What a ding-dong!
32 bell-ringers at York Minster are sacked ... and the ‘control freak’ Dean is blamed after ‘corporate reorganisation’
PEALING out across the city rooftops, the bells of York Minster are a joyous sound. Now, however, they have been silenced after the ‘brutal’ mass sacking of the volunteer bell-ringers.
The 32-strong team, aged from 11 to 70, were told in a nine-minute meeting that their agreements had been terminated with immediate effect.
Not only that, but the locks on the tower doors had been changed to prevent them from gaining access.
It means the main bells of the historic Minster will be silent, except on Remembrance Sunday, for around six months.
The decision – which comes after volunteer flower arrangers were told they would need to retrain – has prompted anger, with an online petition demanding the Minster ‘honour tradition by allowing the ringers to ring’ amassing more than 1,700 signatures by yesterday afternoon.
Some of the bell-ringers were reduced to tears by their unexpected axing. They appear to have done nothing wrong.
The decision has been put down to a ‘corporate reorganisation’ of the Minster’s business, with ‘a bit of health and safety’ too.
The Dean of York, the Very Reverend Vivienne Faull, 61, has been blamed for the ‘unchristian’ shake-up and described by one former bell-ringer as a ‘control freak’.
A paid role as Head of the Bell Tower is being created to lead a fresh team of newly
‘People were in tears afterwards’
recruited trained ringers – with the previous volunteers invited to apply.
Vergers will follow tradition by ringing the 14 main bells on Remembrance Sunday, but they will no longer ring out across the city on Sundays, Tuesdays (when practice took place), Christmas, New Year or for weddings, funerals and other events.
Peter Sanderson, the sacked Ringing Master, said his ‘ happy, united, vibrant, skilled, and dedicated team’ of ringers were the envy of many cathedrals.
In a letter to the Dean, he said the manner in which his team was discarded ‘with no warning and in such a brutal fashion was heartbreaking beyond measure’.
In an apparent reference to the novel 1984, he added: ‘The letters of termination handed out to members were headed “York Minster invites everyone to discover God’s love”. Such doublespeak would hardly be out of place in George Orwell’s most famous work.’
Mr Sanderson, 46, said there had been ‘grievances’ with the Chapter – the Minster’s governing body – over the past 18 months, but reasons for the changes were not clear.
He said: ‘I just feel undervalued now and we are all mystified by the decision and have had no engagement from the Chapter.’
Invitations to the Dean to visit bell-ringers in the tower had all been rejected, he said.
Giles Galley, 84, a retired priest and former bell-ringer, said: ‘ The Dean, Vivienne Faull, has lost it, I think, and is trying to control us – she’s a control freak, quite frankly. She is going to go down in history as the Dean who sacked her bellringers. I’m disgusted and dismayed by it all.’
One bell-ringer, who attended the ‘emotional’ meeting with church officials on Tuesday evening, said: ‘The reaction was one of complete shock and people were in tears afterwards. The Minster has increasingly taken a corporate managerial approach rather than one of Christian compassion.’
The smaller carillon bells, linked to a keyboard to play specific tunes, will still be used. They are played by Dr John Ridgeway-Wood, who said the Minster ringers were ‘some of the finest’ in Britain. He said: ‘For a lot of them, this is their life. The actions of the Dean and Chapter are outrageous. I am furious.’
The Minster restructuring has already involved changes among the teams of volunteer flower arrangers and broderers, the embroiderers who sew the vestments and altar covers.
Even helpers involved in arranging flowers for services have required retraining as part of the corporate-style changes and there is now an official head flower arranger and head broderer.
A Minster spokesman said: ‘It’s about ways of working and to bring staff working practices up to speed with everybody else. The bell-ringers have their own way of working that has not been modernised in an awful long time.’
She said there was ‘ no specific safety issue’ behind the decision to stop the ringers from ringing, but a structural reorganisation was taking place and ringers could no longer ‘work in isolation’. The Dean, who took over running York Minster four years ago, said: ‘We have told our existing bell-ringers we will be very, very happy for them to apply to become bell-ringers as part of the new band when that happens. We know that can’t happen very quickly but we hope we will have a new band in place by Easter next year.’
A statement from Minster chiefs said it was important ‘to ensure that there is a consistent approach to health and safety, governance and risk management across all of our volunteer teams’.