the first time I had done this. The second help was that I spent an hour each way on the train to Lon­don, and decided to use it to work out the full plain course for Sted­man Doubles. Turn­ing to the back of the note­book I had with me I found my notes of 18 months earli­er which I had entirely for­got­ten about.

Sted­man is based on the two orders in which you can arrange six bells. There are only six ways you can arrange six bells, and in ringing there are only two ways of arran­ging these six dif­fer­ent changes, since a bell can only exchange places with its nearest neigh­bour (or stay in the same place). These two ways can be con­sidered as: ‘for­ward hunt­ing’ in which the bell in first place hunts to third place, and then down to the front again; and ‘back­ward hunt­ing’ where the bell in third place hunts down to the front, leads, and hunts back up to third place again. Sted­man con­sists of each of these ‘sixes’ per­formed altern­ately. At the end of each ‘six’ the bell in third place moves out of the front three into fourth place, and the bell which was in fourth place moves down to take its place. And dur­ing each ‘six’ the bells in fourth and fifth places dodge with each other.

Armed with this inform­a­tion, you can then work out a plain course of Sted­man Doubles, or indeed Triples.

12345
21354
23145
——-
32415
23451
24315
42351
43215
34251
——-
43521
45312
54321
53412
35421
34512
——-
43152
34125
31452
13425
14352
41325
——-
14235
12453
21435
24153
42135
41253
——-
14523
41532
45123
54132
51423
15432
——-
51342
53124
35142
31524
13542
15324
——-
51234
15243
12534
21543
25134
52143
——-
25413
24531
42513
45231
54213
52431
——-
25341
52314
53241
35214
32541
23514
——-
32154
31245
13254
12345

Then came the moment of truth, this Wed­nes­day. ‘Did you have a look at Sted­man?’ I am asked. ‘Right, we’ll ring Sted­man Triples.’ So we rang Sted­man Triples — and I made a com­plete hash of it. Very annoy­ing, hav­ing put some effort into thor­oughly learn­ing the ‘blue line’, and know­ing exactly what I was sup­posed to be doing — but actu­ally try­ing to remem­ber that and ring at the same time was too much. Later in the prac­tice we had anoth­er go, with me again ringing bell num­ber 4. This time — I got it right, and we rang a plain course of Sted­man Triples without me going wrong. I guess my strik­ing could have been bet­ter, but I nev­er lost my place, knew what I should be doing, and was always more or less in the right place. Phew! Now to do it a lot better.

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