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Bill Butler was the driving force behind the Prolific Peal Ringers project. He was himself a prolific peal ringer who rang 3540 peals between his first in 1947 and his last in 2018. He was also a keen ringing historian and author so it was perhaps not surprising that these two aspects of his life came together in the Prolific Peal Ringers project, recording the lives of ringers who had rung 1000 peals or more.
He joined the Central Council Biographies Committee in 2011 and agreed to publish a series of articles about prolific peal ringers, taking them in sequence, ie starting with the first to pass a thousand – Rev F E Robinson in 1905 – and working through the others in the order of ringing their thousandth. A few of them were still alive when he was writing so he skipped over them.
By the time of his death in 2021 Bill had written 46 articles. He worked in blocks of ten, and when he reached number 60 he had completed 44, all of which were published in The Ringing World. He had begun work on the next ten and had competed numbers 61 and 66, which were not published at the time.
Bill also collected 700 photos of ringers, which he donated to the Biographies Committee.
The Prolific Peal Ringer articles are linked from the respective ringer’s page, along with other biographical information, and they can also be accessed direct from the list below. There is no article for the ringers shown in italics, who were alive when Bill was working on the project, though some have since died, in which case a purple link goes to their general page.
Well over 500 people have now rung 1000 or more peals, see the full list on PealBase
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