US Edition It took 11 days in May 1882 for a traction engine to haul the biggest bell ever made in Britain from Loughborough to St Paul's cathedral. Slid up a ramp greased with tallow through a hole knocked in the wall, it was raised 125 feet to hang in the south-west tower.
It sounds each day at 1pm. Great Paul, still the biggest bell in Britain, at 16½ tons (or, in the now obscure notation of bell-ringers, as hundredweights, quarters and pounds: 334-2-19). Round the bell runs the inscription vae mihi si non evangelisavero – Woe is unto me, if I preach not the gospel.
That is the essential part of the theory of church bells: that their ringing proclaims the good news. Gerard Manley Hopkins makes their function more existential: "each hung bell's/Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name". He means that any created thing declares God's glory.
Whatever the theory, the practice of change-ringing church bells is peculiarly English., and the founding of bells spans the centuries. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry boasts of its foundation in 1570, though it developed from local bell foundries of a century earlier. The other English bell foundry, Taylors of Loughborough, which made Great Paul, traces its history to the 14th century, and has been in the hands of the Taylor family since 1784.
Or it had been until last month, for now it is in the hands of the administrator. Thirteen of the 28 staff have been made redundant and a buyer is sought for the company as a going concern. Bids had to be in by last week, but no announcement was made and the deadline extended.
The straw that apparently broke the back of Taylors was an instruction by the Health and Safety Executive to re-roof the foundry's tuning-hall. It cost £70,000. In August, cash-flow dried up and the bank was not to be persuaded.
Days after administrators moved in, orders worth £80,000 were confirmed. "In hindsight, we probably should not have done the HSE work," Jill Clarke, the foundry's operations director, told the Church Times.
Closure of Taylors would be painful for the employees but disastrous for the continuity of British bell-founding. One of the staff, David Cole, has been there for half his 36 years. His father taught him to use a lathe when he was seven. A lathe is what bell-founders use to tune a bell after it is cast. Mr Cole can tune a bell to a hundredth of a semi-tone, no easy matter when its harmonics are of baffling complexity.
Casting the bell still follows medieval techniques, shown impressionistically in Andrei Tarkovsky's film Andrei Rublev. A pit of black sand, a cone of brick and coke smeared with a loam of sand, water and horse dung, and a furnace capable of melting tin and copper into bell-metal at 1,100C come into it. Just as medieval masons could carve stone into geometrically accurate vaulting by applying templates to raw blocks, so old bell-founders used strickle-boards, wooden templates like French curves, to govern the shape of inner and outer moulds.
Techniques did change over centuries, and the Victorians transformed the process with cranes and steam transport. But the bells made today would have pleased the men who made the bell at St James's, Lissett, in the Yorkshire Wolds, dated 1254, or the bell of St Botolph's, Hardham, in Sussex, said to be even older.
When people ask what Britain is to produce in its struggle to climb from the recession, the answer is a bundle of disparate skilled specialities. One of these, bell-founding, does not figure on any graph of GDP. It is not just a business, but a living tradition.
"Their sound has gone into all lands," says a motto of Taylors' – from the Bible of course. St Paul used the phrase in discussing faith that comes by hearing. You don't have to be Joan of Arc to hear words of faith in the sound of church bells.