Describing himself as ‘a pedantic old palaeographer’, a
friend of mine who had just read Ring
Out, Wild Bells! (my previous post) suggested tactfully that I had misread
the last word of the telegram sent to Charles Eamer Kempe on 21st
June 1887. He was right, of course: what I had too hastily transcribed as ‘all
three’ is actually the name ‘Attree’. It makes quite a difference.
I had assumed that the telegram referred to the three bells
Kempe had donated to his local church, All Saints Lindfield, Sussex, where he
was churchwarden. He had given these to enable a full peal to be rung in
celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee. I admit that the word, as
written out by a Telegraph Office clerk, looked more like ‘alt[h]ree’, but I had
made the mistake of underestimating the clerk’s accuracy. The transcription
error was mine, not his. What’s worse, I’d failed to notice that the word began
with a capital ‘A’, albeit in the old-fashioned script form I was taught at my
own primary school. So, on all counts my misreading was an egregious error, and
I must apologise – not least to Mr Attree, whoever he was.
But I think I can identify him. Attree, I’ve discovered, was
(is) a widespread Sussex name. In Kempe’s own immediate neighbourhood and in
his own time, there were plenty of Attrees listed in the census returns of 1881
and 1891: a blacksmith at Bolney, an innkeeper at Cuckfield, gardeners,
carriers and so on – all indispensible members of a rural community in those
days. But Kempe’s family came originally from Brighton and in the late 18th
- early 19th centuries both the Kemps*and
the Attrees were
property speculators. However, in Brighton in the 1880s perhaps the most
well-known Attree was George F Attree, who combined two important businesses.
As both undertaker and auctioneer, he provided what was doubtless a useful,
two-in-one service, dispatching not only the deceased themselves but their
belongings too. Indeed, George was a man of parts, with a keen interest in
promoting bell-ringing. It was through his endeavours that the Sussex County
Association of Change Ringers (SCACR)
was founded in 1885, and he was its first Secretary.
So I think it likely Kempe would not only have known George
but would have consulted him about his plans for the Lindfield bells. What’s
more, I suspect Attree himself was one of the ringers of the Jubilee peal:
already an experienced change ringer, he would have been a valuable addition to
what might otherwise have been a team of novices: this was the first peal rung
from the Lindfield tower – and ringing a full peal requires stamina, practice
and terrific concentration. It may even be that this peal was rung not by local
Lindfield men but by SCACR ringers brought in for the occasion.
I’d love to know if the name ‘Attree, GF’ appears on a board
in the All Saints ringing chamber, recording this memorable first peal. If it
does, then it should be no surprise that, after the peal was successfully
completed, George sent Kempe a telegram on his way home, telling him the ring
had been completed in precisely three hours seven minutes and reporting that the
bells were ‘good and go well’.
In addition to my friendly palaeographer, I have had a
number of responses to ‘Ring Out, Wild Bells’. Some sided with Ezra Pound; but
for my own part I always enjoy the sound of a peal of six, eight or even twelve
bells going like the clappers – a campanological simile, as it happens. In Tydd
St. Mary, the Fenland village where I lived in the 1950s, the bells were rung
every Sunday morning. My father, the Rector of Tydd, always regretted that the
bell ringers, having come down from the tower, sat at the back of the
congregation so that they could sidle out when his sermon began, to enjoy an
early pint at the nearby Six Bells.
Even more vivid, however, than the Sunday peal, is my memory
of the Nine
Tailors being rung to announce a death: nine solemn strokes and then, at
half-minute intervals, one stroke for each year of his life. The whole village
stopped to count: men and women weeding between the emerging rows of peas would
pause, unstoop and lean on their hoes until the bell ceased tolling – this I
have not forgotten. ‘Never send to know for whom the bell tolls’, warned John
Donne, from whom Ernest Hemingway later borrowed the phrase; ‘What passing bell
for these who die as cattle?” demanded Wilfred Owen, and Thomas Hardy wondered
… will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in
the gloom,
And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,
Till they rise again, as they were a new bell's boom,
"He hears it not now, but used to notice such
things"?
It was this verse – and in particular the second line
– that Seamus Heaney recalled when writing ‘Chanson d’Aventure’, the remarkable
love poem addressed to his wife in which he relived the trauma of the stroke he
suffered and from which he nearly died. As the ambulance hurtles him along
familiar Irish roads the fear of being separated from his wife makes him recall
at once Keats and a famous line from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, the bell-ringer of
a staunchly republican Irish village and his own efforts ringing the chapel
bell as a student at St. Columba’s College:
Apart: the very word is like a bell
That the sexton Malachy Boyle outrolled
In illo
tempore in Bellaghy
Or the one I tolled in Derry in my turn
As College bellman ….
that last word even summoning ‘the owl that shriek’d,
the fatal bellman’ from Macbeth.
All of which is a long way from Charles Kempe and
George Attree, if indeed it was George who sent the telegram. But it just shows
how powerfully bells resonate – across time and poetry.
Adrian Barlow
[Illustration: the Kempe arms, used as a mark to identify the S transept window of Hereford Cathedral, 1895
* It was Charles Kempe himself who added the final ‘e’
to the family name, seeking to revive a connection to the old family line
that included Cardinal Kempe (c.1380-1454), Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Thomas Hardy stanza quoted above concludes his
poem ‘Afterwards’ in Moments of Vision
(1917). The lines by Seamus Heaney are from ‘Chanson d’Aventure’ in Human Chain (London: Faber and Faber,
2010) p.15.
I have written about Tydd St Mary once before, in Cuthbert,
Dibble, Grubb.
I have also blogged about Heaney before:
