The thought that bells may one day be installed in a winery building at Lenton Brae was contemplated as early as 1982 when the vineyard was first made ready for planting. Coupled with the plans for vine type disposition and row orientation came the selection of a location for the winery, machinery sheds, fuel and water tanks and so on. With that location in mind came building design and functional layout possibilities offered by building down the slope of the “little hill” which is the main topographical feature in the centre of the land.

The Scots called a little hill a brae. The noun eyebrow derives from their word ‘eyebrae’, or little hill over the eye. Several of our grandparents came out to Australia from Scotland; from Edinburgh and New Abbey near Dunfries.  Lenton is the name of the Chapel district (as opposed to the high church of England district) in Nottingham from whence the Tomlinsons emigrated to Western Australia in 1884.

As the winery design evolved, sketches showing two complementary towers looked more balanced giving the option to install bells in either tower; i.e. bells over the eventual main public entry on the north, or on the south, orientated to overlook the Wilyabrup Valley adjacent. The Valley is the place where the first Margaret River vineyards were planted but very much embryonic fashion.

Bruce asked a close family member Ernest Tomlinson to help organise a family “100th year since arrival at Fremantle” anniversary celebration. Both Ernest’s wife Bernice and Bruce’s younger brother Rodney along with over 100 descendents of the original emigrating family of husband and wife and eight children under 12 years of age, attended. Three years later both Bernice and Rod Tomlinson died suddenly.

The winery had been started in 1987 and in memory of Bernice and Rod, Bruce and Ernest decided to share the cost of having a quintet of bells founded, hoping to be run  as a pentatonic scale. Ernest knew an elderly metal worker named Bert Priest who had made Church orders for bells. Mr Priest had retired but still did odd jobs in his Welshpool machine shop. He said that founding bells able to give a pentatonic scale was only half the problem and that finding a way to strike the bells at sufficiently accurately different one from another to create a tune would be equally as difficult.

After the bells were foundered in 1989 we ‘rang’ them and believed that 3 of the 5 sounded true to scale. Ernest devised a method with solenoids connected to strike arms, power connected to striker arms, power connected to effect the ‘music’.

Finally a musician relative adjusted the time intervals between each solenoid activation so that when the bells rand each noon, a pleasant random peel was heard.

Quod erat demonstratum.

Bruce Tomlinson   21.7.07

“The bells are currently being tuned at the Department of Engineering, Acoustics at the University of Western Australia in Perth. We hope to have them back and ringing again soon.”