o9 July 2015
Fading Icons – Stop the Clocks
by J R Thomas
“Stop all the clocks” said W H Auden in his much-quoted elegy. That advice seems to have been taken very much to heart in the modern municipal centres of the UK. At one time, within reasonably recent living memory, there was barely a street in any decent city centre – and even in market towns with an urge to a certain civic standing – where it was not possible to glance around and accurately know the time via a public clock. It was of course pretty much guaranteed that nearly every church would have a clock, often with several faces to serve every part of the locality, but any decent public building would also have a magnificent timepiece. It seemed de rigeur that on every town hall there should jut some magnificently grand Victorian or Edwardian timepiece, often with junior versions on libraries, museums and concert halls. And all kept properly to time, wound weekly and serviced properly so that no confusion should ever arise in the minds of citizens as to whether it was 11.32 or 11.34.
It was not just civic clocks that regulated the steady heartbeat of urban life. Many commercial premises were proud possessors of a public clock, bracketed over the street and double-faced. There can have been few jewellers who did not draw attention to their wares by having a clock outside the premises, but pawnbrokers also seemed to like to make a public display of time – maybe to reassure those about to pop their watches that they would still be able to tell the looming hour without that comforting weight in fob pocket or on the wrist. And of course the railway companies, whose whole existence was founded on complex manoeuvres happening precisely when they were supposed to, had clocks everywhere for the passengers, for the staff and for the station-master to check his watch against as he waved off the 2.31 to town. Time was crucial to any railwayman. Get it wrong and, so tight were the schedules in main stations, things would stay wrong until the end of the day.
The deep reasons for this constant urge to help the public with their timeliness would probably be worthy of a learned dissertation in themselves. Free advertising for many of the commercial premises, of course, coupled with a sense of worthiness and weighty resource (as the mahogany lined banking halls and elaborate stonework of many bank premises attested to their strength and stability). But one suspects that the true reason lay much deeper in the Victorian psyche; a sense of the seriousness of life, that punctuality was a virtue to be highly prized, that time was valuable and not to be wasted.
If that was so then, it now says much about our modern times. Public clocks are ticking their last in many places. Many of them have gone altogether, of course. When those splendid Victorian buildings, built to last a thousand years, felt the blast of gelignite and the metronomic swing of the wrecking ball, down came the clock with the building – literally so in many sad cases. And not many developers were going to pay for a new one. The idea of Richard Rogers or Norman Foster designing a clock suitable to fit their great curves of glass curtain walling or with its insides proudly displayed is appealing, but it is an opportunity for timeless immortality which their architectural lordships seem to have overlooked.
Even where public clocks survive, they have an alarming habit of saying midnight (if you have that melodramatic frame of mind) or midday (if you are thinking more about lunch), no matter what the true time. The Royal Exchange in the City of London has two clocks, one either side of the great façade that stares past the Bank of England to the Mansion House but neither will tell you the time anymore – though at least they have both been stopped at the same moment and hour. Take a few steps to the right and look up Lombard Street to where the Government Broker used to check the time during his top hat clad rounds by a glance at the gracious Georgian clock on the church of St Mary Woolnoth. He doesn’t exist any more, replaced by electronic transfers. The clock does, but it too has stopped. In the modern City surely, if electronics can replace the Government Broker, electronics could also power the St Mary Woolnoth clock?
Things are even worse in Swansea, a proud Welsh city founded on Victorian coal and steel wealth. Swansea has eight public clocks in the city centre. Unfortunately, they all came to a stop in March this year. The city clock winder, David Mitchell, who had done the job for 30 years and deferred his retirement twice as the council was not able to find anybody to replace him, became the striker in a row between the city council and the owners of the buildings on which the clocks sit. For over a hundred years the city council has taken responsibility for maintaining time in Swansea – or at least the clocks that tell the time – but the cuts have even affected horology and the council wished to give up this responsibility. As did Mr Mitchell, who at the age of 72 was beginning to find the constant stair climbing more than a little onerous. The building owners refused to take back their clocks so Mr Mitchell took control of time personally. He stopped all the clocks at midnight – or midday – and left them like that. Since then a few building owners have been public spirited enough to make their own arrangements, but some clocks remain stopped and the rest are not always in total agreement as to what the true time is.
Health and safety has also been stopping clocks. At Llandovery in Carmarthenshire five generations of the Rees family have been proud to wind the town clock in its tower. Not any more. David Rees, the current clock winder, has been told he is not to climb the tower any more as it does not comply with health and safety standards for ladders and for hand rails (there are none), and accidents might result, although there have been none in the 150 years the Rees’s have been winding the clock. So now the good people of Llandovery must rely on consulting their watches or mobile phones and one must hope none of them fall down manholes or slip on pavement edges whilst so engaged.
Even on railway stations (train stations if you must) clocks are increasingly difficult to espy. No longer the great black and white face and ponderous clunky movement of the minute hand as it moves steadily to departure time. Now the clock will be hidden in one corner of the departures board, an insignificant little electronic blob, usually lit in green. The cynic might think, now that railway punctuality is not what it was and that the railway companies are subject to fines and penalties for late running trains, that the last thing they want to do is to draw anybody’s attention to the time. Though maybe if the time was more visible they might feel a greater urge to run according to it.
Now that we all have wrist watches and mobile phones, and even Ipods and Ipads that are tuned to the millisecond of Greenwich Mean Time, perhaps we don’t need public clocks. But one can’t help feeling that there is a proper sense of dignity and urgency and seriousness imparted by a great public clock. It unites us in a common thread of life, gives us a place to meet beneath and hastens our feet as we rush to appointments or assignations. It is a bit of technology we can all understand (even if in reality powered by an electric motor), one of those traditions that unite us, a regulator of our time upon the planet. Let us hope that time is not up for civic clocks.
