East Garston

Peter Cook about to present an insight into the workings of this wonderful old clock Photo Dawn Tonge

All Saints' Church Clock

This is a familiar friend to all of us and is normally the only part of the Church clock we get to see.
Not any more! - thanks to the open church weekend and the indefatigable ingenuity and enthusiasm of Peter Cook, the clock with all it's larger than life mechanisms, weights, wires and hammers, has now had all it's secrets laid bare.

Where as many church clocks of this type have under gone conversions to enable automatic winding by electrical power, this one hasn't, and requires manual winding at least twice a week. For many years this task was diligently undertaken by Douglas Vellender alongside his duties as Bell Tower Captain. When Doug was unable to continue due to health reasons, Peter Cook took on the task and has continued the tradition of keeping the clock accurate, much to the appreciation of many. Particularly when you are out walking the downs - and your watch sits at home on the sideboard.!!

Over to Peter

The clock, complete with a new dial and hands, was donated by Mrs King Smith as part of the general refurbishment of the church that took place at the end of the 19th Century. The cost to Mrs King Smith - (£200 or £14,500.00 in today's money) - and the fact that the clock was officially started on Christmas Eve 1889, seems to indicate that it replaced an earlier one, the only evidence for which is a picture of the church dated 1870 showing a Diamond shaped dial and probably a single (hour) hand.

The clock is a horizontal frame three-train tower clock, and was manufactured by John Smith & Sons at the Midland Steam Clock works in Derby in 1889. Steam Clock Factories, were so called because they had steam engines to power the machinery. Smiths installed the clock in the ringing chamber, and still make an annual visit to maintain the mechanism.
Lord Grimethorpe invented the horizontal frame design in 1854 for the Great Clock at Westminster, more commonly known as Big Ben after the name of its largest bell.

The design’s main advantage is that all the wheel bearings are bolted onto a horizontal frame, making the clock movement easier to manufacture, assemble on site and to service. The cast iron frame is 4 ft 6 in (1.4 m) long, and has three separate trains of wheels. As is traditional in almost all chiming clocks, the central train tells the time and drives the hands. The right hand train strikes the hours while the left hand train plays the chimes each quarter of an hour.

The pendulum, which beats 3150 times each hour or 52.5 times per minute, is about 5 ft (1.5 m) long. The bob is a rounded end cast iron cylinder 6" (15 cm) diameter and 15" (38 cm) long. It weighs approximately 90 lbs (42 kg) and is suspended on a hollow wooden rod.

The time train has a pinwheel escapement in which each swing of the pendulum allows one pin on the escape wheel to work its way down through two “steps” attached to a crutch, which is swung by the pendulum rod. This is a much simpler, and cheaper, escapement than the gravity escapement also developed by Lord Grimethorpe for the Westminster clock.

Despite this simplification the clock keeps excellent time, and is usually accurate to within a minute. At the height of summer its timekeeping is almost perfect; but as the pendulum gets shorter in the depths of winter it gains about 30 seconds each week. To keep it telling the right time the clock is stopped occasionally (about every other week when the weather is very cold) for up to a minute and then restarted. History has taught the winders that if the clock is a little fast no one in the village notices (at least they don't complain!). If it’s a little slow then the winders are reminded that, "The old clock's a bit slow this morning".

The time train drives an output shaft that rotates once per hour. This motion is taken, through a set of bevel gears and universal joint, up a shaft to the single dial which is mounted about 18 ft above the clock itself on the south face of the tower. The shaft drives the minute hand through another bevel gear and universal joint. A set of gears mounted just behind the dial, known as the motion work, translate the once per hour rotation of the minute hand into the once per twelve-hour rotation of the hour hand. The weights on the motion work are counterweights for the hands. These ensure that the weight of the hands does not affect the timekeeping.

Every quarter of an hour the time train releases a lever that causes the chime train to run and sound the next pattern of notes. The chime tunes are a modified form of Westminster Chime (that clock again!) and use 5 of the 6 (or seven if you count the Sanctus) bells in the top of the tower. The earliest bell dates from 1677, four are 18th Century, one early 19th and one, which is much more roughly cast than the others and may have been cast in a pit by the church, has no markings The chime mechanism is a wheel resembling a musical box. Each bell has a separate track on the wheel, with “bumps” at the appropriate points.

The pattern of “bumps” on the wheel has two complete sets of quarter, half, three quarter and hour chimes,. so the wheel itself rotates once every two hours.After chiming the hour, the chime train releases the strike by lifting a lever with the pin in the side of the chime wheel.

The strike uses the biggest (Tenor) bell. The chime and strike mechanisms lift the hammers and release them via a system of levers and wires that go up from the clock and across and through the ceiling to the bells. The released hammers fall under gravity and strike their bell.

	Three weights drive the clock one for each train. All three are located to the right hand side of the clock and the cables run from the clock up to pulleys at the top of the tower some 36 ft (11 m) above the clock - and directly over the seat on which the vicar sits during services. The heaviest weight drives the chimes. This is 3.75 cwt (190 kg). The strike is driven by 2.25 cwt (115 kg) while the time train has a very small 0.5 cwt (25 kg) weight. When fully wound the small time weight can keep the clock ticking for a full week. Unfortunately (for the clock winder) the chime and strike weights will only do their job for half that time before needing to be wound back up to the top of the tower. This means that the clock has to be wound twice each week. As Ken has already mentioned, the clock winder for 33 years was Doug Vellender who was also captain of the bell ringers; so winding was done on Sunday morning before bell ringing for the 9:00 am service and on Wednesday evening before ringing practice. This is still the pattern even though Doug has now retired. The clock is wound with a large crank handle on three winding squares across the front of the clock. The central square, for the time train, has a small weighted lever in front of it that needs to be lifted to gain access for winding. This is a form, of what is known as "bolt and shutter" maintaining power which keeps the clock ticking while the weight is wound up. The larger weights are suspended on a three-wire compound pulley system. This reduces the load for winding, but even with the leverage afforded by the crank handle the chime train needs a 22 lb (10 kg) pull, and forty two turns of the handle each wind. The total energy used by the clock in a week is the equivalent of lifting a 1 ton weight about 23 ft (7 m). The original clock would have been set to local mean time (about 5 minutes and 55 seconds behind Greenwich) taken from a sundial; possibly the one that can be seen set in the wall on the south side of the church. However by 1880, nine years before the clock was installed, Greenwich Mean Time had been adopted (in law) as the time standard for the whole country; a trend begun in 1840 by the Great Western Railway, which ran through Newbury. Today the clock is set by reference to a radio controlled clock kept in the ringing chamber and synchronized to the national atomic clocks.
		Research and photos by Peter Cook

Photo Ken Tarbox

Photos : Peter Cook : Dawn Tonge : Ken Tarbox