The Little Welsh Girls

I thought it might be fun to compare the new bell with the other similar bell I had stored away, so I ventured into the attic and hunted through shelves and boxes for almost 20 minutes and finally found her meditating among the Tibetan prayer bells (which was amusing, given that Jenny Jones' claim to fame was her adventurous long walk to buy a bible). With my first Welsh girl bell clutched tightly in my hand, I clambered down the ladder and placed the two bells side-by-side on the table. I quickly decided they were identical. In fact, they were so similar they looked to me as though they were made by the same company from the same mold.

To confirm my conclusion, I turned them this way and that, counted the folds in the skirt and the bodice, looked at the lines in the basket and the fingers, measured the size and shape of the skirt bottoms against one another, and felt rather smug about having acquired two copies of the same bell from different parts of the world. The very slight differences between them seemed to be due to wear (and the effects of the light) rather than to any differences they might have had when originally manufactured.
Then I turned them upside-down and peeked at their clappers and had to admit that I was wrong about them being the same bell. They had different clappers and neither clapper seemed to be a replacement.
Well, I thought, A company can change clappers, perhaps to make it easier to attach or to cut down costs, that doesn't mean the rest of the bell isn't from the same mould.

Having satisfied my curiosity, I was about to put the bells away and then decided to take one more look at the clappers because clappers, like people, are rather interesting. There are so many different shapes and sizes of clappers, so many different kinds of chains that can be used to hang them, and a multitude of ways in which they can be fixed to a bell. In this case, one bell had an eyelet screw and a flat round brass clapper, the other had what looked like a copper knob securing a flat eyelet from which hung a fat, round, lead clapper.

Peeking Under the Covers
I have been learning from stories on the Web that a clapper can help you tell the age of a bell, so I got curious about the age of my two lady bells. Were they old? Were they made by the same company at different times?
It was then I noticed there was a significant difference between them--one was much thicker than the other! After getting over my embarrassment of not having noticed this right away, I ran and grabbed a postal scale and discovered that my first lady bell weighed just under 2 ounces and the new one weighed 2.25 oz. For such small bells, this was a significant difference and seemed more than what could be accounted for by the clappers alone. Then I peeled a magnet off the fridge and tested the metal to see if any parts of the bells would attract a magnet, thinking that perhaps the two bells were made out of different materials. The clappers and the bells were not attracted to the magnet, so I concluded that they were probably made of solid materials or brass overlaid over something nonmagnetic. I suspect both bells are solid brass and are fairly old, based upon their construction and style. Both seem to have slight traces of gilt or some other bright gold coloring that has worn off the brass. They both say MADE IN ENGLAND around the clapper attachment in the same size and font, so it appears they may be from the same source.

More Questions than Answers
So now I had a mystery and I can't resist mysteries. Were these two different models of the same bell produced by the same company? Or was one an original and the other a clever reproduction? Or were they both reproductions of yet another bell? And were they indeed depictions of Jenny Jones or just a generalized depiction of a Welsh woman in traditional costume?
While I was pondering all these questions, I was feeling chastened about my original hasty conclusion about the bells being identical, and decided to look at the bells again even more closely. It was only then that I noticed the differences in the faces. One had a very nice, smoothly detailed face while the other was lacking in details but was fashioned so cleverly, it almost wasn't noticeable (with a macro lens and the 2x zoomed Photoshop image shown here, you can readily see the differences, but these bells are small--with the unaided eye, you have to look very closely to see the facial features).

This is an excerpt from Mya's bell journal, which dates back to the early 1990s. Other excerpts with photos will be posted here from time-to-time.