When I learnt Cambridge (my first surprise method), I learnt it as a line, in detail, which seemed like hard work at the time, and there were some parts of it that I found hard to remember. Now that I’ve been ringing it for a long time, and ringing quite a few more methods, I can see that there is some background information it would have been useful to know, that would have given me more understanding of what I was learning. So I’m writing it down here to help those who are about to learn it, or are in early stages of learning it.

For a piece-by-piece introduction with less general background, see Cambridge Surprise Minor Introduction by Bob Wallis.

Some of what I explain here is meant to help you think in terms of general principles, which I think are easier to remember than row-by-row detail.

The start of this is quite deep in the background to methods, and not that specific to particular methods; the text will work its way towards the specific method quite gradually.

Right-place and wrong-place methods

Unless you have been ringing Stedman, all your hunting so far will probably have been right hunting, which means that when you come down to the lead, you lead at handstroke then backstroke. It’s also possible to wrong hunt, which doesn’t mean it’s incorrect, but that when you come down to the lead, you will lead at backstroke then handstroke. You can do this as a practice exercise by starting plain hunt with the treble staying where it is for one blow, and the second hunting out and the third hunting in. There are two ways of switching between right and wrong hunting (explained below); if these don’t occur anywhere in your method, it is a right-place method. How these work is useful background for method ringing in general.

If you overlay the grid for plain hunt onto a checkerboard, you’ll see that one of the colours of squares is for bells hunting up, and the other for bells hunting down (like the Bishops’ moves in chess). When you turn round at the lead or at the back, you move one square down, instead of diagonally, and that puts you onto the right colour square for your new direction, then you set off in that direction. I’ve put a hatching pattern into the squares to align with the normal direction of movement for that square.

If, however, you move down one square vertically but don’t change direction, you’ll now be on the wrong colour for the direction you’re going.

Likewise if you change direction without going down one square vertically.

You can see in these diagrams that after these moves, the bell line is now crossing the hatching of the squares, to emphasize that it is going in the wrong direction.

In many methods, including Cambridge, all the hunting is right hunting, and you never make either of the moves that switch you between right and wrong hunting. As you now know there are some things your method’s line will never do, you don’t have to remember whether or not they will happen at any point; they simply never will. This reduces how much you have to remember, which is good. This is also part of why wrong-place methods are generally seen as harder to learn and to ring than right-place ones.

This is background information I would have found particularly useful for learning the frontwork (the start of second place Cambridge, and the end of fifth place Cambridge), where you have a sequence of places and dodges in the same two positions; although it also applies the the backwork and to the Cambridge places in the middle. This is because these rules imply that successive places (with dodges between them) must be in alternating places, not the same one. So when you’ve made seconds near the start of second place bell, then dodge, the next place you make must be a lead, not another seconds.

And likewise if you’re in a long sequence of leads, seconds, and dodges, and you’ve just made seconds, then dodge around for a bit, your next place must be a lead.

If a method were to break this rule, by having two successive places be in the same place, one of those places would have to be wrong, in the sense of backstroke then handstroke, and we know that our method never does that. Knowing this reduces the pieces of information you need to remember row by row, which again is good. For an example with more than just a dodge between successive places, see the second place bell of Bourne Surprise Minor. For an example of a method that breaks this rule, because it’s a wrong-place method, see the 4th and 6th place bells of Beverley Surprise Minor (which is likely to be the first wrong-place surprise method you learn once you’ve learnt Cambridge).

Some right-place building blocks

You can reduce the amount of information you need to describe (and hence to remember) a line by learning some building blocks, and constructing as much of it as you can from them instead of from individual rows. (You presumably already do this by remembering parts of plain bob as hunting rather than a sequence of individual positions; and likewise, treble bob as treble bob instead of as a sequence of “hunt, dodge, hunt, dodge…”.) We can use the constrained set of things you can do in right-place methods to build up a collection of blocks. These things are: hunt, change direction by making a place, dodge. (Dodging does actually put you into wrong hunting for one blow, but that seems to be seen as allowed, perhaps because you couldn’t build so much without it.)

As these blocks use more rows than positions, I’ll draw them across rather than down the page, to reduce the page height they take up.

We can make places twice in succession, changing direction each time as expected for a right-place method. The two changes of direction cancel each other out, and we end up continuing in our previous direction.

Any sequences that I describe here can be reflected in either axis — you can ring them in either direction (in fact, you usually will ring them in both directions, as most methods are palindromic) and you can also ring them either way up.

Since a dodge, being made of two points which cancel out each other’s change of direction, doesn’t change direction overall (as you will have seen from plain bob and treble bob) we can add it freely into our sequences. Here is a pair of places with a dodge between them.

We can also put a dodge at each end of a pair of places. This is called “Yorkshire Places”, as it occurs prominently in the method Yorkshire.

Because sequences like this are rung in either direction, it’s helpful to think of the places as far and near places (where far and near are relative to the direction you were going before the Yorkshire places), rather than upper and lower or 3rds and 4ths. So Yorkshire Places are “dodge, far, near, dodge“.

If, however, we only had one place between the dodges, we would have to turn round and go back. You can see this in Cornwall Surprise Major. (This would also occur for any other odd number of places between the dodges. I’m not aware of any examples, but there probably are some.) I don’t think this really has a name; in my head, I call it a turning place, because it makes you turn round.

Of course, adding another dodge to one end (or both) is also possible, and now we’re getting onto something specifically connected to ringing Cambridge:

This pattern occurs at the end of 2nd place Cambridge, the start of 5th place, and twice (but with the last part replaced by making a place) in 3rds place. In Cambridge, it occurs only at the back, and is described as two and one at the back or one and two at the back.

We can continue to build longer sequences of these; “Cambridge Places” are like two Yorkshire Places joined together by sharing a dodge:

If you were to add a single place (“turning place” as I call it) to the end of that, and another dodge, you would have to turn back to the side you came from. This occurs in place bells 2, 4, 5, and 7 of Superlative Surprise Major.

That’s not directly relevant to ringing Cambridge (although Superlative shares a lot with Cambridge) but if we cut it down to Yorkshire Places plus a single place and dodge, we get something that does occur in Cambridge, but subtly… I didn’t realise this for decades.

This is the second half of Cambridge Frontwork (the start of 2nds place bell) as seen when you run into it from a Bob. So we’ve dealt with the alternation of ringing in first and second place already, because it being a right-place method forces them to alternate; the other problem I had in learning the Cambridge frontwork was where the dodges and places come, but now I’ve realised that the part of the frontwork nearest the lead end is Yorkshire Places, that means I don’t have to remember the detail of where the places and dodges come: “Yorkshire Places, lead and dodge” is less to remember than “dodge, lead, seconds, dodge, lead, dodge”.

Seeing the general pattern

Many minor methods extend to higher numbers (usually only to even numbers; likewise, some doubles methods extend to higher odd numbers), and looking at the higher stages of a method can show patterns that you can’t see at the lowest stage. For example, Cambridge Surprise Minor has one pair of Cambridge Places, one each side of the palindromic place bell, but if you look at higher stages such as Cambridge Surprise Maximus, you’ll see that it is part of a repeating pattern, that you can’t see in Minor because there is only one instance.

Part of the line that I had difficulty remembering at first was at the front of 6th place bell: is it “lead and dodge”, or “dodge and lead”? (And likewise for its mirror image in 4ths place bell.) But when you look at Cambridge Max, you’ll see that the Cambridge Places are always attached to runs of treble bob that go all the way to the front or the back. Therefore, in the “lead / dodge” combination at the front, the dodge is always on the side nearest the Cambridge Places.

And the other side of that is also visible at higher numbers: you can see in Cambridge Max that, apart from the frontwork and the backwork, Cambridge is mostly treble bobbing, except where it’s Cambridge Places or a short run of Plain Hunt (i.e. you miss a couple of dodges). More specifically, whenever you meet the treble when it is dodging, you do so in the middle of Cambridge Places, and whenever you meet the treble when it is hunting between two dodges, you hunt past it. And when you do the latter at the frontmost possible position (as part of 6th place bell), that bit of plain hunt wraps round to include a lead. So that’s another thing that means that in 6th place bell, it is “lead and dodge” rather than “dodge and lead”.