Autumn Meeting at The Old Town Hall, Grosmont
Mike Berry began his talk by posing the question “Did John Jeffreys, the watchmaker, also make long case clocks?”. The question arose while he was completing some restoration work on an unusually well-made longcase clock movement and case, where the dial was 'signed' John Jeffreys, London. Mike found that John Jeffreys was born in 1701 to a Quaker family in Berkshire. In 1717, he was apprenticed to Edward Jagger in London, and in 1726 was made a Freeman of the Clockmakers Company. In 1735 Jeffreys took on his own apprentice, Larcum Kendall. John Jeffreys was introduced to John Harrison by George Graham. Harrison asked him to make a new pocket watch which was to include and prove some design ideas for temperature compensation, which Harrison was later to incorporate in the watch that won him the longitude prize. The Jefferys watch was finished in 1753. Jeffreys died a year later, sadly not seeing Harrison take the prize, but his business was taken over by Larcum Kendall who continued to work for Harrison and for the Board of Longitude.
Now to the clock in question – Mike's excellent photographs made clear that this long case clock and dial was of a quality far above the usual. It has thick plates, bolt and shutter maintaining power (though with a recoil escapement), five plate pillars and very well made ‘comma' cocks with beveled edges, the front plate motion work being under cocks. Apart from pinned rather than latched pillars, the movement has many of the characteristic hallmarks of clock movements from the workshop of George Graham. Members took part in detailed discussion about the movement and its design. However, the question of whether a watchmaker with a commission from a customer for a longcase clock would make it himself, or order one from a good workshop owned by a colleague, having his name added to the dial as ‘maker', still awaits a definitive answer.
Owen Gilchrist, a professional watch repairer from the Bristol area, talked to us about the Smiths 19PY movement (19 ligne, P pocket watch, Y from Smiths factory at Ystradgynlais). The basic design of this movement is older than many of us realized. Owen told us that Ingersol produced some 70 million watches to this design between 1905 and 1922. It seems that the blueprint (and even some of the machinery?) for this movement moved from Ingersol to Smiths, and that as British industry began to recover after the Second World War, this was a key product of Smiths Ystradgynlais factory. The factory opened in March 1947 and closed in April 1980. Smiths made some 21 million of these watches with their basic pin pallet, cone and cup balance pivot, 14,400 train movements. They were made for the mass market and there were many variants from standard nickel cased pocket watches, to stop-watches, and the now rare and collectable novelty watches, where an elongated pallet arbor protruded through the dial, allowing a ‘moving' feature to be attached above the dial. Locally, the movement was very popular with miners because of its robust reliability. The movement was also apparently manufactured in China, not for export, but for the Chinese domestic market. Using a small camcorder and live video projection, Owen took us through the complete reassembly of a cleaned movement, explaining where wear was likely to have occurred, what problems to look out for, and how to deal with them. He also explained which lubricants to use on all the various moving surfaces. It was fascination to view the watch being assembled in front of us.
Owen also brought along a collection of other movements, and in particular talked about distinctive aspects of the Waltham Riverside Maximus, with its 23 jewels (including 4 diamonds and sapphire pallets) gold wheel train movement, with Lossier inner terminal balance spring, made in 1908, and the IWC Fishtail model cal.71, with its delicate and precise balance spring regulation. Only 600 of these and a further 600 of the similar cal.72 were made, this one in 1904.
Growing up in a clock restorer's household, George de Fossard described how he first tried his hand at clock design aged 8! Nevertheless, when he left school he moved away from the family business and completed an apprenticeship in mechanical engineering. He followed this by obtaining a degree in mechanical engineering and then worked at Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station for a year. However, office work did not fulfill George's wish to work with his hands, and in 2003 he was accepted on to the West Dean College's postgraduate Clock Restoration course. He followed this with a further year at West Dean during which he designed and made his own ‘modern interpretation' of a lantern clock.
When he returned to Bath, he began work as a clock restorer and also took on a private commission to build a skeleton clock. George took us through the design, client approval and radical re-design stages, then through the building and subsequent fitting of the attractive strike lever work. The customer ended up with a highly original skeleton clock, based on their own modern design ideas; very satisfying for maker and client. Probably most ‘clockmaker-repairer-restorers' have never actually designed and made a complete clock, so George was clearly treading a rather different path.
In 2010, after eight months in a Canadian restoration workshop, George returned to work in Frome. More recently, responding to a commercial commission from Campbell and Archard, George has made two pairs of replica Vienna regulators. He is currently working on the second of the final pair, a Binder regulator, and brought the movement along to show us in its part-finished state. In true horological fashion George has made several small modifications to the original to aid setting up and beat adjustment.
This year, as a way of highlighting his work and seeking further commissions, George has made a half-scale pendulum clock movement based on a Fromanteel longcase clock of about 1660. He brought along this exquisitely made miniature movement, with its latched plate and dial pillars, and ¾ second pendulum, and described the issues around taking a standard one-minute seconds hand drive from the train count he had produced!
This was an inspiring talk from a modern restorer/maker who is clearly ploughing his own furrow through the horological world.