Methods Committee meeting

Methods Committee meeting

The Methods Committee held its spring meeting this year in Whitchurch, Hampshire.

The chairman, Tony Smith, reported news of the Committee's publications. The Collection of Plain Methods, which had sold out, had now been reprinted, and work on the new Collection of Principles was now complete. Correspondence in The Ringing World and elsewhere had suggested that the Central Council's Decisions were not readily accessible to the ringing public - or even to Council members, so Tony Smith and Pat Brooke had produced an up-to-date set of the Decisions in booklet form, which has now gone on sale as a Central Council publication.

Much of the Committee's time over the past year has been spent discussing Doubles Variations, and this meeting was no exception. At the 1989 Council meeting, the Peals Analysis Committee had been asked to look at the six contentious Doubles peals, and their recommendations have been included in their report for this year. These recommendations were considered by the Methods Committee which decided to propose that the peals - if accepted by the Council - should at least be recorded in a manner conforming with the Decisions. As a further consequence of this debate, the Committee decided to propose the lifting of the restrictions on Doubles Variations imposed by Decision (E)A3, thus widening the range of variations available to peal ringers.

Finally, the Committee said farewell to Patrick Brooke, who is leaving the Central Council after serving on the Methods Committee for six years.

The Ringing World, June 8, 1990, page 550