Ticking Along

Tags

antiques, clock, restoration

Considerable Reader,

I blogged a little while ago about a handsome old clock that I’d bought while attempting to shop for old books. I am no clock restorer – but I hope that the Reader will allow me to blog a little upon my first amateur steps to try and restore this wonderful timepiece.

The first job was just to give the frame and dial that I’d bought a bit of a clean, which aside from uncovering a few old screw holes lost in grime, showed how long it had been since the clock had last been looked at properly – the top of it was encrusted with ancient candle wax.

Some quick notes on what was needed and where it would end up.

Then I had to buy some things. The list of parts the clock needed was quite extensive, but fortunately a clock known to have been made by the same maker only a year earlier is well photographed online. What I needed to make or buy was:

• A bell
• A bell hammer
• A clock hand
• A mechanism, either striking or one that could be made into a striking mechanism
• Brass to make a crown from
• Brass to make the fretwork from
• Brass to make the side doors from
• Brass finials
• Brass feet
• Bolts to fit the thing together, as well as other odd finishing pieces.

This list does not include the tools I’ve also had to amass to even begin attempting this project.

So far I can tick a few things off.

I’ve bought a bell –  a beautiful thing that is probably about the same age as the clock if not a little earlier. The hammer is going to be tricky though, and I’ll probably end up making that myself to fit the shape of the old holes in the top of the clock.

Some things piled on top of the clock.

 

I’ve also got two mechanisms, I spent a long time trying to find one that was front winding and would line up with the old winding hole, but the movement from the ~19th century conversion that created the old winding hole must have been pretty custom, so I’ve decided to go for a rear-winding movement to keep it simple. One of my mechanisms is a very incomplete 19th century French carriage clock movement, the other is a simple Swiss movement from the 40s, which should be easy to add a passing strike to.

A Swiss movement – I have since bought an escapement for it too.

I’ve bought some nice hand-cast finials, which are surprisingly similar to examples used by Savage on his other clocks. There’s also a bunch of brass sheets, which will I’ll be cutting and engraving to make up the several parts of the clock which were custom to it and can’t be sourced easily – namely the fretwork, doors, movement-stand, and crown.

Lastly there’s the hand – just one, since my clock is early enough to be single-handed – I bought a nice laser cut reproduction, which I can work down with a file to make look hand-made and original.

Oh, and I haven’t bought any feet or bolts yet.

So, what have I done so far?

Firstly, I had to make up a template for the fretwork. I’d decided to start off by cutting out all the brass so that I had everything I needed for assembling the clock.

Once a template was drawn out onto card and cut out I could use that to stencil the design onto the brass.

Then it was into the vice for cutting, first with a saw and then the detailing around the edge with a file.

Next job will be piercing the fretwork, I haven’t started that yet.

I’ve also cut out the crown, which needs filing down and then bending so that it will fit over the top and support the bell. I’ve also hand-finished the clock hand to make it look more handmade.

Some more things on top of the clock.

Until next time, happy Reader!

Wintery Rhymes

Tags

oh no look what mike's done now, poems, Poetry

Propelled Reader,

Yes, wintery can be spelled that way.

The Reader will allow me pause to put my odd attempts at poetic creativity here – not every blog post can be as interesting as others – and, now that I’ve been allowed this dull pause in interesting content, go and find something more interesting to read.

To the Happy West

I wandered by the waves last night
  In many a pleasant dream;
A youthful moon shone proud and bright
  And I within his beam
  But it was just a dream.

I felt the salt air in my heart
  And breathed the winter shore.
And thought that time would never part
  Those happy days before
  That stand up here no more.

The happy west, the conq’ring sea –
  These things I’ll breath again –
But there are hearts of lads like me
  That pine for them in vane
  And shall not come again.

Their hearts were willing long ago
  But clay makes good men still:
These dancing spirits wander so
  But time will cure what’s ill
  When I’ll go west and still.

Sunrise, 2016

The sheen of dawn
That ran aground
On the high idle mountain
Coloured the waiting room of stars
For a moment red
And newborn.
And the banners of darling things:
The diamond starlight
And baleful moon
Turned out,
And, done into nothing,
Poured down bronze
From out the autumn of the night
Into the bright rising spring
Of day.

A Tired Old Year

“That rhyme’s as broken as the rest of the world.”

  Big Ben strikes
Four and five and six.
He showers the evening down
And mocks at England’s politics:
The thorn of state and crown.

  The world shakes –
Another modern fear –
And happy news a tinderbox
To help it burn more clear.
Still turn those senseless clocks.

  Time and time again
Repeats old history
Philosophers mock at societies lot
And says’t no mystery –
Who wins or not.

  No, for sure
‘Tis clear as Bow bell’s chime
Evil asks only good does naught
And now’s its time –
How joy was short.

  But hope –
Lads, that’s an honest cure
Let’s not forget our friends
And when the world lays all unsure
We’ll work for better ends.

Night, 2016

Heaven transcendent
Crouched over a void of tears
That dribbled out
Towards the hue-forsaken west
And into a colourless tribute
Among newborn stars.

“There comes, you know,”
Spoke those time agnostic lights
“A day when dawns will be made of ash
“And dreams counted out
“When all things are up and done.”

The west sighed
And breezes from the bosom of home
Trembled forgotten things.
Charging good health
And happy days
And ignorant joys.
And starlight distant
Employed in their immaculate heaven
Mocked the quiet ambitions of man.

The trees breathed out together
And under the quiet reigns of night
And happy chords of heaven
Echoed those night wind stars again
“Beds of mould
And finite smiles
Are no comfort in this bleak eternity.
Starlight fades
And empty lungs
Tell no histories here.”

Adieu, dearest Reader.

Off the Shelf #1 – Sun Dials

Celebrated Reader,

It’s been a while since I had a series of posts going on in this blog – the last was my pre-written history of London’s gates – so I thought I’d try something I’ve wanted to write for a good while; a history of some books. In case the Happy Reader is unaware, I’ve got a lot of them. I’m in the middle of cataloguing them (something I’ve claimed to have been doing for about three years now), but I’d guess I have at least three hundred volumes stretching from the 20th century back to the 15th.

Here’s the history of a few (we’ll just have to wait and see exactly how many) of them, with this first post being on a fascinating old book I bought a few years ago.

The full title of this first volume is lengthy – Dialing: Plain, Concave, Convex, Projective, Reflective, Refractive, shewing, How to make all such Dials, and adorn them with all useful Furniture, Relating to the Course of the Sun – and the book itself is as grand as the title; folio sized, and full of large engravings of sundials and mathematical scales.

It’s a first edition, printed in 1682, and still in the majority of the original binding – it’s on my list of books to get professionally restored and one that I would never attempt to work on myself. It was written by William Leybourn, a seventeenth century surveyor and mathematician, and printed for and sold by an extreme Whig and Williamite who was involved in treasonous activities during Monmouth’s Rebellion – one Awnsham Churchill.

My copy is a splendid survival. It was originally bought in 1682 by Joseph Moxon, a famous mathematician and surveyor in his own time; he had grown up as a Royalist exile in the Netherlands, and when he bought my book was the advising hydrographer to King Charles II as he rebuilt London’s watercourses destroyed in the great fire. Moxon, by a note in the front cover, seems to have lent the book out and found it necessary to add the inscription Joseph Moxon lend mee. Moxon must have had a particular interest in sundials – in 1697 he published his own work on designing and creating them.

The opening page of the book was quite filled up with names

He sold the book on 8th June 1689 to one Joseph Howes, who I’ve been unable to track down. There is the slimmest chance he could have been a bookseller in Nottingham. Howes paid 12 shillings and sixpence for it, but doesn’t seem to have kept it for too long:

This is where the most active owner of this book comes in, Isaac Kirk. Kirk was given the book as a child in 1690. His childish handwriting repeats his name countless times over the front and back endpapers of the book, along with a faded Sunday school rhyme and a few other phrases that sound like the sort of thing a theologically minded parent or schoolmaster might have taught a child – things like put away from you all Evill and I ask not for Evill but Shun yt.

Isaac took a great interest in this wonderful book, and as he grew up he clearly became a skilled surveyor and mathematician – and a keen ‘Dialer’. Unlike almost any other annotator in any of my books he named and dated every note he made, many of which are long calculations and solutions to problems poorly outlined in the text – some of which he claims as his own invention or idea. There are also grand tables for calculating different angles for the dial depending on latitudes. Amazingly, he also hand-rubricated the entire book with his own pen.

There are plenty of grand engravings, some have been enlarged upon by Kirk.

He lost interest in the volume in about 1705 when his notes trail off (although it is quite amazing that for some 15 years he regularly made new notes in the margins of the book, all on the art of creating sundials), he returned briefly to the pages in 1715, when a few small notes indicate that he had re-checked several sums and found them to be correct.

Kirk himself is a very interesting character, and it took me a long time to track him down – it was one small note towards the end of the book that gave him away; a line of latitude that relates to a sundial he built in Pilsley, Derbyshire. I had misread Pilsley as Tilsley, so hadn’t managed to find him before, and only once I traced the route of the line did I recognise the name and connect the man to the places he knew. Isaac lived down the road from Pilsley, and turns up in Derbyshire records as Isaac Kirk of Shirland Lodge, a freemason and surveyor. He was important enough to take charge of repairing the bridge at Swarkestone, and may have worked on Pilsley Hall – since he references his work on a sundial at Pilsley in relation to a ‘Great Chamber’; the main room of an old hall house.

Kirk last appears in my book in 1715, and last appears in records in 1717; no one put their pen to the pages of my book again for almost a hundred years, when the book turns up only just down the road from where Isaac lived. This owner was Elijah Hall, a well of mill owner who lived at South Wingfield Park, who came to own the book in 1812.

Hall himself would become involved in an interesting moment of British history a few years later, when his mill workers refused to work in the face of the industrial revolution and the introduction of machinery. This turned into an armed uprising called the Pentrich Rising, which shortly afterwards was crushed by the government. One of the men who challenged Hall over the new machinery in Hall’s mills would be among the three last people executed by beheading in the British Isles.

He was the last man to write his name in the book, and no other notes appear recording its history since then. The next step in its history will be a trip to the restorers before it deteriorates any more – the spine is already missing and several pages are loose, with the front board detached and leather pealing away. Fortunately though, once I have the funds together to get it properly restored, the unique history of this book and the wonderful musings of its owners can be preserved for as many centuries to come as the aged pages have struggled through until today.

Until next time, Merry Reader

What Happened to Aldgate?

Tags

aldgate, bethnal green, gates of london

Botanical Reader,

Now that you are well planted in your chair, allow me to potter along with a little story of Aldgate that I have meant to put into this lettered form for far too long.

When I left off the eighteen-hundred year history of that edifice the year was 1761, and I clumsily ended saying that it was briefly being reconstructed at Bethnal Green as a curiosity. I had a sneaking feeling that something was wrong here; this was the only mention that I had found of it being reconstructed, and there was no evident reason for why this would have happened.

The story that I found, however, was beyond what I had expected – and stretches the history well into the 19th century.

To begin, we must go back to 1761, when the order for the gate to be dismantled was first given. The structure that was being pulled down dated from 1607, but may well have contained much recycled material from the earlier medieval structure.

This is where I have to introduce a magnificent antiquary – Ebenezer Mussel esq. – a Fellow of the Royal Society of Antiquaries and renowned collector of a vast range of ancient objects. From Roman and Egyptian treasures to illuminated manuscripts and even a pair of Elizabeth I’s gloves, this man’s vast collection covered the history of much of the globe, and his interest seems no less disposed towards the poor fate of the ancient gates of London. So, naturally, he bought one.

This gate was, as the Reader may be happy to expect, Aldgate – and he had all of the materials of the gate used to construct a wing on his home known as Corner House in Bethnal Green. It is this that led to it becoming known thereafter as Aldgate house. Corner House itself is recorded as early as 1538, and had already been rebuilt in the early 1640s and possibly again during the reign of James II, Mussel had bought it in 1760, only a year before purchasing Aldgate.

Mussel sadly died without seeing the new ‘Aldgate wing’ finished, but his son Ebenezer Mussel jr. had it finished in 1766 and had an inscription made up to celebrate it.

Aldgate House c.1800

The wing stood on the north side of the house; incorporated into the gate were the ancient battlements, the pair of circular portraits of Roman emperors, supposedly based on coins from a hoard discovered when Aldgate was being rebuilt in 1607. The arched relief under the window may have been the wooden relief cut from ‘Wat Tyler’s Tree’ – a tree on Bow Common that had been cut down some years earlier, and local legend said had been the tree under which Wat Tyler had met his rebellious peasants.

A slightly later engraving of the house.

After Ebenezer Mussel snr.’s death at the start of October 1764 the house and Ebenezer’s possessions’ ownership came into question, and it took two law cases for things to be settled, during which time the house was rented to a few of the many Jewish families who were at that point moving into Bethnal Green. The collections in the house were sold off in 1765, and the library followed in 1782. In 1790 the house was finally confirmed as having passed to his wife, Sarah, who had remarried in May 1765 to one John Gretton. Sarah, however, had died before 1790 so the house went to her widowed husband.

As a side note completely outside of the gate, and just to spark a bit of 18th century gossip, Sarah and John’s first daughter was born only three months after their marriage, and their marriage itself was only seven months after Ebenezer’s death.

Hughson describes the house as still standing in his description of London published in 1807, but it can’t have been long after this that Gretton had the aging property pulled down and replaced with a few houses and a small Calvinist church, which he touchingly named the Ebenezer Chapel. The chapel was finished in 1811, and the entire development by 1813. It is unclear how long this stood for, but by the end of the 19th century the population demographic seems to have shifted enough that there was little need for an independent chapel in the middle of Bethnal Green. By the start of the 20th century it had been replaced by Our Lady of the Assumption Roman Catholic Church, which still stands on the site today.