The tunes being rung by the main cathedral clock every quarter of an hour are commonly called the Westminster Chimes, because they are rung by the bells in the tower-incorrectly-called-Big-Ben in the Palace of Westminster.

Turns out that they were originally written in 1793 for the church of St Mary The Great in Cambridge, which is the church of the University of Cambridge.

Each quarter of an hour the tune is a bit longer, until by the end of the hour it has four separate sections.  It took me some time to realise that the tune does not simply get longer, but actually is different each time.  This is because a curious clock designer worked out that you actually only needed to set up five measures on your chiming system, if you could use them all twice, thus:

• Quarter past: Measure 1
• Half past: Measures 2 and 3
• Quarter to: Measures 4 and 5 and 1 (now going round for the second time)
• On the hour: Measures 2 and 3 and 4 and 5.

Which is satisfyingly clever.

You may notice that between measures 4 and 5 one note is repeated twice, which requires two separate hammers to do it in time, so Salisbury’s bells along with all the others using this pattern have two hammers on the lowest bell.

Oh, and you may also notice that the hour sequence starts with the third bell from the top.  When you are up at the Bells Level in the tower, if you look very closely as the hour approaches you will be able to see the cable on that bell just starting to tighten, which saves you jumping out of your skin when the ringing starts.

This site from the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors may give you more information than you wanted to know on how a mechanism to ring these chimes work, including how the clock can automatically make sure that the hour tune is the one actually rung on the hour.

It might be easier to get started by looking at the Old-est clock on the floor of the cathedral first, and see how the hour chimes are counted.

The post What are the Westminster Chimes? appeared first on 332 Steps.

Up in our bell chamber we have five bells, each struck with hammers pulled by a clock two floors further down.  Four are used to play the Westminster Chimes at each quarter of an hour, and the fifth strikes the hour.

The bells were originally in a separate bell tower where they were swung and could be rung with ropes.  The wooden beam that you can see above the hour bell in this picture is indeed a “headstock”, part of the original mechanism used in the bell tower after it was recast in 1661.

This next picture is linked to the Belfry Upkeep website where you can find out more about headstocks and attachment methods.  This is just one tiny corner of the terribly fascinating portal provided by the Central Council of Church Bellringers.  Click on it at your peril…

Back at our own story; by 1780 the bell tower was in such disrepair that James Wyatt decided to demolish it and move the bells into the central tower of the cathedral.

The forces generated by a swinging bell are very considerable, with each bell able to generate 4 times its weight horizontally and twice its weight vertically and so they sensibly decided that adding this pressure to the already-fragile central tower would be a bad idea.  Instead they hung the bells “dead”, fixing them permanently to a framework, and just hitting them with hammers.  The hammers are now pulled by cables from an electrically-operated clock a couple of stories further down the tower.

This may have piqued your Curiosity further:

• What are the Westminster Chimes?
• Where was the original bell tower?
• Why was the bell recast in 1661?
• How did they get the bell up here?
• Who was Wyatt?
• Can you ring any of the bells by hand?

The post Do you have bell ringers? appeared first on 332 Steps.

An organ is a collection of “stops”, each of which is a set of pipes producing a specific noise for every key on the keyboard.  Salisbury Cathedral’s organ has 65 stops, which means 65 different collections of pipes, so it has a LOT of pipes – 3,870 of them or maybe 3,852 depending on who you believe.  The stops have names which could feature in a somewhat specific pub quiz:

“Question: Which of these is NOT a stop on our organ:

• Hautboy
• Salicional
• Nazard
• Fagotto
• Octave Flute”

“Answer: I hope that you spotted that we don’t have a “Fagotto” – ours is a Contra Fagotto!!”

Hearty laughter and much rueful thigh slapping from the assembled quiz participants.
All these pipes are crammed inside in the two boxes either side of the quire, except for the really tall deepest-sounding ones which are so much bigger than the boxes that they have had to be put in the North Transept.

Our “Father Willis” Organ was made by Henry Willis & Sons who have a Facebook page here with some great photos including these which help to answer your next question: “How do they fit (almost) all those pipes into those two little boxes?”  Click on that link with caution because there are loads of interesting videos there too…

The whispery ones are made of wood and the boomy ones are made of metal.  The metal is usually lead with some tin, and zinc if you want your really big pipes to be strong enough to stand up (the biggest ones in the Cathedral are 32’ tall).  The metal pipes are mainly cylindrical.  Tin and lead don’t form an alloy and they separate when they are mixed and cooled, so the result is called “spotted metal”.

The wood is usually hardwood although softwood can be used on the bigger ones.  The wooden pipes are mainly rectangular.

And here are 12 glorious minutes of John Challenger demonstrating the sound it produces.  The little writing down each side of the screen shows you which stops/controls he is using.

As you look up at the organ from the floor of the quire, you may also be thinking:

Why is the organ box not aligned with that pillar?

Was the organ always at the sides of the quire?

When was that wall painted?

Why does the Moses window look different to the other windows?

The post What are the organ pipes made of? appeared first on 332 Steps.

Where we find:
1. In every church and chapel where baptism is to be administered, there shall be provided a decent font with a cover for the keeping clean thereof.
2. The font shall stand as near to the principal entrance as conveniently may be, except there be a custom to the contrary or the Ordinary otherwise direct; and shall be set in as spacious and well-ordered surroundings as possible.
3. The font bowl shall only be used for the water at the administration of Holy Baptism and for no other purpose whatsoever.

Well this is very interesting. and Salisbury gets a big tick for point number 2, but where is the cover? What about the water?

A conversation with the cathedral staff discovers that the font has a secret drainage pipe which leads out into the central part of the cloisters, so that the water blessed for a baptism can be drained afterwards onto consecrated ground and replaced with eau de tap until it is next needed. So although what you are seeing here is water on holy ground, it is not technically holy water unless you are actually at a baptism.

You may notice that fonts in parish churches have a little plug at the bottom so that the water again can be drained out onto consecrated ground… but no, you won’t notice that, because all the fonts have covers on them, see point number 1.

So how did Salisbury get permission to have an uncovered font?

Some digging around reveals an application for the nearby church of St Thomas in 2023 to install a new, uncovered font in the centre of the church, replacing their old Victorian one. The judgement from the Salisbury Bishop’s Consistory Court makes interesting if slightly long-winded reading but a determined reader will eventually reach paragraph 40 which references Salisbury Cathedral’s font:
“However, there are examples of uncovered fonts namely in Salisbury Cathedral, in Portsmouth Cathedral and in the Church of the Resurrection at Mirfield. In all of these cases the font was designed as a piece of sculpture as well as being a font and the sculptural element meant that a cover was not deemed to be desirable or practicable…
“There can be practical issues which arise from having an uncovered font. When the font was first installed at Salisbury Cathedral for example visitors used it rather as a wishing well which meant that the vergers had to regularly go fishing for coins.”

And indeed the vergers tell me that the coins were a problem, particularly with parties of visiting Italian schoolchildren, and they now have a special shrimping net to get the coins out.

The writer of this document is a bit sniffy about not knowing where Salisbury Cathedral actually got its permission from, implying that they seem to have been bypassed somehow.

So once again we seem to have uncovered more questions than answers:

Why is there a Canon on Royal Supremacy?
Why is there a Canon on Schisms?
What did they find when they installed the font?
What is a Consistory Court?
Why is there a rule that fonts should be covered?

The post Is that holy water in the font? appeared first on 332 Steps.