THE sound of bells weaves through the British landscape as sinuously and naturally as rivers do. Morning bells, smothered by mist and birdsong; evening bells, mellow as the low light that caresses hills, cattle and trees; giddy carillons of change-ringing that mark victories, coronations and weddings, and the slow boom of majestic timekeepers and signallers of death. “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day” begins Thomas Gray’s “Elegy”, which every schoolchild once learned by heart.

Hundreds of those bells had something to do with the Whitechapel Bell Foundry, which was set up in 1570—possibly as early as 1420—specifically to make and mend them. Their bodies were recast, their clappers remodelled or their frames rebuilt by men working in the once-industrial, then desolate, now gentrified East End of London. From Whitechapel, in 2014, workmen came out to rescue the bells of St Mary Balcombe, in the wooded Weald of Sussex, and those of Holy Trinity Duncton, near the great house at Petworth. That was simply in one county; they would travel the length of the land.

The foundry itself, since 1738, was set in a complex of 17th- and 18th-century brick buildings grouped around a coaching inn called the Artichoke, just off the Whitechapel Road. The founder’s house and shop, in the same old brick, was attached to the place of work; the last founder, Alan Hughes, still lives there, as did his father, grandfather and great-grandfather. Bells were like family: individuals and their moulds, new and old, almost human with their bodies, ears, shoulders and tongues, would stand around the workshop floor in various states of readiness or undress.

The foundry’s long role in the making of bells can be hard to detect. Its “three bells” stamp was used early and revived in the 1900s, but in the 18th and 19th centuries Whitechapel bells were marked with the name of the founder, not the company. This was an old tradition anyway; medieval bells often sing out “John made me” or “Peter made me”; so the names Robertus Mot, Jos. Carter, Thos. Lester or Richard Phelps on bells are those of Whitechapel founders, immortalised on their work.

Pealing for liberty

There was nothing parochial about the business. It shipped bells to Auckland, Sydney, St Petersburg and Montreal. As early as the mid-18th century it was sending peals of bells, or great single bells, to the American colonies. If the antipodean bells stirred sentimental memories of the old country, the American bells, as if galvanised by sharper air, became symbols of freedom and revolution. The Whitechapel church-and-lookout bells of St Michael’s in Charleston, South Carolina were captured by the British in the revolutionary war and seized back again. In Philadelphia in 1776 citizens gathered to the cry of the Liberty Bell, made in Whitechapel, to hear for the first time the Declaration of Independence.

The foundry always insisted that the famously cracked bell came ashore in good order, and was damaged later by incorrect hanging. For bells, despite their solid look, are delicate. A piece one inch thick will break in a man’s palm if struck with a two-pound hammer; and it is the very brittleness of their metal that allows them to ring freely, as well as for freedom’s sake.

The foundry made other bells: musical handbells, table bells to summon servants or tea (fashionable in the wake of “Downton Abbey”), doorbells and chimes for household clocks. But four-fifths of its business was the casting or repair of big tower bells. Rather than presaging buttered scones or announcing the Amazon man with a parcel, Whitechapel’s bells were in the business of summoning souls to prayer, alerting loiterers to curfew and marking the passage of time. The heaviest bell ever made at the foundry was Big Ben, for the Houses of Parliament, in 1858; it weighed over 13 tonnes, and its moulding gauge hung ever after, like the remnant of a dinosaur, on the end wall above the furnaces. Big Ben was intended to be so exact that the whole country would set its watches by the first sonorous stroke of every quarter, and passers-by still instinctively do so.

Time itself moved glacially in the foundry, where the usual gap between order and delivery was around 11 years. The lag was so great, as the present founder, Mr Hughes, told Spitalfields Life, that the business almost ran in counterpoint to the economy. In good times, churches ordered bells; when the inevitable downturn arrived they were stuck with the contracts, on which the foundry thrived. War, too, brought compensations. In the 1950s the foundry worked day in, day out to replace bells lost to fires and enemy raids, including the “Oranges and Lemons” peal at St Clement Danes and the great bell at Bow.

By the late 20th century, however, the business was struggling. Church-building had become rare. It was hard to keep up with changing ways, despite the opening of a chime-bell music room and an online shop. The patient art of melting metal, pouring it in moulds, waiting for it to set, hammering, polishing, tuning and inscribing, had never been a craft many learned. Even Mr Hughes’s great-grandfather had feared the foundry would go under.

The buildings, being listed, will remain. But their old bricks will no longer carry the echo, heard or imagined, of the history and settlement of England—and beyond.

Correction (January 5th): A previous version of this obituary inaccurately cited the first line of Thomas Gray’s “Elegy” as “The curfew tolls the knell of passing day”. The day in fact parts. This has been updated.