Some Odd Poems

Charitable Reader,

For the last few days I have been happily on holiday and also unhappily ill; now allow me to rhyme a little instead:

Night, London, September

The spendthrift stars, so rich in gold,
Were distant skies and dawns untold
And night’s new easel, plain and bare,
Was fresh with unadventured air.

The treetops spoke unlikely tales
That rolled the hillsides out of Wales,
To breath beneath those clotted suns
A story fit for greenwood lungs.

Stretching back their ancient limbs
Their figures played beguiling hymns
While high the eaves of mem’ry raised
And, backwards facing, lonely gazed:

They told of Harry Monmouth’s cause
When heaven’s anvils rang with wars,
And sang a tune of King Charles’ town
Before the rebels tore him down.

They spoke in knitted oak-green tongue
Of when Paul’s new built steeples rung,
And in the bloody height of doom
When it stood bright against the gloom.

They dreamt and whispered every tale
That they had glimpsed in life’s long trail,
Of daring men and noble lords,
Of senators, and flames, and swords.

And I sat out all dreaming too
To sleep an age long over due
Beneath my quarry cleared of light;
The empty and embracing night.

The Final Hour

All of heaven with his fiery garb descended:
I knew him not but saw him plain.
He sank his heart and, sure, his day was ended
So was the happy hour, when things could start again.

It was the proper hour, when time had done his duty,
With quiet glances of the sea-wet dawn,
When things to do had passed, and day had shed his beauty
And sin had had his way with me, and left the night forlorn.

Now slow I pace through ever conquered ages
With flaming forks and terror in between;
It’s little joy for six short feet of wages
And foolish things that once had been.

Adieu, Happy Reader.

A Biography of Richard Savage

Terrific Reader,

I blogged about my new old clock the other day, and now time for a quick biography that I have put together of its creator!

Richard Savage was, by all the records we have, apparently the earliest domestic clockmaker in Shropshire. He was born on the 2^nd August 1663 in Much Wenlock to William Savage, a tobacco pipe maker, and his wife Joan. The family was large – his parents had some dozen children between them – and for whatever reason Richard decided that his career should be one of clock-making. Perhaps his decision not to follow a similar path to his father was due to his father falling into debt regularly (a William Savage is constantly apparent in the Shropshire records as being called upon for debt during the interregnum – although there is nothing to say this is the same William Savage as Richard’s father).

How he learnt the trade of clockmaking is obscure, no records remain of an apprenticeship, but since no trace remains of any earlier clockmaker in the area it is likely he moved away for some years to learn the trade in the early 1680s. He must have finished this apprenticeship by 1686, when he married Elizabeth Price of Bridgenorth. It possible, though I conjecture this purely through my own happy speculation, that they met while Savage was an apprentice, since Myddleton records in his Chirk Castle Accounts that there was one Rowley living in Bridgenorth at least in 1686, a watchmaker from whom Savage could have learnt his trade. Another possibility for his apprenticeship is one Thomas Millington, a local man who worked in Shrewsbury and is recorded as a ‘Clock Mender’ as early as 1679 – Robert Weaver and John Walker were also apparently knowledgeable men who worked on repairing the town clock during this decade.

The earliest established date one of Savage’s clocks (something he rigorously engraved on his work) is 1692, when we know for sure that had returned to Much Wenlock and started up his clockmaking workshop. His early clocks are charming and very traditional, engraved with his name, the year, and commonly the name of the owner who commissioned it or who it was a gift for (several of his clocks appear to have been wedding gifts and are engraved as such).

His property in Much Wenlock seems to have been called Bridgcroft, recorded thankfully in a court record where one Elizabeth Knocke stole some plants from his garden; sadly no remnant of the place survives to our present time. It was here that on 15th September 1687 his son William was born, another son, Thomas, was born on 17th August 1690, and one Richard on an unrecorded date – there may have been further children of whom we have sadly no record.

The clock trade was clearly a successful one for Savage, and by the close of the 17^th century he had moved to the county town of Shrewsbury, where his 13 year old son William was apprenticed to him in 1700. Thomas would follow this trend in 1703 aged 13, and apparently at some point the more obscure third son, Richard.

At the start of 1700 Richard may worked on Shrewsbury’s town clock, when record is made in 8^th February 1700 of a payment of ‘7s 6d’ for fitting the town ‘engine’. The use of engine keeps the exact device unclear, so may have been related to some other mechanical piece within the town, but there certainly would have been a clock present that would need to be regularly maintained, since we have record of it as early as 1637. It may be that the town engine was not the same as the clock, however, since the Mayor’s accounts from the 1679 contain both the maintenance of the town clock and the town engine as separate articles.

Richard’s wife died on 7th March 1722, and after a few years, in 1726 he remarried one Margaret Jones – the commonality of whose name in those parts making her unhappily difficult to further research. This marriage lasted only two years, and this famous clockmaker of Shropshire died in 1728, probably being buried in Shrewsbury.

Adieu, dear Reader!

An Old Clock from Shropshire

Despotic Reader,

As I have happily been regaling my unhappy friends with recently, I bought a clock.

I’m not entirely sure how I ended up buying a clock, but I was searching for some old book or other online and somehow a clock appeared, and it looked amazing.

Oh look, (a bit of) a clock

This majestic thing is the remains of a Lantern clock, a type of wall-hung clock popular in Europe from the early 17th century through to the early 18th. All I have here is the frame, formed of four pillars and the base and top plate, and the face. The winding hole in the front is later, and appears to be one of the remnants of it being converted to a mantle clock probably in the 19th century.

Restoring it is a project for the winter.

But who made this clock? Well, I’ve been doing some investigating.

The top of the dial should have contained the answer – this is where clockmakers of the period would often engrave their names and the date – but it had clearly been the pride of some long-lost owner, who had polished away all but the date, Jan: 1693, and what appeared to be a double t at the right hand side of the inscription.

I immediately searched for all clockmakers of that date whose names ended in double t, there were several including a Stephen Wilmott who had lived and worked in London. There wasn’t much to go on, and I gave up for a while.

It wasn’t until very recently, when I was researching whether a brass or iron bell was more appropriate for the clock, that I came across an auction catalogue from 2015, in it was described a curious lantern clock of similar date to mine. This clock was described as having cast iron plates at the top and bottom of the frame, the same as mine, and apparently this was a very curious thing – the usual metal being brass.

One name was associated with this particular practice – Richard Savage. I immediately started researching his clocks and, amazingly, his engraving style matched that of mine perfectly – I had my clockmaker. One particular dial even had the same double t at the end of the engraving; it is in fact a tt at the end of a mispelled Latin word fecit. This would have accompanied the clockmaker’s name to proudly immortalise his making of it.

A close up of my clock’s dial

A close up of a very similar dial on another clock made by Savage a year earlier than mine

Savage is known for his charming style, and one small detail that I love about mine that does not exist on the other clocks that I have seen is the small faces engraved under the chapter ring at the bottom of the clock – Savage was known to create clocks commonly as commissions for gifts; could mine be celebrating the birth of a child? Or the quick cartoons of a newly wed couple?

Or they could just be cherubs, a pretty popular thing in the late 1600s.

I’ll be posting a short biography of Savage soon.

Adieu, happy Reader!