First posted: 20 July 2024

ANZAB Peal of Kent Treble Bob 16

Peal Band in Tower

Congratulations to those involved in organising and ringing the first ANZAB peal of a treble-dodging method on 16. This is only the second ANZAB peal on 16, with the first being Little Bob in 2016.

Four ringers in the Kent Treble Bob peal were also in the Little Bob Peal. Four were WA residents. Four were Perrins. Four were women.

James Perrins sent the following information:

The idea to ring a 16-bell peal in Perth by an Aussie band was something which was discussed time and time again during social gatherings but was never organised. It was in January that "I needed to know if it could be done" and I sent emails out to various ringers across Australia. The response was strong and soon it was clear that this idea would fly. We settled on the winter school holidays for the best availability and organised other peals around Perth to create a "long-weekend" out of it.

It was also decided that we would have two whole days to practice on 16 bells to give us the best scoring chance. When the big day arrived (or first big day), it took a fair bit of getting used to ringing on that many bells. Every change was clearly much longer than what we were all used to and we began by ringing some plain hunt on 16. This was followed by treble bob hunt on 16 and three leads of Kent TB 16. The ambition was to attempt Yorkshire 16 and we did ring one lead twice which felt satisfactory. We then went for a Quarter-Peal of Yorkshire Sixteen which was a very good effort but it didn’t feel all that pleasing. We also had the very loud, automatic, bourdon bell going off for 2 minutes half-way through which was quite distracting. After Lunch we decided to go for a Quarter-Peal of Kent which felt a lot more comfortable and it was clear that Kent would be the method to aim for a peal attempt.

The next morning we had arranged the bourdon to be disabled and we went for our peal of Kent. Starting with a plain course was really lovely and the best ringing was in this first hour. However after the first few "bobs" we did have a few wobbles but we kept on going strong. Kent is very predictable knowing where most of the bells will be and there was only one instant where a big minority of ringers were a little lost but we did recover. As it came round there was quite a relief to most of us but very shortly the celebrations began. There were smiles all round for the rest of the day and a pub-session ensued. This peal wouldn’t have been achieved if we didn’t all work together and it's this team cohesiveness which makes the reward all the sweeter.

20 July 2024

Post script: Related articles of interest were published in the August 2024 issue of Look To! (see the Members' section) and in issue 5909 of Ringing World.

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