By Clare Wainwright · Ludham, Norfolk

“The low notes I can still hear. It’s the top I’ve lost, and the top is where a chime tells the truth.” — Why a 76-year-old Norfolk plumber and church bell ringer is selling his last hand-tuned copper wind chimes at cost, before his ears give out for good.

Arthur Kett at his shed at the bottom of the garden, a few steps from Womack Water.

Arthur Kett holds a copper tube up on a piece of string. He taps it once with a little wooden mallet and tilts his head. From the rose bed by the fence, his wife Pam calls out: “That one’s flat, Arthur.” He smiles and puts the tube down. He didn’t hear a thing.

Arthur is 76. He lives in Ludham, a village of brick cottages and reed beds in the Norfolk Broads. For forty-eight years he was the village plumber. For sixty-four years he has rung the bells at St Catherine’s church.

“Copper all day, bell rope all evening,” he says. “Sixty-four years of it. You’d think I’d be sick of the sound of metal by now. I’m not.”

The Bell His Grandad Put in His Hands

The ringing chamber at St Catherine’s. Arthur has rung here every Sunday since 1962.

In 1962, Arthur’s grandad George took him up the church tower for the first time. Arthur was twelve. St Catherine’s has five bells. Two of them were cast in 1619. The biggest, the tenor, rings in E.

George put the boy’s hands on the tenor rope. “That bell’s been in E for longer than anyone can remember,” he told him. “Learn what it sounds like, and you’ll never be out of tune in your life.”

Arthur learned. In 1988 he became tower captain, just like his grandad before him. He still rings every Sunday morning, and every Monday at practice night.

Forty-Eight Years of Copper Pipe

The pipe cutter on the bench is the one Arthur started his apprenticeship with in 1966.

Arthur left school at sixteen and went to work for the old village plumber. In Britain, houses are plumbed in copper. So for forty-eight years Arthur cut it, bent it and soldered it. Hot water tanks, boilers, the pipes in half the cottages between Ludham and Potter Heigham.

When he retired in 2014, he missed the copper. So he started making wind chimes in the tarred wooden shed at the bottom of his garden. Behind it runs Womack Water, the little creek that links Ludham to the River Thurne. Each chime takes him about four hours. In eleven years he has made more than 1,100.

“Hear that?” he says, tapping a fresh tube. “That one’s a bell. The last one was a biscuit tin.”

The Animals Came to the Window

Barn owl, dragonfly, butterfly, ladybird and angel. Each one came from somewhere close to home.

Arthur never planned to put animals on his chimes. He just looked out of the shed window. The barn owl came first. Every evening it hunts low over the marsh behind the shed, white as a sheet and silent. The dragonfly is the green-eyed Norfolk hawker that patrols the ditches in June. The butterfly is the swallowtail, which in Britain lives only here in the Broads. Pam grows its favourite plant by the back door.

The ladybird was for his granddaughter Poppy, who used to count them on Pam’s roses. The angel was made for the church in 2021, when the bells were finally allowed to ring again after lockdown. It still hangs by the churchyard gate.

What Sixty-Four Years of Bells Taught Him About a Wind Chime

Every tube is checked against a tuning fork in E before it goes on a chime.

Arthur’s chimes look simple. Four copper tubes, a copper cap with a small animal on top, a striker in the middle. But he built every part around one idea: a chime should sound as if it had been hanging next to the bells.

• “The Tenor-E Chord.” The four tubes make one chord that sits with the old tenor bell of St Catherine’s. When the wind moves them, you hear notes that belong together, not a clatter.
• “The Plumber’s Copper.” Arthur uses the same metal he put into Norfolk homes for forty-eight years. Copper is heavier and softer than aluminium, so the sound is warm and round. “Like a church bell across the fields,” he says, “not a bicycle bell.”
• “The Broadland Patina.” There is no paint to peel. Out in the rain the copper slowly darkens to a soft brown, like the old copper tanks Arthur pulled out of lofts for half a century.
• “The Practice-Night Test.” Before a chime is packed, it hangs in the window of the ringing chamber on a Monday night while the band practises. If any of the ringers says it sounds off, it goes back on the bench.

Turn Your Sound Up — This Is What a Chime Tuned to a Church Bell Sounds Like

No clatter, no rattle. Just four notes that belong together, carried on the wind. “That’s the tenor,” Arthur says. “Or near enough.”

The Ringers Who Listen for Him Now

Monday practice night. Every chime hangs here before it leaves Ludham.

The practice-night test started as a bit of fun. Arthur would hang a new chime in the tower window and ask the others what they thought. Now it is the most important part of his work.

“They’ve all got better ears than me these days,” he says. “Old Jim, young Sophie, the lot of them. If they nod, it goes in the box. If they pull a face, I start again.”

The Sound He Can No Longer Hear

Arthur has worn a hearing aid since 2023. It helps with conversation. It does not help with tuning.

Every morning for eleven years, Arthur has walked down the garden to the shed with Pip, his old Jack Russell, at his heels. He puts the kettle on, opens the window to the water and taps the first tube of the day. That quiet first note is the part he will miss most.

Sixty-four years of church bells have worn down his hearing. The low notes are still there. But the high ring at the top of a note is gone. And that is exactly where you hear if a tube is right.

Last spring he filed one tube three times. Pam called from the garden that it sounded like a bicycle bell. Arthur had not heard any difference at all.

“My hands are still good,” he says. “It’s my ears that have finished with me. I can’t hear honest anymore.”

So the chimes hanging on the line in his shed are the last. There will be no second batch.

He Just Wants Them Hanging Where the Wind Can Ring Them

Where Arthur hopes his chimes end up: by a back door, heard every evening.

People in the village often tell Arthur he should charge more. He just shakes his head. “I’ve had a good life out of copper,” he says. “I don’t need to make money on the last few.”

So he sells his last chimes for the cost of the copper and the postage.

What he wants is simple. He hopes each one ends up in a garden somewhere between Cornwall and the Highlands, by a back door where someone sits out with a cup of tea in the evening. “A chime in a drawer is a waste of good copper,” he says. “Put it where the wind can get at it. Let the wind do what I can’t anymore.”

Arthur still uses an old button phone. His granddaughter Hannah, a nurse in Norwich, set up the online shop after she posted a short video of her own chime in the village Facebook group and woke up to forty-eight messages. Arthur still writes a card by hand for every order and stamps “A.K. LUDHAM” into each copper hanging ring.

“It Sounds Like the Church Bells Across the Fields” — What People Say About Arthur’s Chimes

Sent in by a reader in Shropshire: “Hung it in the apple tree. Now we eat outside just to hear it.”

• ★★★★★

  “My old chime from the garden centre went straight in the bin. This one is soft and deep. Even my husband, who hates wind chimes, says it’s lovely.”

  Jean M., Ludlow
• ★★★★★

  “Heavier than I expected, and after a wet month the copper has already gone a lovely warm brown. It looks like it has always hung there.”

  Derek P., Whitby
• ★★★★★

  “Bought the barn owl for my mum’s eightieth. There was a handwritten card from Arthur in the box. Mum read it twice and had a little cry.”

  Sarah L., Harrogate

Before You Order — What People Ask Arthur Most

More From the Gardens They Landed In

• ★★★★★

  “I’ve had cheap chimes for years. This is the first one that actually sounds like music.”

  Malcolm R., Exeter
• ★★★★★

  “The dragonfly is beautifully made. You can tell a real person tuned it, not a machine.”

  Ann T., Lincoln
• ★★★★★

  “It came through a proper winter gale without a scratch. Still ringing beautifully.”

  Iain C., Inverness