Some Thoughts on ‘The Nine Tailors’
Since I am a literary bell ringer, Dorothy Sayers’ bell-ringing murder mystery, The Nine Tailors, has come up a few times on this blog. So when I read the following in the ‘letters’ section of The Ringing World last week I thought, ah ha! Blog entry! . . . RW is slowly beginning to develop a web site rather than just an opening page that says ‘hi, we’re the change-ringing weekly paper, you look way too normal, go away’ but they aren’t hanging their letters yet. First I looked up D G Rowlands’ home tower’s web site* and the only bell ringer contact info they offered was the church office phone number. So then I emailed RW and asked if they could put me in touch with D G Rowlands and they immediately sent me his home phone number. Which tells you something about how small and friendly the ringing world is. We’re all fruit loops but we tend to be sociable and hospitable fruit loops.
So then I spent 1,000,000,000,000 hours trying to ring D G Rowlands and getting a busy signal. I suspect an on-line cruising teenager and no broadband. When I finally did get through I abruptly discovered that saying ‘Hi, I would like to run your letter on my blog’ sounds really strange. But he said oh, fine, go right ahead, without even asking me to repeat what I had just said . . . slowly. Or to spell my name and then checking this blog first. Small and friendly and trusting, as I say.
There is I acknowledge safety in obscurity. I’m at the mews and my copy of Nine Tailors is at the cottage, so I have just been googling it in the hopes of finding listed somewhere what the method of the famous peal was—and for that matter why it was supposed to last nine hours. An average peal is three and a quarter hours or so. Nine hours isn’t a peal, it’s a . . . well, it’s a curious sort of masochism is what it is.** But in my fruitless search I kept running into these book reviews saying that the book is boring and/or hard to follow because of all the bell ringing.*** Er. I read Nine Tailors repeatedly in my Sayers-mad youth; it was one of my favourites. I loved the arcanery of bell ringing—who needs to understand it? Not to mention the Fens landscape, which I didn’t understand either but could still get all swoony over.†
However, people who can’t read Nine Tailors because of all the bell ringing probably won’t find a lot of the following letter interesting either. But then people who find disquisitions on bell ringing boring and impenetrable probably don’t read this blog regularly anyway.
Oh yes, and SPOILER ALERT. If by some mysterious chance you haven’t read Nine Tailors and still think you might like to some day, you don’t want to read the following.
Sir,— The technical aspects of Miss Sayers’s bellringing in The Nine Tailors have been argued over and debated many times, not least in this journal, but there are a number of other questions that arise also. They are all fairly obvious and I don’t claim any originality in setting them down here, though I haven’t seen them posed in print before.
In particular, the circumstances leading up to the death of Jeff Deacon suggest several problems to the literal mind. According to Will Thoday’s account (“The Dodging”), he put Deacon up in the bell chamber and tied him to a beam there, leaving him overnight. Would Deacon, a murderer, have submitted to being tied up there in the cold? The bell chamber would be open to the weather unless the louvers were blocked with snow and freezing cold. We will skip the problem of his bodily functions, as does Miss Sayers and just about every other fiction writer of the period†† (Walter de la Mare excepted) ††† and note that in the morning before daybreak, when Will took Deacon food and drink he found him “all right only very bad-tempered and perished wi’ cold . . .” I’m not surprised! Just that ordeal might well have killed him—freezing cold with very little freedom of movement. Then, how did he get Deacon to submit to the tying up again? Because Will collapses with ‘flu’, Deacon is then left the whole of the day and evening in the bell chamber, still tied up in the freezing cold. When did he die?
With a 9-hour peal intended, it is impossible that the conscientious steeple-keeper Jack Godfrey would not have gone up to check the ropes and adjust them. He might well have fitted new or repaired ropes a few weeks before and gone to adjust them before the New Year’s Eve ringing. He could hardly have missed seeing Jeff Deacon tied to a beam of the bell-chamber even if after dark and with only a lantern.‡ Then again, after the handbell practise‡‡ for Wimsey’s benefit—and before dinner that evening—the ringers go to the tower and ring up the bells for the service. It would only need one bell to go up “wrong” (easily done on heavy old bells on plain bearings)‡‡‡ and Jack or someone would have had to go up and put it “right.” They would also have seen Deacon.
As has often been said, it is debatable whether the noise of the bells even in such close proximity could kill anyone, but if we accept it for the sake of argument, did Deacon survive the ringing up and later the ringing (on 6 bells only) before the Watch-night Service? If so he then had the 9 hours of peal ringing during which time Wimsey/Miss Sayers implies that he died.
I reckon that he died a lot earlier and from cold (despite Will Thoday’s coat), not the bells. It was purely his bad luck that Jack Godfrey or another didn’t discover him tied up there and raise the alarm.
The one technical (ie “ringing”) point that I’ve not seen mentioned is that unless Hezekiah left “Tailor Paul” up at backstroke after the service ringing (back six?) or the raising, then ringing The Nine Tailors for the Old Year (9 + 12 strokes) would have left him at the wrong stroke for starting the peal.§ But being a downy old bird, no doubt that’s what he did!
D. G. Rowlands
Ivor, Buckinghamshire
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* I am still not really accustomed to the fact that everyone and his/her axolotl has a web site these days, but I’m learning that looking for everyone’s axolotl’s web site is the first thing to try. And I get really cranky when there’s a web site and nothing on it. Content! I want fascinating content from the comfort of my kitchen table! To read in my copious free time! When I should be writing my blog entry! So I can get back to PEGASUS before my single firing brain cell closes down for the night!
** And Lord Peter just would be a bell ringer. Of course. Gah.
*** Note that whoever wrote the Wiki entry on Nine Tailors is glaringly not a bell ringer.
† I have long been capable of becoming swoony over British landscape.
†† Something that bothered me a lot when I was a kid. Was I the only human being in the galaxy who had bodily functions?
††† I don’t remember this at all. But then, my memory makes a sieve look like a bank vault. Maybe it’s my excuse for a long leisurely de la Mare wallow.
‡ And one might assume Deacon would be trying to catch the attention of any unexpected visitor
‡‡ Handbell practise? Okay. Must read this book again.
‡‡‡ ‘Wrong’ means the clapper is lying on the wrong side of the bell as it stands mouth-up waiting to be pulled off for change-ringing. Yes, it matters. You don’t really want to know, do you? I could explain this and plain bearings if you really wanted me to, but I’d have to think about it earlier in the day when I’m awake first.
§ Usually you ring a few rounds before you start your method. He could have just not rung the first handstroke, and picked up on the second (back) stroke. Or maybe I’m missing something.
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