Late Storm Bellringing May 12, 2015
Author: Beach Combing | in : Modern , trackback
Enjoy this short extract from a Sheffield newspaper about a folk practice in Devon in south-west England: 28 July 1899. Bells it will be remembered were for the supernatual like alcohol for bacteria: they drove away witches, fairies and, of course, storms…
There is a curious survival in that pretty, quiet little south country place, Dawlish; a quaint superstition (says Vanity Fair). It seems that the spirit of the bells can overcome that of the lightning: and so when thunder rolls, the chief bells are rung to scare away the evil spirit. On Saturday the bells rang furiously when the storm was its height! They tell that the bellringer holds appointment for the purpose!
Sheffield too far away from rural Devon? Well, perhaps but the story also appeared in the Torquay Directory 9 August of that year, which is practically next door. There can be no question that Dawlish’s bells were believed in the area to have rung against the black clouds.
It transpires that in conformity with an old usage, the bells in Dawlish Parish Church were rung during the recent thunderstorms, in the belief that ‘the Spirit of the Bells would overcome the Spirit of the Lightning.’ This superstitious belief in the efficacy of bell ringing in thunderstorms is very old. The surprise is that it should have survived to this day, and that the practice should still obtain at the pretty little South Devon resort of Dawlish.
Bell ringing to ward off lightning storms is a pre-reformation Christian practice. What is almost unbelievable here is that the good folk of Dawlish seem not to have heard that the reformation had come and gone and that Britain was a Protestant country without any exotic papal practices. Henry Bullinger gives one of the last mainstream descriptions in the early sixteenth century…
About bells there is a wonderful superstition. They are christened by bishops, and it is thought that they have power to put away any great tempest. In the old time men were stirred up to prayer by the ringing of them, what time any sore tempest did rise; but now the very ringing of bells, by reason of their consecration, seemeth to have a peculiar kind of virtue in it.
Is Dawlish perhaps the last trace of anti-storm bell-ringing in the western world? It is late, but surely somewhere in our records in Britain or perhaps in the Dominions or in New England… drbeachcombing AT yahoo DOT com If it is last there are worse places for this charming custom to die than ‘pretty’ (as the two newspapers above call it) Dawlish.
