One yard, five generations

Josiah Harlowe digs the pit. A wheelwright's son with a borrowed furnace casts his first service bell for the chapel at Aldenmoor. It still rings the half-hours.

The first ring of eight leaves the yard by canal barge. The boatman is paid partly in beer, a practice since discontinued and occasionally mourned.

The tuning shop is built. The second generation takes up the new science of the five partials and true-harmonic tuning, and stops trusting its ears alone. The ears stay on the payroll regardless.

The yard goes quiet. The furnace is given over to war work, and the day book records two years with no bells in it — the only silence in the family's keeping.

The recasting years. A decade of remaking what the war took, pouring parish bronze back into parish bells across England and the Continent.

First full carillon — forty-seven bells for a Flemish belfry, and a taste for instrument work that never left the house.

“Patience” arrives — the vertical tuning lathe, eleven tonnes of Sheffield iron, named by the tuner who would spend thirty years listening to it.

The fifth generation takes the keys, and with them the rule the first generation set: the founder whose name is on the gate pours the metal.

Casting, tuning, hanging, keeping. New bells on the book for three continents, and survey ladders in a dozen old towers this season.