01 November 2024
A Personal Peal at St. Paul’s
Most directors of cathedral music would probably consider their energies amply enough absorbed by the demands of choir and organ and liturgy, but a few years into his tenure at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, Dr. John Stainer (1840–1901) found duty beckoning him away from the choir-stalls and organ-loft to the belfry in the north-west tower. Here, in the mid-1870s, over 160 years after the cathedral’s completion, there still hung no full peal of bells for change-ringing, only the solitary service-bell. (The three clock bells chiming faithfully over in the south-west tower were entirely separate: what was lacking were bells to celebrate Sundays, feast-days and great occasions.) It was a situation incompatible with civic and national pride, and a problem which now fell to Dr. Stainer, at least in part, to remedy. With the other members of the newly-formed Bell Committee, he set about creating cathedral music of an altogether different kind.
John Stainer: ‘A genial, good-natured, likeable man’
John Stainer, c. 1878. Reproduced in Lock and Whitfield, ‘Men of mark: a gallery of contemporary portraits of men distinguished in the Senate, the Church, in science, literature and art, the army, navy, law, medicine’ (London: Sampson Low, 1876-1883). British Library RB.23.b.7030.
Stainer, a native of London who had sung as a boy treble at St. Paul’s, had been appointed organist and Director of Music in 1872, aged 32. He is generally acknowledged to have made considerable improvements to the Cathedral’s musical standards while remaining, as one description has it, ‘by all accounts […] a genial, good-natured, likeable man whose industrious personality engendered respect in others.’ [1] He was also a composer in his own right: ‘God so loved the world’, from his oratorio ‘The Crucifixion’, is still sung regularly in Holy Week.
Campanology must presumably have been relatively unfamiliar territory for him, but his ‘industrious personality’ he nevertheless threw into the work of the Bell Committee. Three years were to suffice for the necessary fund-raising and the commissioning of a brand-new peal of twelve bells. Tuned to the key of B flat and weighing thirteen tons in all – at the time the world’s heaviest peal of twelve, and still second only to the bells of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral – they were cast at the (still-extant) foundry of John Taylor & Co. in Loughborough, carried gingerly to London, hoisted into the north-west belfry through a gap apparently left specifically for that purpose by the ever-prescient Sir Christopher Wren, and rung for the first time on All Saints’ Day, November 1st, 1878. [2]
Enter H. R. Haweis, foe of ‘din and discord’
Such a prominent change to London’s soundscape was bound to attract much attention and comment. One figure who could be counted upon to offer an opinion was the Rev. Hugh Reginald Haweis (1838–1901), the charismatic, go-ahead vicar of St James’s, Marylebone. A veteran of the Italian War of Independence and an early advocate of the Sunday opening of museums and galleries, he had made a name for himself by arguing controversially that spiritualism was compatible with Christianity, and, even more controversially, by actually attending séances. Amidst all this he still found time for music, and in particular for a keen interest in bells. His expertise, though amateur, was well-respected – he had been the author of the article ‘Bell’ in the ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, published earlier that year [3] – and indeed, when it came to bells, he was a hard man to please: ‘I question whether there is a musically true chime of bells in the whole of England, and if it exists, I doubt whether any one knows or cares for its musical superiority.’ [4] He was convinced of the tonal supremacy of Belgian bells, writing repeatedly of the ‘relief’ afforded him by visits to ‘the old cathedrals of Belgium, with their musical chimes and their splendid carillons’. [5] ‘Willingly do I escape from the din and discord of English belfries to Belgium, loving and beloved of bells,’ he declared.[6]
H. R. Haweis, c. 1888. Reproduced in J. Waléry, ‘Our celebrities: a portrait gallery’ (London, publisher unknown, 1888). British Library 1764.e.5.
So he could certainly be expected to take an interest in the tintinnabulary developments at St. Paul’s, and to wish to see and hear the new peal at closer quarters. Just over a week before the inauguration, John Stainer wrote to him with a personal invitation. ‘Our formal opening will take place at 5.30 on Nov[ember] 1st but if you will mount the tower with me at 11 on that day you shall have the bells struck for your own special benefit.’ [7] Stainer also sketched out a musical stave indicating the pitches of the new bells, along with their respective weights.
Letter from John Stainer to H. R. Haweis, 22nd October 1878. British Library MS Mus. 1928. Reproduced with permission. You may not use the material for commercial purposes.
Haweis pronounces his verdict
As it turned out, Haweis did not have to wait that long to carry out his inspection, nor Stainer to find out his verdict. On 29th October, a letter from Haweis appeared in the Times: ‘Fresh from a tour in Belgium, with the sound of the Mechlin [Mechelen] and Ghent bells still ringing in my ears, I ascended, with note-book, candle, and muffled hammer, the side tower of St. Paul’s Cathedral, in which twelve new bells have just been placed by the munificence of the City companies […]’. (A pause to point out that ‘For eight years I have pleaded the cause of bells and carillons in England.’) Having first excoriated the flatness of Big Ben at the Palace of Westminster (‘hoarse, cracked, and gong-like […] the scourge of the neighbourhood’), the new peal at St. Paul’s he merely damned with faint praise. ‘It is as good as most in England,’ he wrote. ‘Ten years ago it would have been passed by architects and bell committees with applause – will probably be so passed now – and the newspapers may speak of the “superb new peal” and its “mellow silver tones”, the cost, and so forth – and indeed it is quite as good as I expected and as expensive as needs be.’ [8]
But after six hours in the belfry he had discovered a more fundamental flaw: the bells were out of tune. ‘I am quite clear that the radical imperfection of the octave and a half as it now hangs will appear whenever the first attempt is made to ring a tune on the first seven and last five of St. Paul’s bells.’ [9] He also believed that they had been hung in such a way as to damage the tower when ringing.
Whether Haweis returned on the morning of the 1st November to take up Stainer’s invitation, or what passed between the two men if he did, is not known. But that evening the Cathedral was ‘crowded to the doors’ for the inauguration, with thousands more gathered in the churchyard and down Ludgate Hill to hear the first peal rung by the Ancient Society of College Youths, the City of London’s foremost bell-ringing society. (The Society is well-named in that, tracing its foundation to 1637, before the Great Fire, it is older than the cathedral itself, as well as most of the City’s churches.) [10]
The west front of St. Paul’s seen in N. D’Anvers, ‘Some Account of the Great Buildings of London’ (London: Marcus Ward, 1879). Autotype photograph by Frederick York (1879). The change-ringing bells hang in the north-west tower on the left.
A regular ‘ding-dong’ in the Times?
In subsequent days Stainer and other members of the Bell Committee wrote to the Times in defence of their work. Stainer took Haweis to task on the question of tuning. It was not a question of pitch but of timbre, he argued; all bells sound several secondary tones as well as the principal one, and Haweis must, moreover, have been striking the bells in the wrong place. ‘The only place where a bell should be struck is on the sound bow itself […] Would Mr. Haweis test a [Stradivarius] violin by bowing it below the bridge? […] When properly tested on the sound-bow, there will be found a remarkable purity of tone throughout the St. Paul’s peal […] They are in excellent tune, and capitally hung.’ [11]
Haweis returned to the letters page on November 14th, the tenor of his argument unaltered. The bells were sharp, he was sure of it, and in any case, if the ear has an impression of sharpness, it scarcely matters whether timbre or pitch is the technical cause: ‘It is no more apology for sharp bells to say that they seem sharp when they sound sharp, but are really “excellently in tune,” as Dr. Stainer says St. Paul’s bells are, than to tell me that my boot is a comfortable fit although it seems to pinch […]’ [12]
A lasting legacy for Londoners
Other committee members continued the debate in subsequent editions, but Haweis, never to be persuaded, was to maintain his lamentation of the deficiencies of both St. Paul’s and Westminster belfries, notably at a Royal Institution lecture the following February. [13] Stainer, for his part, seems to have been content to let the bells speak for themselves. At any rate, he had given enough satisfaction to Dean and Chapter to be entrusted with the installation in the south-west tower, three years later, of ‘Great Paul’, at sixteen tons the United Kingdom’s largest working bell, and the second-largest ever cast in this country. [14] He was knighted for his services in 1888, but in the same year had to resign his position owing to failing eyesight.
Stainer and Haweis died within three months of each other in 1901. The bells, of which Stainer had predicted ‘Londoners will some day be proud’, rang on, Sunday in and Sunday out, gradually embroidering themselves into the life of the City. [15] ‘And neighbouring towers and spirelets joined the ringing / With answering echoes from heavy commercial walls, / Till all were drowned as the sailing clouds went singing / On the roaring flood of a twelve-voiced peal from Paul’s,’ John Betjeman was to write in 1955, by then recalling the Sunday morning soundscape of the pre-Blitz City. [16] Many of the bells he was remembering had been first silenced by wartime conditions, then destroyed in the bombing of their churches — but, almost miraculously, those of St. Paul’s had survived, and to this day ring out for half an hour before three services on Sundays.
But Haweis’s ultimate wish, one to which Stainer had expressed sympathy, is yet to be fulfilled: the installation of a carillon in the south-west tower of St. Paul’s: ‘I still hope,’ he had written, ‘to see Dr. Stainer […] seated there at a noble carillon clavecin of 40 Belgian bells, whose melodious tongues will then utter aloud the open secrets of the great Tone-Poets, while the crowd below […] shall be rapt in wonder […].’ [17] A project, perhaps, for some future Director of Music.
Dominic Newman, Manuscripts Cataloguer
MS Mus. 1928, a newly-catalogued collection of various musicians’ letters, is now available for consultation in the Rare Books & Music Reading Room.
References
[1] Dibble, J. (2004, September 23). ‘Stainer, Sir John (1840–1901), musicologist and composer.’ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2023, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-36234.
[2] St Paul’s Cathedral, ‘The bells’, web article. Retrieved 26 Oct. 2023 from https://www.stpauls.co.uk/bells.
[3] Baigent, E. (2004, September 23). ‘Haweis, Hugh Reginald (1838–1901), author and Church of England clergyman’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Retrieved 25 Oct. 2023, from https://www.oxforddnb.com/view/10.1093/ref:odnb/9780198614128.001.0001/odnb-9780198614128-e-33763.
[4] Haweis, H. R., Music and Morals (London: Longmans, 1872), p. 389.
[5] Ibid., p. 377.
[6] Ibid., p. 387.
[7] Letter from John Stainer to Hugh Reginald Haweis, 22 Oct. 1878. British Library MS Mus. 1928.
[8] Haweis, H. R., “The New Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 29 Oct. 1878, p. 8. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS135052125/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=6035918d. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
[9] The Times, 29 Oct. 1878, ibid.
[10] “The Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 2 Nov. 1878, p. 8. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS135314274/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=74c6b84b. Accessed 26 Oct. 2023.
[11] The Times, Nov. 7th, 1878.
[12] Haweis, H. R. “St. Paul's Bells.” The Times, 14 Nov. 1878, p. 11. The Times Digital Archive, link.gale.com/apps/doc/CS185777006/TTDA?u=blibrary&sid=bookmark-TTDA&xid=48be56ae. Accessed 13 Oct. 2023.
[13] The Times, 10 Feb. 1879.
[14] “The Bells Of St. Paul’s.” The Times, 2 Nov. 1878, ibid.
[15] Stainer incidentally has another musical legacy in London: Stainer Street, near his birth-place in Southwark. This street is unusual in being enclosed along its entire length by a long brick tunnel-like arch holding up the platforms of London Bridge station. The arch is effectively a barrel-vault and creates, appropriately enough, a church-like acoustic. Into this space, which is now part of the station concourse, an old church organ was installed in 2022; at the time of writing it is available for anyone to play free of charge.
[16] John Betjeman, ‘Monody on the Death of Aldersgate Street Station’, in Collected Poems (London: John Murray, 1985), p. 270.
[17] The Times, 14 Nov. 1878, ibid.