English firm of bell founders. It pioneered the extension of the range of the carillon with both higher- and lower-pitched bells. Between World Wars I and II its exports of carillons, with those of John Taylor & Co., made the carillon widely known outside Europe for the first time.
The firm was founded by a clockmaker, William Gillett, who had a shop first in the village of Hadlow, Kent, then in Clerkenwell, London, in the early 19th century. In 1844 it moved to Croydon, Surrey, where it began manufacturing tower clocks under the name Gillett & Bland. In 1877 Gillett formed a partnership with Arthur Johnston (d 1916). Under the name of Gillet & Johnston the firm cast chimes and swinging peals. In the late 1890s the firm, following principles developed by Canon A.B. Simpson through his research on bell partials, devised a method of casting bells better in tune with themselves and with others in a set (see Bell (i), §2). Cyril Frederick Johnston (1884–1950) succeeded his father in 1916 and continued his work on bell tuning. In 1918 he began to make small carillons; these instruments provided the basis for the development of the first four and a half octave carillon (53 bells), for Park Avenue Baptist Church, New York (1925). Johnston’s casting of bells (the largest, an e, weighed 9.98 tonnes) and the mechanism he devised to play them earned him a reputation as an excellent designer and engineer. The lower bells, however, developed an unwanted partial, a ‘wild’ fourth, which was never completely eradicated. Other important ‘grand’ carillons built by the firm include those for the University of Chicago (72 bells; 1932), the Parliament Buildings, Ottawa (53 bells; 1927), and the Catholic University of Leuven (48 bells; 1928). The firm’s interest in carillons waned after the death of C.F. Johnston.
A.B. Simpson: ‘On Bell Tones’, Pall Mall Magazine, vii (1895), 183–94; x (1896), 150–55; partially reprinted in Bulletin of the Guild of Carillonneurs in North America, xxxii (1983), 9–18
P. Price: The Carillon (London, 1933)
A.L. Bigelow: The Acoustically Balanced Carillon (Princeton, NJ, 1961)
T.D. Rossing, ed.: Acoustics of Bells (New York, 1984)
K. and L. Keldermans: Carillon: the Evolution of a Concert Instrument in North America (Springfield, IL, 1996)
PERCIVAL PRICE/KAREL KELDERMANS