Easter Bells in Britain

In summertime on Bredon

The bells they sound so clear;

Round both the shires they ring them

In steeples jar and near,

A happy noise to hear.

It was like old times in England this Easter Sunday. Once again the people heard their beloved church bells. Muted since Dunkirk three years ago (they were to be rung only to signal invasion), they have pealed out only twice since, on a memorable Sunday last November, when they rang in thanksgiving for the victory at El Alamein, and last Christmas. But now they will ring out each Sunday.

All of Britain's bells did not join in the joyful clangor. From some of the 1,200 blitzed parishes the bells are gone; others hang in belfries so weakened that they cannot be pulled. From most of Sir Christopher Wren's famed churches in the City of London came no sound. St. Clement Dane's ("Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement's") were still.* Silent, too, were the famous Bow bells of Cheapside, within whose sound all Cockneys were once born.

But bells rang out from Westminster Abbey, St. Botolph's, Bishopsgate. The bells in the grey spires of Oxford sent their tumbling, brazen din across the countryside, and in ruined Coventry Cathedral the bells pealed from the tower, the only part of the structure intact.

In many a parish, shorn by the war of its change ringers, only a lone peal rang out the good tidings of Easter. But Londoners were especially delighted to hear St. Paul's bells ring the half-hour-long Stedman Cinques. Alfred B. Peck, for 40 years bell-ringer at the Cathedral, had long been awaiting this day. All through Britain's darkest hours he and his 13 assistants bad practiced regularly on the Cathedral's twelve-bell peal with a special muffling apparatus that prevented any sound.

*But four members of the Ancient Society of College Youths rang hand bells at the west door in London's Strand.

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