The University of Chicago’s Guild of Change Ringers will be ringing the bells in Mitchell Tower for two separate hour-long sessions on Saturday, May 6, in honor of the coronation of British King Charles III.
The campus student group UChicago Guild of Change Ringers will ring the bells from noon–1 p.m. and again from 2–3 p.m. CT. The group is led by Tom Farthing, a community volunteer, who said that curious visitors can come into the tower on Saturday to watch the ringers in action. If it gets too crowded, the group will cycle people through the tower.
While commonplace in England—where bells will ring across the United Kingdom in the traditional English art form on the day of coronation—change-ringing bells are rare elsewhere in the world. The University of Chicago is home to one of only 50 such peals in North America.
The bell tower that soars over the Reynolds Club has a strong connection to England. The structure was modeled after a 1509 tower at Oxford’s Magdalen College, and the chimes, which were dedicated in 1908 in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer, the first Dean of Women in the graduate schools, were cast by a London foundry. The Palmer bells weigh from 564 pounds up to 2,443 pounds.
The change bells are typically rung audibly for a half-hour, once a month and sound much different from the typical melodies played by the bells’ neighbor, the more famous Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Carillon inside Rockefeller Chapel’s tower.
—Prof. Chuan He
