The sites are listed in order by the year of casting (unknown first),
which may be different from the year of installation.
For a given year, they are in order by country and city.
Following the year is an indication of the founder's contribution to the instrument:
trad - carillon with traditional keyboard non-trad - carillon with non-traditional mechanism mech? - carillon with unknown mechanism chime - chime (any mechanism) chimola - chime of hemispheric bells (any mechanism) ring - bells hung for change ringing (chime-sized) great - great bell (over 4 tonnes weight) not in a chime or carillon [...] - instrument is defunct; link is to "sites that are no more"
ZANZIBAR : TANZANIA 1??? C [mech?]
Cathedral
Westminster : ENGLAND 1856 - [great]
"Big Ben" (original)
Clock Tower
Houses of Parliament
Leeds : ENGLAND 1859 - great
Town Hall
CALCUTTA (KOLKATA) - STJ : INDIA 1864 C chime
St.James Church (Jora Girja)
Bolton : ENGLAND 1872 - [great]
Town Hall
DEPTFORD : ENGLAND -SE 1872 C (chimola)
St.Luke's Parish Church
DALSTON - SMK : ENGLAND -E 1877 C chime/ring
Saint Mark's Parish Church
GRAHAMSTOWN : S AFRICA 1879 F ring
Cathedral Church of SS.Michael & George
WELLINGTON - STPE : NEW ZEALAND 188_ C chime
St.Peter's Anglican Church
MADRID - 1 : SPAIN 1882 C ring
South tower
Real Basilica de San Francisco el Grande
MADRID - 2 : SPAIN 1882 C chime
North tower
Real Basilica de San Francisco el Grande
MURRURUNDI : AUSTRALIA 1883 C chime
St.Paul's Anglican Church
CHARLESTON - G : USA - SC 1883*F ring
Columbarium tower
Grace Episcopal Church
* (cast for St.Mary Magdalene, Enfield,
Middlesex, England)
QUÉBEC - B : CANADA - QU 1885 C ring
The St.Matthew's Bell Tower
(was part of St.Matthew's Church)
BIRTLES HALL : ENGLAND -CH 1895 C chime
St.Catherine Parish Church
OLD GREENWICH - B : USA - CT 1901 C chimola
Chimes Building
Tod's Point (Greenwich Point Park)
PERTH - STG : AUSTRALIA 1902 C (ring)
Cathedral Church of St.George
FREDERICTON - CCC : CANADA - NB 1911 C chime
Christ Church Cathedral
WINNIPEG - K : CANADA - MB 1912 C chime
Knox United Church
(formerly Knox Presbyterian Church)
SAINT JOHN - T : CANADA - NB 1914 E chime
Trinity Anglican Church
TORONTO - TE : CANADA - ON 1914 C chime
Timothy Eaton Memorial United Church
STAVANGER : NORWAY 1922 F trad
Domkirke (Cathedral)
The firm of John Warner & Sons was begun in 1739. Under continuous ownership by the same family for more than two centuries, they manufactured a wide variety of products before finally closing in 1949. It's uncertain whether the firm might have operated under other names for some periods of their history.
Warner began making bells in 1788, and continued to do so (with a hiatus between 1816 and 1850) until 1924. Their total production of bells is unknown, but there are approximately 2550 surviving Warner bells that are hung primarily for change ringing, carrying dates from 1788 to 1921. That count does not include most of the bells referenced from the index listing above, nor a goodly number of clock bells, some of which bear the clock-maker's name rather than the Warner name. It also does not count a number of chimes and clock-chimes made of hemispherical bells, nor a few installations of tubular bells.
The Warner foundry (or foundries) operated at various locations in London from before 1782 until about 1924. These locations included Cheapside, Cripplegate (#2 Jewin Crescent, commonly known as the Crescent Foundry), Spitalfields (Spelman Street) and Fleet Street. Warner kept the Jewin Crescent address as their registered office after the Spitalfields location was developed in the 1870s. Other Warner foundries or works were located at Tendring, Essex and at Stockton-on-Tees, where the original Big Ben was cast.
Both the Cripplegate site and the Spitalfields site were badly damaged in WW II, and the land was cleared thereafter. All of Warners' bellfoundry records were also destroyed in that war, so details of their work must be recompiled from secondary sources.
Warners' telegraphic address was "Big Ben, London', and that was in their catalogue for 1900 in spite of the fact that their original casting of that great bell had been long gone (see list above).
Links:
As of Nov.2007, very little information about Warners is availabe on the Web,
though there are numerous mentions of Warner bells in the descriptions of various rings.
Return to Indexes to bellfoundries.
This index page was built from the database on 12-Nov-01 and last updated on 19-Dec-09.
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