APPEAL OF THE BELLS

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 39, 15 February 1930, Page 10

APPEAL OF THE BELLS

HYDE PARK CONCERTS

LISTENING CROWDS

(Fnom "The Post's" Representative.) LONDON, 7th January.

Ef/ery day thousands of Londoners are listening to the recitals given on the Wellington War Memorial Carillon in Hyde Park. The popularity and tunefulness of the selections may be juiAged from to-day's programme:

12.0-12.20 p.m. —"Robin Adair," "•John Peel," "Avo Maria" (Schubort), "Rocked iv tho Cradle of the Ileep," and "Mary."

3.0-3.20 p.m.—"Absent," "Kathleen Mavourneen," "Juanita," "Seremade" (Schubert), "Love's Old Sweet Hong."

6.0-6.20 p.m.—"Melody in F" (Eu'benstein), "Annie Laurie," "Parted" (Tosti), "The Banks of Allan Water," and "Somewhere a Voico is Calling." There were very large crowds of listeners on Sunday. That was to be expected, but yesterday they were almost as numerous. Decidedly tho bolls are becoming most popular. While the recitals were in progress on Sunday tho "tub thumpers" at the Marble Ardh entrance were sparsely supported. The counter attraction was too great.

Messrs. Gillett and Johnson, the bellfounders, are rapidly completing the installation of the apparatus for playing the bells by electricity, and it is anticipated that the machinery will be finished in a week. It will the.n be. possible for abbreviated recitals to be given without the presence of a human player. 'The provision of electrical apparatus includes an ivory keyboard similar in appearance to the keyboard of a piano or an organ, and by a slight manipulation of switches the bells could be played from this keyboard by any efficient pianist or organist. A CONCERT DESCRIBED. Describing yesterday afternoon's concert tho representative of the "Morning Post" writes: "It was a great afternoon for an open-air concert, with the sun touching the white tower and glistening on the peeled trunks of the plane trees; and the hint of frost in the air made the bells sound clearer, just as it makes a winter fire burn- brighter. There must have been an audience of two or three thousand standing found on turf that already begins to look rather trampled and bare.

"High' up in the side of the tower one could see through the little window the carilloneur vigorously at it. His coat was off, his shoulders worked; and at the end of 'Land of Hope and Glory' he turned to bow to the applause and wiped his forehead all in one motion. A moment's pause only, and then the tower was reverberating again—'Come Back to Erin,' said the' bells invokingly. "Something suddenly went wrong. The music flagged, felt its way uncertainly, and stopped. A .figure in dungarees climbed precariously among the caged bells, stooped from a platform, and all was well again. Treble notes escaped once more, exaltingly clear, and the bigger rims resumed their low melodious humming.

"The majority of the crowd stood a couple of hundred yards to windward; it is from about that distance that the bells, sound sweetest. And what a various crowd it was, with the dissimilarity that only London can fully produce. "Slim girls, silk-stockinged, with the fashionable small, hats like goblin helmets; well-lunched business men with nicely rolled umbrellas, who would be extremely late at the office; men without overcoats and without collars, whd1 could not have been genuinely seeking work; schoolboys with school caps, checked, ringed, and striped;_ governesses and charges; a youth in kilts; terriers straining on the lead and pricking their ears at strange, unusual sounds; and an old bell-ringer up for the day from Buckinghamshire. "It does seem a pity that the bells have to go to New Zealand. Cannot Mr. Lansbury, among his schemes for brightening Hydo Park, provide us with a permanent Carillon?" "A BEAUTIFUL MEMORIAL." "We know by repute the carillons of tho Low Countries," says the "Sunday Times," "but the rango and beauty of the music of forty or fifty grouped bells is strange to us, famous though our. own bells and bell-found-ers are. And this carillon sounds for us with a special appeal. It belongs to New' Zealand, and will shortly be transported thither to serve in- her capital as that Dominion's memorial to her war dead. "From childhood to the grave the music of" bells has countless romantic and historic association?! for us English peopled Their voices remind us of fairy tale and legend. They ring out our hours of rejoicing and sorrow, they speak to us of victory and the peace of God. No tiny community of our race in distant lands, but has its church bells, whose peal each Sunday morning transforms that alien soil into a bit. of England. The people of New Zealand could have chosen no more beautiful form of memorial for their sons who died for the Empire."