Whitechapel Bell Foundry
Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London E1 is Britain’s oldest existing business. Above the door it says 1570, but recent research indicates it may have been operating in the 1420s, and perhaps even earlier. The foundry’s business, quite obviously, is making bells. Church bells and hand bells mainly, but whatever your bell requirements, this is the place. This factory not only manufactured Big Ben and Philadelphia’s Liberty Bell, but has supplied thousands of churches in Britain and throughout the anglophone world. It also does a brisk business in maintenance, giving old bells a new lease of life and plenty of TLC.
Yesterday a group of London Historians took one of the foundry’s legendary tours. Our host and guide for the day was the the assured Alan Hughes, a consummate presenter whose persona reminded me a little of Edward Woodward: a man full of acumen, confidence and knowledge, he kept us spellbound throughout. Authoritative and humourous with it.
Starting with church bells, Alan took us through the process. How moulds are made, what they comprise (sand, goat hair and horse poo, mainly), how they are shaped; the furnaces, one which can boil up to two tons of liquid bronze, the other up to six tons; the painstaking process of harmonically tuning each bell, which involves shaving metal from the inside surface of the bell – over and over again – until it is just right (fewer than 20 people in the world know how to do this); the workshop where the paraphernalia of hanging each bell is is assembled: the attachment assembly, the wooden wheels (comprising oak ash and birch) and the framed superstructure – thousands of nuts and bolts required; on to the cramped carpentry shop in the cramped loft of the building where the bell wheels are made (motto: Nothing is impossible for the man who doesn’t have to do it himself).
After that, we had a tour around the small stuff: the hand bells. Hand bells are made from the same bronze composition as their church bell brethren. The business of tuning them is less painstaking. But they are seen by the public, so they must gleam – the buffing and polishing go through many stages. Then they have their handles attached – these are made of leather – I never knew that.
As a finale, Alan swung the demonstration church bell in the garden. It is LOUD.
For about six centuries and possibly longer, hundreds – probably thousands – of craftsmen have been manufacturing bells in Whitechapel. None is apprenticed, so officially the Foundry’s staff are unskilled labour, though there cannot be a more skilled workforce anywhere. Our tour, I cannot emphasise enough, was an utter delight.
Because Whitechapel Bell Foundry is a working factory, it is only open to the public on Saturdays through the summer. Tickets are snapped up fast (I ordered ours last September). But at time of writing, they have about 140 tickets available for the rest of this year. I’d highly recommend you book yourself on a tour asap, or it’s 2013 for you. We, London Historians, will most definitely do this again next year.
Here are rather more photos than I normally post, justifiably so.
Apologies if this is the 2nd time this comment appears. I don’t think the first time I commented, you received my comment – so I’m trying again!
I’m sure that this must be the bell foundry in London which the church in Great Dunmow, (North Essex) commissioned to build their new church bells between the years 1527-9 (during the reign of Henry VIII). Great Dunmow’s churchwarden accounts have survived and these accounts detail a parish-wide collection with every house-hold in the town contributing money for the new bells – 153 household contributed a total of £7 0s 7d. After the collection for the bells, the accounts record a great flurry of activity when the churchwardens and local elite went back and forth to the bell-foundry in London to inspect the casting of their new bell. Unfortunately, the accounts do not specify the precise location of the bell foundry but there can’t have been too many of them at this time. I would like to think that it was the Whitechapel Bell Foundry but I expect we will never find concrete prove of this.
In 1529, travelling backwards and forwards between Great Dunmw and London incurred some expense to the parish of Great Dunmow. These expenses (mainly for food and lodgings) are recorded in the churchwardens’ accounts. Finally the bell was ready to be taken back to Great Dunmow’s parish church and the local elite went to London to ‘fett home the bells’. The sum of £10 was paid to the bell founder in London – a substantial sum of money indicating that this was a very fine bell indeed. A further £6 13s 4d was paid out by the parish church ‘for makynge a new flower [floor] in the stepell & a new belframe & new wheles & stoke all owre bells redy to go’. (The accounts are silent on how they made up the difference between what was collected by the parish and what was eventually paid out!) The churchwardens’ accounts do not specify if there was a grand ‘open ceremony’ but I suspect there must have been. The financial collection, commissioning and the elite going to the bell-foundry in London to get the bells had been a community event involving the entire parish.
I would love to know if Great Dunmow’s Henrician bell was cast in this bell-foundry in Whitechapel!
And I forgot to say in my post that there are more details regarding Great Dunmow’s Tudor churchwardens’ accounts in my blog http://www.essexvoicespast.com
Thanks for your posts, very interesting indeed. Reading between the lines, and not wishing to misrepresent WBF, I think as far as they are concerned they have been in business with some certainty since 1570 but accept that the historian who did the research for the earlier period is probably correct about an earlier date. They see themselves as being bell manufacturers first and foremost, historians very much second, if at all. Your dates are within this earlier period, that is to say, the existence today of very little evidence / records in this particular area. Given that all industry that was noisy/smelly were kept to the east of the city wall during the period (because the prevailing wind came from the west), it must be probable that your bell(s) came from Whitechapel. I don’t know whether there was more than one foundry, though.
Thanks for the reply Mike. I think almost certainly (for the reasons you mention and also the risk of fire), that the foundry Great Dunmow purchased its bells from was somewhere in the east of London. However, interestingly the accounts consistently state ‘London’ whenever the bell foundry is mentioned (and there’s nearly an entire page of entries regarding the bell). Was Whitechapel known as ‘London’ by the late 1520s? Could there have been bell foundry within the city walls? But because of the noise, smell and risk of fire, this seems unlikely. I guess we’ll never know but, nevertheless, very interesting to speculate!
http://www.essexvoicespast.com
I guess some light research might give the answer to that, but interestingly, a recent blog post by Mathew Lyons quotes a letter to Elizabeth I in 1559, which says “… the king’s palace at Greenwich, opposite London, on the other side of the river Thames…” with Greenwich, of course, being even further east than Whitechapel. Seems to support the idea that Whitechapel may well be referred to as London in 16C.
http://mathewlyons.wordpress.com/2012/03/10/the-death-of-anne-boleyn-a-correspondent-writes-to-elizabeth-i/
Whitechapel Company is giving its services in London for decades and possibly they are one of the dynamic manufacturer of bells in London.Even my grandfather used to utilized their bells in his primary schools and he was totally a fan of top quality product.