Jabba the Hutt gives Princess Leia a kiss

Quite a lot actually.

A group of ringing friends were discussing the fact that they shared their names with other ringers. Take myself – a Johnny-come-lately  Mary Jones, when there has been a Mary Jones in the ringing community for some years. The "real Mary Jones" rings in Cornwall and had been doing so for over 20 years when her imposter burst on the scene in November 2018 with 20 rounds to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 1918 Armistice.  There are other Mary Joneses that appear on Bell Board – a Mary E Jones rang a quarter of Yorkshire Surprise Maximus at Southwark Cathedral in 1997 – something that I am unlikely to emulate, but if anyone would care to muddle up her successes with my more modest entries, then I would not complain.  There is also a Mary Bone and from time to time I have been credited with her, no doubt meticulous note taking for CCBR meetings. Meetings that I was not even invited to.

Two other ringers at the table knew of ringers who shared their name and I proposed we seek them out and together 6 of us, with 3 names between us, could ring something and then erect a peal board to leave those that follow confused. Who was this Mary Jones who managed to ring the 2 bell and the tenor to Stedman, and this chap who handled the 3 and 5, and some joker controlled the treble and 4?  The bells are not adjacent, so how was it possible? Surely  three people would have tripped over each other in the ringing chamber and created a cat's cradle of ropes?

Musings about names continued because sometimes, once we get the bit between our teeth, there is no stopping our flights of fancy.  We turned our attentions to one J Armiger Trollope, a well-known Victorian ringer and composer.  He was born in East Dereham, Norfolk in 1876 and learnt to ring as a school boy in Norwich. His first recorded performance was in 1892 when, with 2 school friends, he rang 720 Plain Bob Minor on handbells. In 1893 he rang and conducted his first peal on handbells (more Plain Bob Minor with the same 2 friends) and a few months later his first peal on tower bells -  Plain Bob Major this time at St Peter Mancroft with the Grown-ups. I am guessing his talent was spotted early and nurtured and he became one of the finest ringers of his generation. However, he sounds like one stroppy young man, always writing to Bell News and arguing with his elders. Later he attempted to ban "forbidden methods" popular  with working class-bands  in the north of England and generally seems extraordinarily opinionated and arrogant. From its beginnings in 1911, there is scarcely an edition of The Ringing World that does not contain some reference to J Armiger Trollope (originally Trollop) – either a performance or an argument with another ringer. In 1941 he took over the editorship. These were dark war-time days when tower ringing was largely banned and  there was not much to write about.  I believe he wrote most of each edition himself, which is how I feel about our branch newsletter. 

But as we flicked through 19th century back copies of the NDAR Annual Reports over coffee (the reason for which will be revealed at a later date), we caught the moment between 1893 and 1894 when one Jabez A Trollope morphed into J Armiger Trollope. Perhaps with his first peal under his belt he was ready to take on the world and felt that Jabez would not be taken seriously.

I am not surprised the young man was bolshie – he was probably bullied without mercy. It is one thing to be a leading ringer of your generation, but to be saddled with the name Jabez?  Apparently it is Hebrew, means "one borne in pain" and was reasonably popular in the 1880s.  At least he was born 100 years too early to be nicknamed Jabba the Hutt, which is what an inventive kid would come up with these days, and God help him if he was a naturally chubby child.

What were his parents thinking?

(Should I ever ring a peal I will change my ringing name from Mary P Jones to M Petrena Jones, my given name at birth. Don't bother scouring the columns of Bell Board for the metamorphosis cos' it ain't going to happen)