This Foundry had a long and illustrious history, being the oldest manufacturing company in the country (established 1570) and being the makers of another very significant bell, the Liberty Bell in Philadelphia. The Foundry was commissioned to cast a replacement, nine feet in diameter at the mouth. As they didn’t know how much a bell this size was going to weigh, they took 12 hours to melt 20 tonnes of bell metal (a mixture of 77% copper and 23% tin) at temperatures of 1,200º centigrade.

It turned out to be a bit more than they needed: Big Ben, as this second bell was also nicknamed, was cast on Saturday April 10, 1858, and ended up weighing 13 ½ tonnes. It took over three weeks for the metal to cool down. Big Ben was the largest bell in England at the time and coincidentally, just two miles down the road, the largest metal ship in England was also being constructed, Brunel’s Great Eastern. The Whitechapel Bell Foundry was very proud of its work and commissioned a special commemorative picture. 

 

ICONS paid a visit to the Whitechapel Bell Foundry in London to find out how much has changed.

The first thing you notice as you walk into the store front at No 34 Whitechapel Road is an enormous template hanging over the door. This is the actual wooden frame used to make Big Ben and makes you realise just how big it really is. These templates help to form the moulds which give the bell its shape, inside and out. The cope is the outer mould for the bell and the core is the mould to form the inside shape.

 
A wooden template is used to shape and smooth the mould for the core.  The cope is then finished with graphite so that the bell metal doesn’t stick to the mould. The cope is lowered with a pulley on top of the core. The gap in between them is the exact size of the template and that is the space where the molten bell metal is carefully poured. This technique, used to cast Big Ben, is still the one followed today.

 
Around the Foundry you can see piles of Mansfield red sand and horse manure which are combined with clay from Sussex and goat’s hair to make the moulds themselves. These ingredients, and their smell, haven’t changed either!

 
After the bell has been cast it needs to be tuned. The tuning is done by a lathe to shave off the metal; the thinner the casting, the slower it vibrates, and the lower the note. For this reason, bells have to be cast sharp because once you have cut off the metal and it’s flat, there’s no going back! Big Ben was cast close to pitch (the note E) and never tuned in this way. Its notorious slightly off-key sound is caused by the fact that it has a crack in it (which occurred once it was in place).

An understanding of the harmonics of bell-tuning has only fully developed in the last century. When a bell rings you are actually hearing a great range of notes. Nowadays, a bell the size of Big Ben would be tuned by listening to its 11 most powerful notes, including the nominal note and the hum note, an octave below. Tuning today is undertaken with the help of a sophisticated electronic pitching device, certainly not available to the makers of Big Ben.

 
However, it is very easy to picture the Foundry back in 1858. The floor would have been earth and the lighting by gas, the fires were stoked with timber and the workers wore no protective clothing. No protection, that is, except on Mondays when they were issued with paper hats to keep their hair clean! As you walk around you notice the mixture of past and present everywhere. You squeeze through small doorways and along narrow walkways; you try to avoid bumping your head on pulleys or falling through trapdoors; you climb a series of steep staircases to get to the attic where the carpenters make the wheels for the church bells out of English oak. There are bells lying around everywhere, in all sizes, in varying stages of readiness for despatch around the world, as there have always been.

There are heavy chains hanging on the walls and handcrafting tools lying alongside much more modern technologies. There are personal touches from the 25 employees: little bits of graffiti on the walls and machinery, and a modern, yet still old-fashioned, time-card punching system.  Most strikingly, up in the carpenters’ workshop, are a series of memorial tablets paying tribute to long-standing employees who have died on the job or in retirement. They date back to 1890 and up to 1997.

 
Another link with the past is our guide, Alan Hughes. He has worked at the Foundry for 40 years and is the fourth generation of his family to do so. He would be delighted to welcome you to the Foundry too!

For more details, see Places to Go under the What Next? section