BOW BELLS

Hokitika Guardian, 28 August 1933, Page 8

BOW BELLS

RING OUT AGAIN After a silence of nearly six years Bow Bells have been restored and dedicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his address he said he hoped there were still some (children in England who were educated : in. the old nursery !tables; it would be a wrongful thing for future generations if they were not. Every English child properly educated- knew 0 f Blow Bells, .which had been familiar to the citizens of London for many centuries—some of these very bells for 2G5 years. Was it too much to say that this event was not only the restoration of Bow Bells, but the restoration of a real part of the abiding life of London?

There was no spell more potent to revive the associations of our conscious and sub-conscious life than the sound of bells. Through the marvellous discovery of wireless the chimes of Big Ben were now heard all over the world; and only that week he had heard' from one in the West Indies, from another in Arabia, that they' bad heard the sound of Big Ben, all .that London meant came back into their mind» arid spoke to their souls. Again, the bells, of Boston .Stump, jn Lincolnshire, had lately been restored through American generosity, and when the, other day the chimes of that famous 'steeple were heard, in Boston, Massachusetts, lie was, tpld how wonderfully and quickly, and in a manner impossible through any other nieans, there came to those Bostonians in the United States the sounds of the homeland from which their fathers had come. It was harder to hear the sound of Bow Bells to-day, than it used to be. for who could hear sounds so beautiful in the midst of the ceaseless .discord of modern' traffic, this insistent and increasing hideousness of noise with which modern life seemed, -inevitably attended?