In The Nine Tailors, the tenor bell is named Tailor Paul, supposedly cast in a field next to the churchyard in 1614. Mary-le-Bow still ring today.īells are fascinating things, right down to how they are made - or rather, cast, since the process involves pouring molten bell metal into a mold. There are still 12 bells, cast at the famed Whitechapel bell foundry in 1956, after the church and bell tower were refurbished. The BBC used a recording of the Bow bells during World War II as an interval signal for English language broadcasts. They weren't rung very often, either: there were problems wit the tower, the bells and the bell frame, apparently, as well as a shortage of ringers. The church was rebuilt with a new tower for 12 bells, although initially there were only eight there weren't a fully 12 until 1881. (It was rung for the first time at his funeral.)īy 1635 there were six bells, although both tower and bells were destroyed in the the Great Fire of London in 1666. A fifth bell was donated to the church in 1515 by one William Copland, a church warden, although he didn't live to see it rung. The first known historical reference to the Bow bells is in 1469, when the Common Council ordered the ringing of a curfew every night at 9 PM. It is said that a true Cockney must be born within earshot of the bells, and a medieval nursery rhyme ends with the line, "I do not know says the Great Bell of Bow." Remember the tale of Dick Wittington? In 1932 he supposedly hard the Bow bells calling him back to London to fulfill his destiny as Lord Mayor.
Mary-le-Bow are among the most famous in the world, showing up frequently in London lore. The famed "bow bells" at London's church of St. (If "nine tailors make a man," then I guess six tailors make a woman.) If that sounds exhausting, remember that life expectancies were much lower as recently as the late 1800s - especially for women. The pattern was similar for a woman, except there would be six initial tolls. Sayers took her title from the number of times a bell will toll to mark the passing of a man: nine strokes ("ringing the nine tailors"), followed by a pause, then the slow tolling of single strokes at half-minute intervals - however many strokes required to mark the age. (Caveat: there will be spoilers towards the end of this post, but I promise to give fair warning when we get there.)īack before the days of insta-communication, English communities relied on the tolling of bells to sound alarms and mark the passing of village residents. So it's the perfect framework to discuss science of bells and change-ringing, which turns out to be a rich lode to mine indeed. Sayers certainly did her authorial homework: the entire novel is constructed around bells and change-ringing, right down to the chapter titles and epigrams.
He made an impression, so much so that a few months later, he gets dragged back to the village to help solve the mystery of a body that has turned up in the cemetery, which may or may not be connected somehow with a robbery of a pricey emerald necklace some 15 years before. This being a holiday, and one of the change-ringers being absent, he finds himself sitting in on a record-breaking, nine-hour ringing of the changes for the parish. Gentleman-detective Lord Peter Wimsey is stranded in a small English village due to car trouble on New Year's Eve at the start of Dorothy L.
#DOROTHY SAYERS NINE TAILORS PLUS#
Links to other posts in the series by Deborah Blum, and Ann Finkbeiner - plus me at Discovery News on Jane Langton's Dark Nantucket Noon, and an earlier post of mine on singing sands, in honor of Josephine Tey's mystery The Singing Sands - can be found at the end of this post. So they decided to write about the science of classical mystery writers instead. "), but then realized that readers were no doubt bored by the overuse of epistolary openings in the science blogosphere. They thought they would co-post, on their respective blogs, some nice literary analyses ("the epistolary opening of Busman's Honeymoon. A Twitter exchange recently revealed that certain members of the small subset of science writers who were humanities majors, also have a shared taste for classic mysteries.
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