Tina Stoecklin ’87 has come a long way from her first experiences on Kalamazoo College’s campus in the fall of 1983. A long way both literally—more than 3,500 miles from Kalamazoo to Glasgow, Scotland—and figuratively—from sitting in a lecture “with a piece of paper with some lines scribbled all over it, waving a couple of handbells around,” to 40 years later being elected president of one of the foremost change ringing organizations in the world, the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers.
That initial lecture on bell ringing was not what Stoecklin expected, yet she found herself carried along by the charisma of the late T. Jefferson Smith, a long-time beloved K math professor and the driving force behind the establishment of change ringing at K and the installation of eight English tower bells in Stetson Chapel.
“Because of the K system [with many students studying abroad or completing internships and career preparation], the rest of the College bell ringers were not on campus that term,” Stoecklin said. “I learned on a Texas Instrument bell-ringing simulator that Jeff had written. He used to sit me down in a room, and I would just plunk away with my fingers, and do this whole simulation. Then in my second term, some of the ringers came back, and I gradually met them all.”
The appeal of the K ringing community pulled Stoecklin more firmly into the world of change ringing.
“I just wanted to be part of it so much,” Stoecklin said. “Then there was the whole history and tradition of it, and once I got far enough in, I was hooked.”
The chapel’s tower still stood empty at that point, so Smith’s ringers used handbells.
“I learned to ring handbells first, which is very unusual for a bell ringer, especially in the UK,” Stoecklin said. “Then at the end of my freshman year, the bells went into Stetson with a big dedication ceremony. The bell hanger from England stayed over the summer, teaching us all to ring, and I drove back and forth to K [from the Ann Arbor area] to get my handling lessons, and we went on from there.
“Initially, I think we did a lot of ringing almost every evening, because they were new, and we were excited, and it was fun. We were all learning together, which is a really, really special way to learn. Traditionally, you’re surrounded by some experts, and you’re brought in gradually—and we had to wing it, really. Jeff knew how to ring, and a couple of the other older ringers knew how to ring, but we were pretty well making it up as we went along, and it created such a strong sense of camaraderie. I’m still in touch with quite a few of the K bell ringers.”
Stoecklin also participated in other campus activities; she sang in the choir for a time, worked on the literary magazine The Cauldron and helped run poetry workshops in addition to completing double majors in English literature and Spanish language and literature. While studying abroad in Madrid, Spain, she embarked on a Senior Integrated Project involving oral history of lingering Francoist influences after the death of Francisco Franco, who ruled Spain as a dictator from 1939-1975. She completed a career development term in Washington, D.C.—a decision based at least in part on access to bell ringing in D.C.
Yet, “within a very short time, a bell ringer was what I was known to be,” Stoecklin said. “My trips to Spain were probably my last non-bell ringing K activities. Certainly, by the time I finished at K, bell ringing was me, and it was something I wanted to keep doing.”
Bell Ringing Beyond K
With Smith’s encouragement, Stoecklin applied for a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, a one-year grant awarded to graduating seniors for purposeful, independent exploration outside the United States.
“I became a Watson fellow on the strength of a bell ringing-based project,” Stoecklin said. “I traveled all over the UK for 18 months, visiting various bell towers and taking photographs and learning from various people and doing all the things you do as a Watson fellow, which is just basically soaking it in and then spitting it out in some way.”
The fellowship cemented Stoecklin’s interest in bell ringing.
“I spent about five or six years drifting back and forth and between North America and the UK in various roles and jobs and things until I finally settled over here in the early ’90s. There was a year where I was living near Philadelphia, which has also got a ring of bells in it, and a group of about four of us women used to travel up and down the East Coast going to bell-ringing practices, and I’m still friends with all of them.”
Stoecklin spent about 10 years in Oxford, then a couple years in London, and worked for a bell-ringing magazine for a time. In 2000, her husband, Simon Gay—a computer science lecturer—was offered a job at the University of Glasgow. They moved to Glasgow and have been there since.
“I moved into e-commerce, and so my professional life has got nothing to do with my ringing life, but I’ve always been very active in ringing,” Stoecklin said. “I met my husband through bell ringing. He comes from a bell-ringing family. In fact, there’s a fake bell in our attic that my husband’s father installed for us so we could teach our children to ring. This is the family I married into.”
A typical week for Stoecklin includes Monday night ringing with the five-member handbell band she and Gay have built over the past 12 years. Tuesday brings tower practice night, where Gay runs the ringing and Stoecklin helps the training team teach the basics to new members before they can be incorporated into a ringing band. On Sundays, she participates in service ringing at the tower. Weekends often include other ringing opportunities and training sessions.
She estimates she has rung bells in a few hundred towers—“nothing like the 5,000 that some people manage. It’s a feature in bell ringing called tower grabbing; there’s a directory of all the bell towers that have ringable bells and people buy a book or use a website and tick off all the towers they have rung at. People will have special trips where they cram in as many towers in a day as they can, which is possible in England, because they’re so close together.
“I tend to go back to the places I like and ring with people I know. It is fun ringing on different rings of bells, but it took me a couple of years to realize that wasn’t for me. What I really like is ringing with people in community and doing activities to push my skills, rather than chasing variety.”
A New Role in Ringing
Stoecklin has a big smile, a big heart, and a laugh that peals out like her bells. She has been involved with the Central Council of Church Bell Ringers off and on for more than 20 years, 12 as a representative for the Scottish association, and was invited to run a workgroup in 2022. Yet she was surprised when the past president suggested she consider running for the role after his retirement. She took some time to consider the workload on top of a full-time job, the impact on her local ringing activities, and her family’s input before deciding that she wanted to “be in the room.”
“People have always encouraged me to get more involved at the council level,” Stoecklin said. “I know a lot of people around the world, I know a lot of bell ringers personally, and I cared very much about how we were running things.”
The Central Council of Church Bell Ringers represents 65 affiliated societies, comprised of local companies who ring bells in the English tradition with rope and wheel, in the British Isles as well as Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the U.S., South Africa and Italy. The council’s object is to “advance the practice, heritage and appreciation of bell ringing as an enjoyable mental and physical exercise and unique performing art for the public benefit of both church and community” (cccbr.org.uk/).
“The Central Council is to be the voice for bell ringers and to represent them to other agencies and government bodies, because collectively we can negotiate about access issues, sound control issues, safety issues, safeguarding issues and things like that,” Stoecklin said. “We also keep reference collections. We have a very large and significant library of books about bell ringing which is unequaled anywhere else in the world. We have a duty of care to that, and we keep software libraries and the database of bells that people use to tick off their towers. We also offer advice services and try to find general ways we can make ringers’ lives a little bit easier if we can with our very minimal pot of money.”
Stoecklin ran unopposed for the role of president of the council and was elected in September 2023 for a three-year term. She is the first American (and American-trained) change ringer and the third woman to hold the office. Her deputy president is also a woman, marking the first time the council’s top two roles have both been held by women.
“For the last few years, I’ve been preaching a ‘say yes’ attitude to help make women more visible in ringing,” Stoecklin said. “There are tons of women in bell ringing, but somehow we don’t filter up to these high-visibility positions in the right proportion. I’ve been involved in local initiatives with other women bell ringers to evidence this problem and take some practical steps to address it. One of the things we say is, if somebody asks you to do something, say yes. Don’t say, ‘Oh, I’m not sure, I might make a mess of it’—which we say, because we want to be perfect. We’re very hard on ourselves. That issue of visibility and representation and stepping up is really, really important to my leadership style, and this is the biggest ‘say yes’ I can think of, really.”
Ringing in Change
Stoecklin’s priorities for the job may seem familiar to anyone involved with an often-traditional nonprofit: addressing recruitment challenges, shifting the culture to be more inclusive, and improving the online experience for both potential recruits and existing members.
As church enrollment and engagement have declined in England as well as other places, historic channels of recruitment have suffered.
“We have the twin problem of, we’re not sure how many places are going to be closed to us, because the bells don’t belong to us—they belong to the institution that houses them, and how many of those places are going to be closed to us in the next 10 years? Along with, how do we replace that recruitment stream that was so comfortable and easy for so many years?” Stoecklin said. “Not to mention the fact that our close ties with churches can prevent us from recruiting from other groups. I’m not religious at all, I’m not a member of my congregation, and I value bell ringing for the openness it has for people from all walks of life, but it’s very, very hard to look that way.”
In addition to recruiting more—and more diverse—ringers, Stoecklin would like the council to set a tone for the ringing community of consistent welcome, inclusion and support.
“We are establishing the code of conduct we want to see for ringers and the way we want to welcome new ringers in and how we want to recruit new ringers,” Stoecklin said. “We’ve been working on language and tone of voice for a marketing campaign to make us think about our placement, our choices, who we encourage and who we don’t encourage. I think often people who feel sidelined might find it hard to speak up, and if I’m there speaking up, that helps them to speak out as well. It’s not just a woman thing, although that’s very important to me, but also about coming from America, where the towers are very spread out, and ringing in Scotland, where it’s relatively remote. A lot of the thinking on the council has always been skewed toward the English experience, which is very particular to England. Yet places like Australia and the States are thought leaders in new ways of working, new ways of organizing, new ways of motivating people. We are meant to be an international organization, and we have to start acting like it, and I think I’m well-placed to be that voice.”
Stoecklin’s work experience with website and digital projects drives her interest in improving the online experience for those interested in ringing.
“Ideally, I want somebody from Chicago, or Ambleside, or York to be able to explore what bell ringing is about in a nice, friendly, accessible way online, and maybe click on a button to find out where they can go see some bell ringing or maybe have a sample lesson—and that experience is the same for every person who tries to do that. That spills on, then, for our already established ringers, if we can give them a similar experience where if they want to visit another part of the country or something, it’s very easy for them to make contact. It’s about making communication better.”
Forty years ago, sitting in that change-ringing lecture with Jeff Smith, Stoecklin could never have imagined how thoroughly bell ringing would shape the course of her life.
“Running an organization like this is a great opportunity to meet a whole different group of ringers than the people I normally see,” she said. “It’s far removed from how I imagined my life as a ringer, doing a lot of bell ringing and not really thinking about the rest of it that much. This is different; this is work in a way, and it’s been very satisfying so far. I see myself as a facilitator, I have a very collaborative leadership style, and I have a great team backing me up.
“I’ve been so lucky to have really, really supportive groups of ringers around me, who support me and challenge me to do things I would never have imagined I could have done, and this is one of them.”
