Have bell, will travel

This week Chester is hosting the 2026 World Town Crier Tournament. I’m familiar with the city because, six years ago, my mother moved to Chester to be close to my sister who has lived there for over 20 years.

According to Visit Cheshire, the week-long event includes three dedicated competition days that will feature ‘25 town criers from across 8 nations: England, the Channel Islands, Australia, Canada, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands and the USA’.

Interestingly (for me at least), the tournament is being hosted by David Mitchell, the city’s very own town crier who I interviewed in 1995 when he was deputy town crier and I was editing the monthly Mensa Magazine. Three years later he became town crier and since then he and his wife have shared the role, which must be a fairly unique partnership.

You can read the interview below. If you’re interested you’ll find several articles about the World Town Crier Tournament online including this report on the BBC website.

See also: The surprising revival of the great British town crier (Telegraph)

Above: David Mitchell. Credit: Nick Jones / Heritage Chester

HAVE BELL, WILL TRAVEL

Looking like a cross between Napoleon and the Prince of Wales (Hugh Laurie) in Blackadder III, a wig and tricorn perched precariously upon his prematurely bald head, Dave Mitchell welcomes me into his home in Hoole, a sleepy suburb of Chester.

 The location is relevant because Mitchell just happens to be deputy town crier for the City of Chester, a position so prestigious he’s prepared to do it for absolutely nothing. A similar arrangement exists with nearby Frodsham where he’s the number one and only crier but, fortunately for his bank balance, he is quietly (?) making a reputation for himself as the purveyor of wedding day awakenings (but more about that later).

A former teacher – he quit three years ago to concentrate on becoming the world’s only professional calligrapher/crier – Dave Mitchell’s first experience of rude awakenings was in 1989. Unfortunately, having arranged for the-then town crier to wake Julie, his bride-to-be, on the morning of his own wedding, there was a mix up and the professional crier had to cancel.

Refusing to be beaten, Mitchell decided to do the job himself. Alerting neighbours not to call the police, he borrowed the town crier’s garb and bell, serenaded the bride in a manner that was to become his own (he claims to have invented bridal awakenings), and the rest is, well, history (prompted, it has to be said, by the sudden retirement of the self-same crier in 1992).

Seeing his chance, Mitchell applied for the position. Sadly he was pipped at the post but was good enough to be appointed deputy crier, which primarily involves standing in for the number one crier when the latter is ill, double-booked, or away on business.

Doomed forever to play the role of understudy? Always the bridesmaid, never the bride? Not a bit of it. While opportunities to don the cloak of the leading man may be thin on the ground, it seems the title ‘deputy town crier’ has it own very special influence.

And Mitchell is nothing if not entrepreneurial. While neither Chester nor Frodsham pays a wage there is still a living to be earned from the spin-off activities the titles generate. Talks, tours, opening shops – you name it, Dave Mitchell will do it. Or, as he says, “Have bell, will travel”.

Above all, Mitchell has made weddings his business. Combining calligraphy (he ran a part-time calligraphy business even when he was a teacher) with shouting, Mitchell’s company offers a complete service from bridal awakenings and master of ceremonies to invitations, menus, place cards and seating plans.

The idea arose from his own wedding which, in addition to the bridal awakening, had an historical theme. “Weddings can be so boring. Because I did calligraphy we decided to do something interesting with the invitation, using pseudo-historical language. And instead of a disco we invited guests to join us in ‘joyous cavorting’ while the meal was an opportunity to ‘partake of victuals’. After that we built in other historical aspects including a horse-drawn barge which took guests from the church to the reception while a minstrel played various historic tunes.”

Although his business, which he runs with his artist wife Julie, has yet to make him a millionaire (he still works as a supply teacher in quieter months), he’s never regretted his decision to give up full-time teaching. “I enjoyed teaching but there came a point when it was time for a change. The National Curriculum depletes the energy because there are just too many demands on teachers.”

With his wife contributing her own skills to the business (“I’m no artist so Julie does the illustrations for me”) , their quality of life has improved enormously. “The variety is tremendous. The great attraction is that every situation is different so there’s an element of unpredictability. You’re always getting thrust into positions you wouldn’t normally have access to, like seeing the bride on the morning of her wedding or being invited to the opening of a new showroom.”

The adoption of the traditional late 18th century style of clothing (tricorn, wig, ruff, tights, breeches and buckled shoes) is a mystery because town crying goes back much further. No-one, however, seems to know precisely how far because the definitive history of town crying has yet to be written. “You’ll never get back to the origins of it,” says Mitchell, “because when it started it was just a way of communicating to groups of people. The modern equivalent is Anna Ford [ITV newsreader] but she doesn’t need to raise her voice because she’s broadcasting.”

Strangely for one whose living depends on having a loud, booming voice, David Mitchell is actually quite, er, quiet. Not for nothing does his wife label him the “shy town crier”. So what are the qualities that make a good town crier? “You need to be an oddball,” says Mitchell. “You’ve got to stand up in front of 200 tourists of varying nationalities dressed in clothing that’s two centuries out of date shouting your head off.

“I’m not an exhibitionist but I like to do the unusual and what better job? Doing things that are unusual can be inconvenient in a school, especially with the National Curriculum focussing on everyone doing the same thing, whereas in the job I’m doing now everyone expects you to be unusual. If you weren’t it would be a disadvantage.”

The unusual, it seems, can take many forms. Most recently he was asked to perform a wedding proposal in a restaurant in front of 100 people. No-one, other than the boyfriend, the proprietor and Mitchell himself knew what was about to happen so there was a certain amount of tension among the protagonists.

Not that it has all been plain sailing. The first year, in particular, was very difficult owing to problems with his throat. “I had this very embarrassing thing called pitch breaks which is caused by tension and working too hard at shouting.”

The solution? Two intensive lessons with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s voice department in Stratford-upon-Avon. “I didn’t know where my diaphragm was, let along how to work it. The instructor could see I was having difficulty breathing so this lady I’d only met five minutes earlier came and stood six inches in front of me and said, ‘Right, Dave, you put your hands on my intercostals and I’ll demonstrate!’”

The discovery of his diaphragm and intercostals aside, the main lesson he picked up from the RSC was never strain to speak with nearly empty lungs.

If there’s an art to shouting, calligraphy also offers a never-ending learning curve. Having mastered the basics, for example, he now wants to learn how to cut his own quills. “Apparently there’s nothing like the satisfaction of having made the tool you’re going to work with and tailoring it to your own needs.”

He believes the resurgence of calligraphy is partly due to new technology, notably desktop publishing packages that seem to convince everyone who has a Mac or a PC that they’re a born again graphic designer. The result, says Mitchell, is a return to hand-produced artefacts that say ‘This is a bit different’.

A member for less than a year, how he came to join Mensa is another example of the way Mitchell works, with one door leading to another. Contacted by the local secretary who was organising a recruitment drive and wanted the town crier to proclaim the attractions of Mensa to the citizens of Chester, he decided to take the membership test himself. The result? One new member and a further invitation to give a talk at the society’s Chester Weekend. I just hope he doesn’t shout …