MIDWAY through my talk to Girsby WI this week, my head began ringing with the realisation that history really does go round and round, but then I began to wonder if I had dropped a clanger.

My talk was about 150 years of Darlington’s Covered Market, including its iconic clocktower – the very same clocktower that only a week ago was at the centre of a front page controversy over the silencing of its bells. Apparently, guests in the only town centre hotel had complained about being binged and bonged awake during the night so the council had spent £6,000 replacing the bells with a tape machine that could be turned off.

“A right old ding-dong,” said The Northern Echo’s headline.

Bells have been ringing in the town centre for centuries. The earliest reference I can find is to 1533 when St Cuthbert’s Church had “four bells in the steeple...and a lyttyll bell that the clock smyteth”.

I also noticed that in 1843, organ-builder George Hoggett rigged up the church bells so that they played, in rotation, God Save the Queen, Britons Strike Home, Life Let Us Cherish, and See the Conquering Hero Comes. This hourly performance must have deeply irritated the hundreds of people living below the steeple, but at least there was some variety in the repertoire – on a Sunday, Mr Hoggett’s contraption automatically rang out the tune to the 4th Psalm all day long.

The town clock, as my talk tries to show, was controversial when it was proposed in the early 1860s because none of the townspeople wanted it – they nicknamed it “Dracula’s Castle” because they thought it was so gothically horrible. I reckon that because of the controversy, Joseph Pease – its principal proposer – felt obliged to personally cough up the £1,000 for its construction – “what a sum to pay for an encumbrance”, said his best friend.

On July 23, 1864, the Darlington Telegraph reported: “Two of the five bells, which are for the future to warn the inhabitants of Darlington of the flight of time, were hoisted into the tower, and about half-past four on Thursday afternoon, the soundness and quality of the metal was tested, the sonorous sounds quite startling the residents in the peaceful locality of the hall.”

The flight of time was so rapid that it was 151 years – almost to the day – before history came full circle and the sonorous sounds were silenced.

My sole contribution to the story about their silencing was to write a headline suggesting that “the council had dropped a clanger”. I imagined the clanger to be the clangy thing in the middle of a bell that does all the clanging – someone with a handbell, I thought, would drop a clanger by allowing the clanger to drop in the wrong place during a performance.

Wrong. The word “clanger”, as in to drop a social faux pas, is slang that only came into use after the Second World War.

The clangy thing in the middle of a bell is either its tongue or, since 1379, a “clapper” – a clap being “a hard, explosive noise”. Hence, when bells are furiously rung in full peal, they are “going at it like the clappers”.

So I dropped a clanger with a headline that was claptrap.