Yesterday evening was the weekly Handbell Stadium practice, which I joined after having missed a couple of weeks. As usual there was a lot of interest in Double Norwich, so I rang a couple of courses. Then there was a suggestion of Duffield.
If you're not familiar with Duffield, it's a major principle, double, with a simple structure based on six-row divisions. The line is easily memorable. The plain course has a couple of interesting features for handbell ringers. First, all the handbell pairs ring the same pattern. Second, at alternate division ends, the pairs come back together. Also Queens comes up just before the end.
It took a little while to get into, but we rang a plain course and then a short touch. After one failure, I realised I had slipped into ringing Double Norwich. A longer touch came to grief and then it was the end of the practice.
Duffield isn't rung very often, and yesterday evening I claimed never to have rung a touch of it, never to have rung it on handbells, and I didn't even have a clear memory of ringing it in the tower. I decided to do a search in BellBoard, expecting to see hardly any performances. There were 40, mainly of major but a couple of royal and maximus (it extends by adding more sets of double dodges at the back, and loses the double symmetry). Clearly someone has been doing some uploading of historical performances, because there are peals from the mid-20th century and even a peal from 1896. Among them is this blast from the past, which I don't recall at all.
Pimlico, Greater London
St Saviour
Sunday, 3 July 1994 (7–1–20 in G)
1254 Duffield Major
1 David Holdridge
2 Keith D Anderson
3 Simon J Gay
4 Juliet R Lawrance
5 Adrienne Pyne
6 Stephanie J Pattenden
7 Ruth M Harrison
8 Thomas F Lawrance (C)
1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8 - circled tower to quarter-peals.
It's a good method for practising ringing by place notation, because there's really nothing to remember and you can focus on the position of your bells and how they are affected by each 36. I have an idea for fitting it into one of our Monday evening sessions - more about that another time.