Plain Bob Major - following the coursing orders

Once you have found out how to work out the coursing orders for a quarter peal of Plain Bob Major you can try calling it with more of an idea of what the other bells should be doing. This may be your first step to conducting as opposed to bob calling. Here is the quarter composition:

1344 Plain Bob Major
W H H H sW H H H repeated
"Wrong and 3 Homes, Single Wrong and 3 Homes. Repeated."

2345	W	H
5243	-	3
3245	s	3

Here are the coursing orders:

7532468

W 3254 *

H 3542

H 3425

H 3254 *

sW 5234 *

H 5342

H 5423

H 5234 *

W 2354 *

H 2543

H 2435

H 2354 *

sW 5324 *

H 5243

H 5432

H 5324 *

Suppose you are going to ring the 7. Notice that the 8 is always your coursebell - that is, it is the bell you take off the lead. The 6 is fixed as well as the 7 and 8, and the 6 is the coursebell of the 8. Then look at which bell is your after bell. For a long stretch after the first call it is the 3, then the 5, then the 2 and then the 5 again.

The remaining three bells rotate round due to your bobs at Home. Learn these coursing orders. When you are used to transposing coursing orders in your head while ringing you won't need to go to the hassle of learning them all by heart, but you will probably just have to do it to start with I'm afraid. To help, you can think of the starred coursing orders as being more important because they come up twice and if you know these really well then they will help you to work out the other ones if you forget them.

You can also notice that the 4 and 5 are back home halfway through. The 4 does the same work at each set of three Homes - In, Out, Make. You can see this from the table of work of each bell affected at a bob:

A B C

Out In Make

I have also written about this in the quarter of Yorkshire.

The coursing order in Plain Bob is the order in which the bells come down to lead and so is the order in which you follow them as you hunt up and down, starting with your after bell. This means you can check them all every time you pass them to make sure they are right. You need to allow for where the treble will be so it is important to know where you need to pass the treble for each approaching bit of work.

For calling the quarter you obviously also need to look at the things you would usually, such as what your work is when the calls are going to be made, how many leads between calls, if you come back into the plain course at any point (you do, after the second single wrong, as you can see from the coursing order at that point), which bells are affected at the singles. Plus anything else you notice and find helpful.

I found following coursing orders for this quarter really rewarding because I could be sure that nothing had gone wrong and I had a much better chance of keeping people right.

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