BELLS
FROM THE CROYDON FOUNDRY: |
INTRODUCTION |
The bell founders, Gillett and Bland (later becoming Gillett, Bland and Co. and Gillett & Johnston in 1884) were based in Croydon, Surrey. They cast bells for Kent between 1877 and 1953. Whilst the foundry is no longer casting bells (it still exists as a firm of clock makers) extensive records of their work exist which therefore permits an analysis of their share of the bellfounding business in Kent. The records are stored at Croydon Library. An index of these records was produced by Alan A J Buswell and is also kept at the library. In this exercise, the author has been through all of the foundry records and headings in the index to ascertain exactly how many bells were sent to Kent. There are a number of bells that arrived in Kent 'second hand' and therefore do not appear in the records as Kent. These have also been included. This exercise has also assisted in the work to double check the quality of the data collected for the index as errors had been introduced through the process of converting the spidery handwriting of the Gillett founders into print. The links below lead to tables summarising all the bells supplied to Kent, giving an indication of their fate, where known, primarily through the author's own research. A Microsoft Excel version of the table may be downloaded from here in case the reader wishes to perform various sorts on the data. Further work may still be done and the author would be grateful for any additional information that others may be able to provide (e.g. photographs of school bells, details of inscriptions, etc). Best thanks are due to Croydon Archives Library (and especially Chris Bennett the archivist), also to those who have assisted in the detective work to track down these bells. Dickon Love |
| Analysis originally published 28th Sept, 2004. Updates: |
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14th Oct 2007 (fieldwork by Catherine Davies) CANTERBURY, All Saints - Bell No. 77 confirmed as hanging in the turret of this church. Picture included. CANTERBURY, St Edmund's School - photograph of bell.
28th
January 2007 (fieldwork by Dickon Love) 8th October,
2006 (fieldwork by Dickon Love) 4th December, 2005 (fieldwork by
David Cawley) 30th March, 2005
(fieldwork) 29th March, 2005
(fieldwork) 13th January, 2005
(thanks to CJP's new research) 3rd January, 2005 4th November, 2004 27th October, 2004
(thanks to DLC) |