The Ministry of Defence has asked that church bells throughout the UK should ring out together at 5pm on July 10 the national day of commemoration for the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II.

The ringers at Kingston Parish church will contribute a quarter peal, starting at 5pm and followed by general ringing in the run-up to Evensong at 6.30pm.

This great national outpouring of peals will be especially significant, as all church bells were silenced by the Government in 1940.

It wanted a means of alerting the country to any immediate threat of enemy invasion, and decided the best signal would be the nation's church bells.

Thus future ringing was only to be done on the orders of the police or the military.

The next time Kingston's bells were rung was November 15, 1942 to celebrate the victory at El Alamein. By then the threat of invasion had receded, and the ban was lifted for Easter 1943.