On 28 April 1885, 17-year-old Thomas Phillips visited the church to watch his friend John Green tolling the church bell for a death. After admiring the sound of the bell from below, Thomas Phillips announced that he was going to climb the tower to get a better view of the church's famous one-ton bell in motion.

A few minutes later the bell stopped ringing, and, to his surprise, John Green found that no amount of tugging on the bell rope would induce it to make a sound. Green claimed that he sensed something was badly wrong up in the tower, so rather than going directly up to investigate, he instead ran to fetch his uncle and brother.

The trio ascended the tower and discovered a horrifying scene in the belfry. Thomas Phillips was lying below the huge bell, his body pinned to the floor boards, the weight of the bell's mighty clapper resting on his stomach. It took the strength of six men to move the bell so that Phillips's body could be pulled free.

Thomas Phillips was alive and able to speak at this point. He told Green that he had 'slipped' and that he thought that his arms and also his legs were broken.

Thomas Phillips was a pupil of Mr G.H. Hall of Rectory Farm at the time of the accident, and it was to Rectory Farm that Phillips was taken. A surgeon, Mr Richard Laycock Routh of Sibford, was summoned to tend to Phillips injuries, and found that while his arms and legs were not broken, one of the vertebrae in his back was, rendering Phillips completely paralysed. He had also lost a lot of blood from wounds to his head.

Phillips died from his injuries at around 10pm that night.

Exactly how Phillips had come to 'slip' in such a way as to find himself struck by the bell and wedged under the bell's clapper was subject of much debate. An article in the Bicester Herald on 8 May 1885 speculated that:

Thomas Phillips's funeral took place in his hometown of Bicester on 2 May 1885, and his grave can be found in Bicester cemetery close to the churchyard gate.