All Saints, Sandy Hill

Today, courtesy of climbing and photography done by Brian Glenn, we find ourselves in the belfry of the former All Saints Church, Sandy Hill, Ottawa, close by the biggest of the eight bells located in the large belfry at the top of the tower.

For many of us bells figure on Christmas cards.  Some of us may think of the familiar carol, “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.”  Indeed the first published piece of sheet music in Canada was an 1840 composition by the organist at Christ Church, Bytown, one F.H. Lehmann, entitled “The Merry Bells of England,” which alluded to the new bell then being installed in the tower newly built at the front of that house of worship.  Never mind that upriver one Hamnett Pinhey parodied this joyous winter piece of sheet music with a composition (to the same tune) entitled “the Merry Belles England.”  Be that as it may, our theme here is bells.

We cannot proceed before correcting an error in the March 2020 Crosstalk photo-feature.  There we stated this to be “the only Anglican church in the City of Ottawa with a carillon of eight bells in the upper tower on which hymns could be played.”  We went on to wonder if prime minister “Mackenzie King’s (who lived across the street) insistence on a carillon on Parliament Hill may well have been inspired by the one he heard playing at All Saints.”

That article caused a reader to come by and explain that a carillon is defined by the number of bells.  The Peace Tower carillon on Parliament Hill has 53 bells.  However, we were assured, the eight bells at All Saints are not a large enough number to comprise a carillon.  Instead they are known to those in the know as a chime.  What excuse could the Archivist offer for this oversight?  Was he perhaps spooked by learning from Bishop John Chapman that the ghost of Bishop Strachan is reputed to play the chimes in the tower of Trinity Church, Cornwall?

How do we excuse our ignorance?  Dictionaries are of no help in sorting things out.  

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines a carillon as: 

1.  A set of bells so hung and arranged as to be played upon either by hand or by machinery 

2. A melody played on the bells  

3.  An instrument imitating a peal of bells.

A chime is: 

2.  An apparatus for striking a set of bells so as to make them chime  

3.  Hence, a set of bells, so attuned as to chime when thus struck, or when slightly swung  

4.  The series of musical sounds thus produced.  

A peal is 

1.  The ringing of a bell as a call or summons  

2.  The ringing of a bell, or a set of bells; spec. a series of changes rung on a set of bells  

3.  A set of bells tuned to one another, a ring of bells. 

And finally, a ring is 

1.  A set or peal of (church) bells  

2.  A ringing sound or noise” but gives a helpful quote from Samuel Pepys’s diary: “Here is also a very find ring of six bells, and they mighty tuneable.

All Saints Church was built in 1899, financed by Sir Henry Newell Bate.  The original ring of five bells in its tower, as the inscription on this bell informs us, was made in memory of Catherine Bate who died soon after the church was finished.  A few years later three more bells were added to mark the anniversary of her wedding day.  As Sir Henry Newell Bate came the first chairman of the Federal District Commission (forerunner of today’s NCC) he would be pleased that All Saints after closing in 2015 is now a visitors centre for Prime Ministers’ Row.

The Archives collects parish registers, vestry reports, service registers, minutes of groups & committees, financial documents, property records (including cemeteries and architectural plans), insurance policies, letters, pew bulletins, photographs, paintings, scrapbooks, musical compositions, parish newsletters and unusual documents.