Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Major

Today’s quite sensible title is probably a relief to those who question my more esoteric ones.

As you all probably know, Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Major is one of the Treble Place Major bell ringing methods. It proudly takes its place alongside Lou’s Carrot Treble Place Major, Cockup Bridge Treble Place Major and the others in its category.

It’s pretty useful if you have eight bells. Heck, add two more bells and you can even go for a Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Royal.

Between the two of them (Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Major and Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Royal) you have the entire subset of bell ringing methods which mention tea. So, as this is ostensibly a tea blog, let’s find out together what we can about the why and how of naming a bell ringing method after an implement of tea ware.

Anyway, a little bit of research shows that the most famous performance of Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Major was at Saint Bartholomew’s in Sproxton, Leicestershire, UK in 2002. It took 4 hours and 46 minutes and was a birthday surprise for someone, possibly an unwelcome one if they didn’t much care for campanology.

A lot of research later, and I’ve found practically nothing, except to note this oddity: the Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Major takes at least 4 hours, the Percy’s Tea Strainer Treble Place Royal considerably longer, but consider these:

• The Rumbaba and Whiskey Chaser minor is shorter and uses on 7 bells
• The Rum Surprise Minor is shorter again and uses 6 bells
• The Eden Ale Minor (ditto)

So the ones named after alcoholic beverages are shorter and require less effort? And the search for methods named after coffee returned no results.

The only logical conclusion* is that this indicates that better, long lasting performance is attained through copious tea drinking, not alcoholic beverages nor coffee.

That sounds right. Does it ring any bells for you?

*in the modern sense of “twisting science to mean whatever you want it to mean”