James Anthony (Tony) Bennett
1937 - 2009
Tony, at the age of three was evacuated with his mother to Elm Tree Farm, Tortworth, Glos. and it was at St Leonard’s church, whilst attending services, and he first heard the sound of a church organ. This was the beginning of a life long love of classical music and his love of organs.
As bombing ceased in the war, Tony and his mother moved back to Swansea, where he learnt to handle a bell aged 10 at Sketty. The family then moved to Bristol where his father took up the appointment as the city engineer.
After the war Tony went to a prep school and Clifton College. He only took up ringing again when he went to Bristol University to study medicine in 1956. Tony lived in Stoke Bishop but rang at Henbury and Westbury on Trym as well, and with the UBSCR at St Michael’s Bristol.
Most of the readers of this journal will not have heard of Tony Bennett – this is because the bulk of his ringing was done during the late 1950s and 1960s. Tony’s first quarter peal was Bob Minor for Easter 1958. His first quarter as conductor was Grandsire Triples at Henbury in May 1958. Thereafter he rang with the UBSCR and he became the chief conductor of the monthly quarter peals at Henbury.
Tony rang his first peal, out of a total of approximately fifteen, which was Grandsire Triples at Henbury in Jan 1958 (conducted by Philip Gray). This was rung less than 2 years after he had started change ringing (in Sept 1956). He arranged many ringing outings for the Henbury ringers in the early 1960s and also some ringing weeks. A particularly strenuous one involved only 8 ringers, lasted 4 days, and involved ringing at some of the heaviest rings of bells in Dorset! Transport was by minibus driven by Tony.
Tony was, indirectly the instigator of another type of ringing tour which became enormously popular. Following his final exams in 1962, he and another Old Cliftonian medical student took a week’s holiday by canal barge. He wrote an hilarious account of his trip in a letter to a friend who was then living in Brighton, and the letter concluded with the remark "A ringing tour by barge might be an attractive possibility". The friend liked the idea, and, with the help of a fellow Sussex ringer, Tony planned the very first ever ringing tour by barge in 1963. This led to at least 3 members of that first tour developing a lifelong interest in canal barges, and, to many other ringing groups and societies arranging barge tours over the years that followed.
After qualifying as a doctor in 1962, his life was much like that of all junior housemen at the time, with long working hours and little time for ringing. He worked at Greenbank Hospital, Plymouth and at the Ham Green Hospital near Bristol, where he developed an interest in lung conditions and produced apparatus to measure lung function in patients. His interest in this led to his lifelong career in Anaesthesia and he went to the University of Liverpool to study under Professor Gray. He did find time to join the Liverpool University Society and rang at St Francis Xavier’s Church there.
Tony returned to Bristol as a lecturer, and then senior lecturer, in anaesthesia based at Bristol Royal Infirmary and lived in Stoke Bishop where he attached himself to the band in the tower there. His parents were living elsewhere in Stoke Bishop, and when his father died the family gave a new bell to Stoke Bishop tower in his memory.
Later Tony became a consultant anaesthetist at Frenchay Hospital, where he specialised in thoracic work and was regularly involved in allday chest operations in addition to the normal on-call rota. Again this left him little time for ringing, particularly since he also joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and progressed through its ranks on temporary naval attachments, retiring after some years with the rank of Surgeon Lieutenant Commander. He became interested in teaching anaesthesia in Africa where the anaesthetic equipment was usually very primitive and electricity supplies unreliable, and he did several six-month attachments to the University of Khartoum in the Sudan as visiting professor.
On returning to Bristol, once more as consultant at Frenchay and curator of the medical museum there, Tony moved to Itchington, near Tytherington in the mid 1980s and involved himself in the life of St James’s Church, as a member of the PCC and of the tower. He was always a first class method ringer. It was in his heyday of ringing, whilst strapping the tenor at Exeter Cathedral for the UBSCR, that after about 2 hours, Tony had heart palpitations. He ceased ringing the peal, and ringing took a back seat in his life for a good number of years. This was in the days before Grandisson was re-hung.
One of his other great interests was church organs. Tony arranged and helped to finance the complete overhaul of Tytherington’s church organ in the 1990s. His music room at home contained a reed organ (with blower in the loft), a three manual electronic organ and a grand piano. He played the organs at the Freemasons Hall, Bristol regularly for four different Masonic lodges and organised organists’ outings to many different places. Tony was one of those people who was unflappable, humerous, generous and always ready to help anybody at any stage of ringing.
His health deteriorated in the autumn of 2008, and by Christmas he was seriously ill. Tony spent his last days at St Peter’s Hospice and this is where he last heard bells being rung. As a memorial to Tony a quarter peal of Cambridge Minor was rung on the heavy six at Westbury on Trym on Friday, 27th February. Three spectators sat in the ringing chamber throughout the ringing, one of whom was a former mentor to Tony.
At his funeral service on Tuesday, 17th February, Tortworth church was full to capacity. The bells were rung half muffed before and after the service. At Tytherington the bells were rung open for Tony’s committal. The ringers were joined by Hugh Evans, the chair of Gloucester and Bristol Association, and Revd John and Beryl Baldwin of Llandaff.
In recent years Tony revived his interest in choral singing and became a member of The Painswick Singers. His last public appearance was to sing in the Painswick Christmas concert shortly before Christmas 2008. It was therefore fitting that the Painswick Singers sang Ave Verum Corpus by Mozart and the Sanctus from Faure’s Requiem at his funeral.
TYTHERINGTON BELLRINGERS
