As bellringers we wanted to do something special to mark Shirley’s departure for Devon and the obvious thing for ringers is to ring a ‘peal’. We had wanted to try and ring a peal in thanksgiving for Geoff Morrell’s life and witness, but we had trouble getting ringers together so decided to mark both events with one peal attempt. A peal is at least 5,000 unique changes (no repetition allowed) and takes nearly three hours of non-stop ringing, so it isn’t easy. If anyone makes a big mistake and gets out of place for too long then we have to stop and the peal is ‘lost’.
We had five of our own ringers so we needed three more, one of whom would need to ‘conduct’ the peal. This involves making calls which affect the order of the bells (these have to be called in exactly the right place according to the ‘composition’ and the conductor has to commit this composition to memory as you can’t have any physical aids in the tower). The conductor also tries to keep people in the right place if the temporarily lose their path amongst the other bells. Luckily we were able to recruit three Portsmouth District ringers including a former District Secretary and two of the current ringing masters.
Adrian Jordan (a Shedfield Churchwarden) announced at the end of Shirley’s last service that we would be ringing a peal and this would be the church’s way of having the last word. Fortunately we managed to ring the peal and it was reported thus:
1 Betty J Daysh
2 Sarah E Hutchinson
3 Lee Pinnington
4 Angela M Edwards
5 Neale V Fray
6 Andrew F Case
7 Richard A Case
8 Malcolm M Powell (C)
Arranged and rung as a farewell to Revd Shirley Henderson, Vicar of Shedfield and Rector of Wickham, leaving to become Team Vicar within the Hartland Coast Ministry Team in Devon.
Also in thanksgiving for the life of Revd Geoffrey Bernard Morrell (1945-2007) former Vicar of Shedfield.
Andrew Case
