19.8.35 to 13.4.09

Bill Jackson died on Easter Monday after a long illness. There can have been few ringers more enthusiastic about the art of change-ringing – and particularly handbell ringing – than Bill. He was born at Tadcaster in 1935, the son of a ringing father, Gibson Jackson. He learned to ring at Hatfield, South Yorkshire, as a young lad under his father’s tuition. His younger brother, David, also learned to ring around the same time. Bill clearly showed promise from an early age, and one of his first appearances in the pages of The Ringing World was as a 13-year-old, conducting a quarter peal of Bob Minor in July 1949 at Carlton-juxta-Snaith with a band of boys aged 11 to 13, including his 11-year-old brother.

At this time there was a thriving peal ringing scene in South Yorkshire and Bill was soon part of this. His progress was astoundingly rapid. He went from ringing his first peal (Grandsire Triples in August 1949 at Campsall) one day after his 14th birthday to his first of London Surprise Major just eight months later (in April 1950 at Thorne). In his first two years of peal ringing he rang a number of peals of London and Bristol Major, as well as other methods including Stedman Triples, Double Norwich and Cambridge Royal. Several famous names appear in his early peals, including Ted Cawser, who called many of his early peals, Eric Critchley, Martin Thorley and Ralph Edwards. The bulk of his ringing at this time was done locally in South Yorkshire. An exception was a trip to Loughborough in August 1950, when the three Jacksons rang a peal of Cambridge Major at the Foundry with Harold Poole. When still a young man Bill was later to return to this tower for one of the early attempts for 40,320 Plain Bob Major, which was unsuccessful.

Bill’s enduring interest in and love of handbell ringing was kindled from an early age. His first handbell peal – Plain Bob Major - was only his 9th peal when he was just 14. The other participants were his father, his brother David and Eric Critchley who conducted. Notably it was the first handbell peal for all. Further peals of Plain Bob followed and one of Kent Treble Bob Major.

Bill’s peal ringing activities went rather quiet in 1951 and 1952 and this may have been because he was devoting himself to his school work at Doncaster Grammar School. This diversion from ringing paid off because in 1953 he went up to Oxford having won a scholarship to Christ Church to read ‘Greats’ (a course involving the study of Roman and Greek language, history and philosophy). In Oxford Bill rang with the Oxford University Society of Change Ringers (OUSCR) and it was not long before his name began to appear in peals for the Society. However, he seems to have struck a balance between ringing and other activities during his four years in Oxford, because he was not a prolific peal ringer at this time. In all he rang 22 OUSCR peals while a resident member. From the ringing point of view this was a good time to be in Oxford, because members who were either resident or returning regularly included some very notable members of the ringing fraternity. Among the names appearing in Bill’s records are those of Peter Border, Wilf Moreton, Stephen Ivin, Don Niblett, John Spice, Rodney Meadows and Robin Turner. After he left Oxford in 1957 he was relatively little involved with the OUSCR, although he appeared in ‘opposition’ territory on Easter Monday 1959 with an OUSCR peal at Great St Mary, Cambridge.

Bill moved to the London area after university and entered a career with ICI, first in advertising and then in marketing. He worked first in the paints division and then (from 1974) in the pharmaceuticals division of the company. From the late ’50s until the mid-60s he was relatively inactive as a peal ringer probably partly due to the demands of his career. It was also during this period that he met Heather, whom he married in 1963. They had three children: Edward, Richard and Clare, who were born in 1965, 1967 and 1968 respectively. He was very involved at this time in local ringing, primarily at Kingston-upon-Thames and in the Surrey Association. At that time, Kingston had a poor going, anti-clockwise peal of 10. When Bill took over as tower captain in 1964 he was instrumental in launching an appeal for the restoration of the bells and he called the fund the ‘ninety nine thousand shillings campaign’. He engaged in such down to earth fund raising activities as going from door to door with other ringers, ringing Bob Minor on handbells and begging for shillings! The campaign was a good illustration of the qualities of meticulous planning and determination which Bill brought to bear on projects. Unfortunately, he had left the area by the time the project was brought to fruition, but the ultimate outcome was the lighter and manageable peal of 12 which Kingston has today.

Bill also undertook local association duties during this time, acting as Branch Ringing Master of the Northern Branch of the Surrey Association in 1966 and 1967. At this time, there was some friction between the Association and the Guildford Guild, due to their overlapping jurisdictions. Some towers that had moved into the latter following its formation wished to retain their Surrey membership, some wished to leave and others wanted to be in both! Bill served on a committee which sought to resolve the issues through talks with Guildford Guild representatives. The fact that any such frictions now seem to be well and truly in the past is perhaps testament to Bill’s notable diplomatic and negotiating skills!

In 1967 with a change of jobs to Miles Laboratories in Stoke Poges, Bill moved to Maidenhead, and rang for a time at Cookham. One of his most notable achievements in ringing at this time was his participation in a peal of Bristol Surprise Maximus at High Wycombe in January 1968. Up to this time, the method had only been pealed in Leicester by Harold Poole’s band (the first peal was in 1950). Following practices in the Thames Valley area, a peal was successful, conducted by David Hilling, with Bill ringing the 4th. This was by far the most advanced ringing in which Bill had been involved, and shows the potential which he was to realise so fully later on in his ringing career.

Somehow he had found time between career, marriage and ringing to pursue an interest in rowing, and was a keen oarsman with the Thames Rowing Club. However, at the end of 1968 a major change in his and his family’s life occurred with a job move to Toronto in Canada, still with Miles Laboratories. This took Bill to bell-less territory, the Toronto twelve not at that time even being a gleam in anyone’s eye. Coincidentally, his brother David also moved to North America in the late1960s, although in his case he eventually settled permanently in California, having started his own business. David effectively gave up ringing. In contrast, Bill’s time in Canada saw some of his most energetic and prolific ringing activity. It was not long before he had made contact with other ‘ex-pat’ ringers living in the area, and the next few years saw a stream of handbell peals with David Ingram, John Owen and Derek Sawyer.

After two years or so in Canada and following a move to Montreal to work for CIL (ICI in Canada), Bill began to look further afield in his ringing activities in North America and made contact with ringers in the United States. At that time, there was a keen nucleus of ringers at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, which was Bill’s closest centre of ringing (Quebec was his closest tower but there was little ringing activity there at the time). The band included Marj Batchelor, Becky Joyce and Alice Parker. The next few years saw very productive ringing collaborations with the Smith ringers as well as ones from Boston and Washington Cathedral. As well as the Smith girls, the names of Geoff Davies, Quilla Roth, Martha Locke and Ann and Eddie Martin occur frequently in Bill’s peal records. The enthusiasm of North American ringers, for whom there was still so much to do and for whom so much was pioneering territory, appeared to have sparked off something in Bill, and his enthusiasm – particularly for handbell ringing – knew no bounds during his period in Canada. A major breakthrough both for him and North American ringers was the step from Plain and Treble Bob methods to Surprise. In October 1971, with a peal of Norwich Surprise Minor, Bill, Marj Batchelor and Geoff Davies rang their first of Surprise in hand and the first in North America. The move to Major was accomplished with peals of Yorkshire in October the following year. In order to get in practice for this, Bill would apparently ring the method on a randomly chosen pair of handbells to the background sound of Bristol Major on tower bells in order to provide a basic rhythm to ring to! Finally, Yorkshire Royal was achieved with peals in August and September 1973. Bill also called the first peal of Maximus in North America with a handbell peal of Kent in October 1971. Perhaps an even bigger milestone was the accomplishment of the first peal of London Surprise on handbells in North America, which Bill conducted in November 1973, the other ringers being Martha Locke, Ann Martin and Alice Parker. Bill had got in some intensive preparation a few weeks before when, on a visit to England, he rang his first two handbell peals in the method with some expert help from John Mayne, Chris Woolley and Roger and Kath Baldwin. The North American milestones were only achieved after considerable practice and failed attempts, often during long weekends where most had driven huge distances to ring together. Bill’s meticulous organisation ensured that everyone was in the right place at the right time, and knew what the targets were for the weekend, and who was going to ringing which bells and when!

During this period, the North American Guild of Change Ringers was formed and Bill was a founder member. The plans for the Guild took shape following the institution of monthly practices involving Kent, Brewster, Groton, Hingham and Boston ringers. Bill and the other Toronto ringers would drive down for weekend tower bell practices and peals. Bill was instrumental in devising the plans for these weekends and subsequently in helping develop the Guild’s constitution. The Guild came into being in 1972. Bill was the first Secretary/Treasurer and later served as Central Council representative from 1978 to 1995.

The North American period in Bill’s life came to an end in 1974, when a work move to ICI Pharmaceuticals took him back to England, where he settled in Wilmslow in Cheshire. Still fired with the enthusiasm that had sustained his ringing in America, it was not long before Bill became deeply involved in handbell ringing in Cheshire. To help understand the context for his contribution, it is necessary to know a bit about the previous history of handbell ringing in the area. In the mid-60s Bob Smith returned from his university studies. At this time, when any handbell peal of Surprise was a rarity, he gradually built up a group which progressed in 1969 to the first handbell peal of Spliced Surprise Maximus, which was only the sixth ever peal of Surprise Maximus in hand, and this was followed by a series of peals in up to 12 methods by October 1969. In April 1970 Cambridge Maximus was rung, and this was only the third ever in hand, and the first away from Leicester. However, the strength of the band declined with the departure of Bernard Groves and Bob Smith.

Bill was therefore a welcome addition to the handbell peal band and soon took over the organisation of the group. With the move into the area of several other proficient handbell ringers (Andrew Mayes, Geoff Bridges and Chris Munday) Bill was keen for the band to resume advanced ringing on higher numbers and Cambridge Maximus was rung regularly from 1975 (which included Bill’s own first of Surprise Maximus on handbells). The band’s repertoire also included London Royal. Several other ringers were also involved with less advanced methods, and for a period there were sufficient ringers for two peal bands per week. During his time in Cheshire Bill rang 162 peals for the Chester Guild. A notable performance during this time was the record length of 13,664 Yorkshire Surprise Major on handbells with David Atkinson, Bob Smith (who conducted) and Alan Scholfield. This record stands today.

Apart from handbell ringing, Bill was a regular tower bell ringer at Prestbury, where his three children all learned to ring, and then at Wilmslow. He rang an occasional tower bell peal but most of his Cheshire peal ringing was on handbells. Although Bill was a proficient conductor and had called many of the peals in North America, he did not really enjoy it, and for the most part he was happy to leave the conducting to others. Bill’s forte was the organisation, and long before computer spread sheets, he had his own paper version, on which bands and peal attempts were planned out for several weeks ahead. Changes to his planned arrangements were not well received!

Towards the end of his time in Cheshire, Bill’s life went through some major upheavals. He embarked on a major career change. Becoming disillusioned with corporate life, he decided to set up his own business. He considered various options, including running a newsagents or a canal boat hire business. The latter appealed to him because the family had acquired a canal boat while in Cheshire. In the end, though, he settled upon a pizza takeaway business and opened a shop in Burnage in 1980. It was also around this time that his marriage to Heather ended. The upshot of these life changes was that he did very little peal ringing in 1978 and 1979. In 1981, in search of a clean break he decided to move from Cheshire and settled in Norfolk, where he set up a pizza business in Norwich.

His time in Norfolk was very fulfilling and happy on several fronts. He met Jill at his local squash club and they married in 1982. Jill was then a nurse at the Norfolk and Norwich Hospital. They bought an idyllic country cottage at Brandon Parva near Wymondham, and this was the setting for many happy days of handbell ringing. Those who visited found the last few courses of peals particularly difficult because of the delicious cooking smells coming from the kitchen as Jill prepared the post-peal repast. The anticipation of a pre-meal drink or two in the sunshine in Jill’s meticulously kept garden was also sometimes too much to bear! Bill was also at this time applying his able business brain to getting his pizza shop off the ground and financially profitable. This was a period when the large chains had not yet started to corner the market in Norfolk and Bill found the Norwich public took to his delicious fare. As with all his activities, Bill took intense care and researched recipes thoroughly to ensure that the products sold by his business were first class. For a time, he ran both a restaurant and a takeaway business.

On the tower bell ringing front, Bill became a member of the St Peter Mancroft band in Norwich. He attended whenever work commitments allowed. At that time, ringing at Mancroft tended to revolve around the same standard methods: Grandsire, Stedman, Cambridge and Yorkshire. Bill undertook a project to extend the repertoire and improve striking by coaching the band to ring Lincolnshire. In typically thorough fashion, he took the band back to basics and at one point even got the band to ring the method with one handbell each in order to appreciate how perfect striking could be achieved.

He also started to generate some handbell activity in Norfolk. Unlike Cheshire, there was very little established handbell change ringing there and Bill set out to remedy this. With Harry and Mary Poyner and Bill Barrett, there was the nucleus of a keen band and regular peals of Plain and Treble Bob methods and Grandsire Caters began to be rung from 1983 onwards. At the same time, Bill’s move to Norfolk and enthusiasm for handbell ringing had not escaped the notice of those in not too distant Cambridge, where there was also a body of keen and capable handbell exponents. In the early ’80s the Cambridge ringers were starting to break into Surprise ringing on higher numbers on handbells, although for some time they had been ringing peals of Surprise Major, Treble Bob Maximus and Stedman Cinques. In 1984 Bill made his first forays across to Cambridge for peals of London Royal and Spliced Surprise Major, followed in 1985 by peals of Cambridge Maximus. It was a particular pleasure for him to be reunited in many of these peals with Marj Winter (née Bachelor), now living in Cambridge following her marriage to Alan Winter.

So far this did not involve any advance for him in terms of what he had already done. However, from 1988 onwards he began to move to technically much more difficult territory when the Cambridge band embarked upon an ‘alphabet’ of Surprise Maximus methods. For the next three years Bill was involved in peals of over 30 different Maximus methods of varying degrees of difficulty, some right place but also many wrong place London and Bristol variants. The culmination was a peal of Zanussi Surprise Maximus in June 1990. Bill rapidly became a very dependable presence on 9-10. But such was his versatility that he could be relied upon to ring any pair very competently if required. Two particular highlights of this period stand out. The first was a peal in a method of his own devising named after his home village: Brandon Parva Alliance Maximus – a London variation. The second was the record length of 15,047 Grandsire Caters rung at his house on June 29th 1989. Despite his fascination with complex methods and the mental stimulation they provided, Bill loved the music of Grandsire Caters and this was shared by several of the ringers in the Surprise Maximus band. There was therefore great willingness to go for this record. With an extremely musical composition by the late Albert Tyler, the peal was accomplished virtually without blemish. The umpires included Albert himself, as well as that great Norfolk veteran and advocate of Grandsire Nolan Golden. (The peal was rung on Bill’s own beloved set of bells which he had commissioned from Whitechapel. In typical fashion, Bill had stipulated that his bells should have ‘a lot of metal’ and wanted bells a size larger than would be normal for the key he specified. After some heated discussion with the Foundry he eventually had his way.)

The alphabet peals were only the beginning of Bill’s involvement with technically hard handbell ringing. In 1990 and 1991 he was a participant in the bands that rang the first peals of Cambridge and Lincolnshire on 16 bells. Then from 1992 until 1995 he was a central member of the band that tackled an alphabet of entirely new methods, some of ferocious difficulty for handbells, named after Fens primarily in the East of England. The performances of the band were captured in an unusual way when Jill, Bill’s wife, a talented artist, painted a striking picture called ‘The Fenmen’, which was later marketed as a jigsaw.

For these peals and many others, Bill would typically join forces for the journey over with the late Frank Price, who lived part the way along his route at Newmarket. The combination of the two was a rich source of anecdote. Frank was a handbell ringer of exceptional talent, but perhaps had less dedication to scoring peals and tackling complex methods than Bill. On one occasion when Bill picked Frank up on the way to a particularly difficult peal, Frank remarked on seeing Bill’s blue line: ‘you can tear that up and throw it out the window, Bill’. The rest of the journey was spent with Bill (successfully) trying to persuade Frank to tackle the method after all. On another occasion the band met at Bill’s house on a Sunday to attempt Grandsire Septuples. This failed after about an hour and within a few seconds Frank had a cigarette lit and a glass of wine in his hand. Bill was astonished at anyone giving up so lightly and convinced Frank and others that another attempt be made, which was duly successful after four hours further ringing.

In the early 1990s, those who rang with Bill regularly became aware that all was not right with his health and he revealed that he had been diagnosed as suffering from multiple sclerosis. Bill was determined that MS should not curtail his activities and he battled determinedly against the increasing ravages of the illness, maintaining a dedicated fitness regime. He retired from his business in 1994. Increasingly he found handbell peals draining and had to give up tower bell ringing. In his last few handbell peals he was so determined that he would strap himself to his chair, because he could no longer haul himself back up if he slipped from being upright. Jill and Frank would between them transport him to peals when he could no longer drive. His last few peals were in 1998 and were memorable ones: Bristol Maximus in January, Stedman Caters with Quilla Roth – one of his old American friends – in March, and finally a complex composition of Stedman Cinques on May 13th. His last tower bell peal was at St Michael’s Cornhill in May 1991. In total he rang 709 peals.

In 2001 Bill received further shocking news, when his brother David was killed in a mountain biking accident in the USA.

Bill’s inability to ring any further peals by no means quenched his thirst for new projects. He had assiduously tape recorded most of the Fen method and 16 bell peals and set himself to learning how to edit these recordings and produce tapes and CDs of them. This project absorbed him for many years and was only completed around the time of his death. He was still able to enjoy ringing vicariously when members of the handbell band would periodically visit to ring a peal, with Bill listening attentively downstairs to the sounds emerging from Jill’s art studio upstairs.

Outside of ringing, Bill set himself to learn a new language – German. In typical fashion this was no mere dalliance with the language but a full-blooded assault, involving visits to Germany and intensive tuition and vocabulary learning. He bought voice recognition software which he could use when he was no longer able to type on his computer. His efforts resulted in him achieving a distinction in the highest qualification in the German language awarded by the Goethe Institute.

Bill remained as active as possible until near the very end of his life. Unfortunately he developed a chest infection which he was unable to fight and died on Easter Monday 2009. At his funeral tributes were paid by his two sons, Edward and Richard, David Brown and his German teacher, Kathy Norris. Those who knew him recognise Bill as a remarkable man in many ways. His enjoyment of the music of ringing and energy for tackling the mental puzzles that handbell ringing threw up was inexhaustible. He was an inspirational leader and a superb and meticulous organiser. He was a very courageous and extremely determined man, never willing to admit defeat in anything he undertook, nor to accept that others should do so. We shall miss him enormously.

DAVID BROWN