Bells (Won't) Be Ringing

Bells (Won't) Be Ringing

The sad, sad news...

Charles Brown-Please Come Home For Christmas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itdNoGtPQ3I

Originally shared by Kam-Yung Soh

The end of an era. "Britain’s oldest manufacturing firm, the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, announced its closure on December 2nd
[...]
There was nothing parochial about the business. It shipped bells to Auckland, Sydney, St Petersburg and Montreal. As early as the mid-18th century it was sending peals of bells, or great single bells, to the American colonies. If the antipodean bells stirred sentimental memories of the old country, the American bells, as if galvanised by sharper air, became symbols of freedom and revolution. The Whitechapel church-and-lookout bells of St Michael’s in Charleston, South Carolina were captured by the British in the revolutionary war and seized back again. In Philadelphia in 1776 citizens gathered to the cry of the Liberty Bell, made in Whitechapel, to hear for the first time the Declaration of Independence.
[...]
It was hard to keep up with changing ways, despite the opening of a chime-bell music room and an online shop. The patient art of melting metal, pouring it in moulds, waiting for it to set, hammering, polishing, tuning and inscribing, had never been a craft many learned. Even Mr Hughes’s great-grandfather had feared the foundry would go under.

The buildings, being listed, will remain. But their old bricks will no longer carry the echo, heard or imagined, of the history and settlement of England—and beyond."
http://www.economist.com/news/obituary/21712109-britains-oldest-manufacturing-firm-whitechapel-bell-foundry-announced-its-closure

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