The Big Bong

No, this isn't an article about a Michael Phelps size smoking device. It's not even about San Francisco's famous marijuana clubs. Big Ben, the imperial size bell in the Tower of Parliament, will soon be celebrating its sesquicentennial. The Brits are justifiably proud of the bell that has tolled from the height of empire, through the Blitz, and on to our modern day. For a hundred and fifty years, Big Ben has announced "there will always be an England."

The bell officially first rang out in July of 1859, but it was put up into the rafters (if that's the right term) right around this time in June of the same year. It was not even the first bell. It was such a huge undertaking that nobody had ever cast a bell quite like it. So the first bell, like our American Liberty Bell, cracked while being tested. The first bell was tested in the foundry yard, so it never actually made it into the tower. That was in 1857, and it took another two years of calculating and reworking to get the right formula.

There are parallels with America's Liberty Bell as both became symbols of liberty and western civilization, with a certain Anglo twist. The big difference is that our Liberty Bell was preserved, crack and all, as a national treasure. England's bell rings out from a tower whose visage is known to almost everyone in the civilized world. The architecture and design correspondent for the London Observer, Stephen Bayley, says "that as silhouettes, only the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower rival Big Ben (although the Gherkin, I believe, is coming up fast)." During the darkest days of the London Blitz, the tower stood as a symbol of defiance, and could occasionally be heard in the background as Edward R. Murrow broadcast from the city under bombardment.

The story of the creation of the tower and the bell was pure English eccentrism. The architect who won the competition to design the structure, Charles Barry, hired Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin to do the metalwork, glass and surface decoration. Pugin was going slowly insane from some sort of mercury poisoning, and it was becoming unclear whether he would stay lucid long enough to finish the job. It was all part of the Westminster Palace reconstruction resulting from the London Fire, so they were charged with being traditional, but original. The result was a glorious Gothic, Greek, Tudor, Edward VI school hybrid.

As the Spectator UK hilariously describes it, "Pugin was charged with designing and decorating archivolts, squints and spandrels, lovingly detailed fleurons, spirelets, stoups and mullions, every detail of crockets and crestings, daggers and diapers, not to mention naiheads, mouchettes, escutcheons and dogteeth, all drawn in meticulous, demented detail." Pugin wrote one last insane letter taking credit for both the tower and the bell, calling himself "the whole machinery of the clock," downed a few flagons of brandy, and went off quietly to the Bedlam insane asylum. Barry, on the other hand, was knighted for his efforts.

Big Ben and the Liberty Bell will go on for many, many years to come. Given the current status of the world, let's hope England and America can do the same. Big Ben survived the Nazis. Will it be able to survive the Jihadis? The mosque currently designed to sit next to these architectural treasures would rival, and perhaps overshadow the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Palace and the Bell Tower. Londoners are beginning to show signs of open rebellion over that.