As a lifelong singer and a teacher, Jean Walters was used to making a noise. At 67 she found a new way to do it
O
ne sunny August evening, Jean Walters was sitting in her garden in Meltham, West Yorkshire, when the church bells began to ring. She sipped her glass of wine; the evening seemed idyllic. “A quintessential English country garden,” she thought, and posted on Facebook: “Bells ringing, how lovely!”
The next day when the plumber came to fix her toilet, more prosaically, he mentioned that he had seen her post, and being a bellringer himself, gave her the number of the local church’s tower captain. “He said, ‘Come along and try it.’ I did. I loved it. I said to my husband, ‘Did you hear that single bong? That was me.’”
Walters was 67 when she first climbed the tower at St Bartholomew’s in Meltham. “And I knew immediately it was something that I could develop and would be good for me.” Just before her 70th birthday, she rang her first quarter peal – nonstop ringing without a mistake for 45 minutes – and earned her badge to become a full member of the Yorkshire bellringers’ association.
