‘Pancake bell’ revived after pre-war lockout
But did the tradition chime with town?
IT LAST rang out across Knaresborough in 1938, but it wasn’t the imminent war that silenced the pancake bell as the traditional Lenten call to prayer – it was the vicar who locked out the bellringers.
Yesterday, the fast, repetitive chime of a single bell was heard again, though the campanologists who revived it were afraid it would fall on deaf ears.
“No-one notices church bells any more,” lamented Derrick McRobert, who performed the five-minute ritual single-handed.
The Shrovetide bell was once part of the soundtrack of life across England, but it continues in only a few Yorkshire parishes, Bingley and Scarborough among them. It used to sound at 4am, in order to wake the congregation, but as the centuries went on it got later and later.
“There’s an old job description for the Knaresborough beadle that required him to ring it at six o’clock, nine o’clock, 12 o’clock and then at curfew,” said Mr McRobert, a retired graphic designer who took to campanology in mid-life.
“It was like a curfew – one middle-sized bell chiming very fast to tell everyone what was happening. It was done that way so as not to be confused with a service or a death. Of course, it predated striking clocks.”
Mr McRobert and Mark Hunter, the organist at St John’s Church, decided to reinstate the tradition after coming across a cutting from 1938 which recorded that “in accordance with old custom, the ‘pancake bell’ was struck for five minutes at noon on Shrove Tuesday”.
After that, there was no ringing there at all until 1966, except by use of a mechanism dating from the First World War which allowed one man to pull eight ropes.
“There was trouble with the vicar,” Mr McRobert said. “He didn’t like bell ringers, basically, so he locked them out. He gave them a set of rules which they didn’t like, so they went on strike.”
By the time manual ringing was eventually restored, the pancake day tradition had been forgotten, except by one of the ringers’ mothers, who recalled it from childhood, and by the late Yorkshire dialect expert Arnold Kellett, who wrote of it in his book on Knaresborough, The Queen’s Church.
Mr McRobert doubted that the resurrection would have sent many of the townsfolk scuttling off to be shriven.
“We’ve noticed this from weddings – unless the ringing goes on for a really long time, people aren’t aware,” he said. “It’s amazing how little you can hear church bells now – the world is so noisy. You can hardly hear the Knaresborough bells in the market place.”
Neither was there any spectacle outside the church to remind passers-by of the impending fast.
“There were no pancake races organised – just me ringing a bell,” said Mr McRobert.
The middle-size bell chosen to usher in the fast dates from 1774, and bears the inscription, in Georgian vernacular: “Whilst thus we join in chearfull sound, may love and loyalty abound.”