summer outing

Summer Outing, Saturday 18th July 2009 - Snowshill Manor, Keith Harding's World of Mechanical Music and workshop, and the turret clock and carillon in the tower of Northleach Parish Church of St. Peter and St. Paul.

Snowshill Manor was owned by Winchcombe Abbey from 821 until the dissolution of the monasteries in 1539. It then passed to the Crown, and was given as a gift to Katherine Parr, wife of Henry VIII. In 1919 it was bought in a semi-derelict state and restored by Charles Paget Wade, who was trained as an architect. Infact Wade had seen an advertisement for the house while serving in the Great War. By keeping the house in its original condition, with no modern additions or alterations, he was able to display his unique collection of about 22,000 items in harmonious surroundings. Each of the rooms was given an appropriate name. Wade only used the house for his collection, preferring to live in the adjacent old priest's house in the courtyard. But he used to invite guests to admire his collection including John Betjeman, Virginia Wolfe and J.B.Priestly. He designed the garden in terraces with the help of Arts and Crafts architect Baillie-Scott.

Although the weather forecast was bleak, we were treated to a wonderfully sunny day. Of the nineteen members that booked for the trip, four sadly had to pull out due to illness. We were able to visit all the venues as one party, the first hour being spent wandering around the beautiful gardens and admiring the flowers and the Zodiac clock and sundial. We were told that there were not many clocks at Snowshill, but this was just not the case. There were at least three longcases, two in lacquered cases, several japanese clocks showing unequal temporal hours with foliate mechanisms and including two japanese pillar clocks, two 'Act of Parliament' clocks, a Regency bracket clock, three turret clocks of various sizes, the largest working with a 1.25 second pendulum, several hooded wall clocks, a Vienna regulator and a large collection of Black Forest clocks. Some of the latter were very early examples with brass plated movements and musical and automaton mechanisms. Further a great many of the clocks were running, and in true Wade style, they were not set to time. Perhaps one of the most important features of these clocks was that they could be admired in their un-restored state and had not been 'got-at'. So often one sees clocks that are heavily over-restored, and it is a pleasure when this is not the case. There was also a small collection of watches. These combined with the thousands of other items in the collection made it quite impossible to take it all in, and I suspect we missed some clocks amongst the thousands of objects on display! Many members felt they would like another visit, several having already been twice.

After a leisurely lunch we moved on to the charming village of Northleach to meet Keith Harding. Keith and his staff made us very welcome and we were treated to a two hour guided tour of his World of Mechanical Music Museum and workshop. Visit his web site via the link for details of his clocks. We were all fascinated by his workshop showing the high degree of workmanship required to re-pin musical barrels (some requiring 8000 pins) and repairing or making new steel combs with their tiny damping blocks beneath. Also the massive springs required to drive some of the mechanisms. We met his partner, Cliff Burnett, who has been with Keith since the 1960s, working away on a Myford lathe!

Keith gave us a full description of the Silver Jubilee Clock they made in 1977 for an exhibition of British craftmanship in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The three-framed design is frost guilded with no horizontal surfaces to collect dust, in the form of an inverted Y. This shape has been likened to the Eiffel Tower or more unkindly (in the trade) as the Y-front clock - Keith said this with a glint in his eye!

A more important clock they designed is the Oriel House Clock (shown to the left from an image borrowed from Keith's web site). This was commissioned in 1982 for the marble entrance hall of Oriel House in Marble Arch. It has a theoretically perfect suspension spring, which Keith went into some detail to describe (a bit technical and over my head) and a massive pendulum weighing 178 pounds to overcome 'noise' from vibrations caused by traffic and the underground. The bob is suspended on an invar rod with compensation tube to compensate for changes in temperature. The double three-legged gravity escapement has modified gravity arms to correct errors in the original Westminster clock design. The clock keeps time to within a second a week.

We were then given a tour of the Museum where we had a demonstration of all kinds of mechanical musical instruments that were used in the home or in pubs and other public places. The talk was well constructed, and the instruments were explained in their cultural context as well as chronologically. All were beautifully restored and working, from very expensive musical boxes that could only have been afforded by the rich, to the simpler organettes that used punched card discs. There were portable street pipe organs, and barrel organs, and various makes of disc player from table-top models to large Polyphons. The high quality reproduction of the Edison phonograph was explained to us as the music is cut into a spiral groove in a rotating cylinder. The needle is designed to track at the same pitch as the groove, thus a constant speed is maintained between the needle and the cylinder throughout its length. The gramophone record effectively looses quality as the needle tracks toward the centre, because the sampling rate is greater at the beginning of the track, where the speed the record passes the needle is greater, the converse being true at the centre of the record. The pièce de résistance was a concert performance by one of the great composers of the 19th Century on a 1930s Berlin café piano.

But all was not yet finished. Sandra Ashby had kindly arranged for us to visit the clock tower of Northleach Parish Church of St. Peter and St. Paul, to see the carillon in operation, but due to a breakdown in communications I thought that the visit was off. I mentioned this to Keith and he arranged for us to be taken up the tower by the church warden and organist, David Cotton - my apologies to Sandra.

The clock is a large flatbed by John Smiths of Derby with a three-legged gravity escapement and electric winding. The clock strikes the hour and plays 'God Save the King' on the carillon, three times very three hours! The clock is so accurate that David usually has to climb the tower no more than every two months or so. The original iron-framed clock is on display in the church.

I hope to have more pictures and details of the day out in the near future.