IN LONDON TOWN

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 56, Issue 71, 6 January 1936, Page 8

IN LONDON TOWN

CLOCKS AND STEEPLES HISTORIC ASSOCIATIONS. The clocks and steeples of "London Town" are rich in historic associations, and the visitor to the world's greatest city will find that they will well repay his study of them, says a writer in the Melbourne "Age." Prior to the great fire of London the central portion of the city must have appeared one forest of steeples. There were then ninety-eight churches in the area attacked by the fire, and of these eight-five were burnt down. Fiftythree were rebuilt, and Sir Christopher Wren was responsible for the reconstruction of most of them. Actually in the London metropolitan area he built fifty churches besides St. Paul's and the western towers of Westminster Abbey. In "Gothic," or as Wren preferred to call it, "Saracenic," architecture, he was not a successful practitioner, although in the adaptation of a steeple, "a form peculiar to Pointed architectuhe" to Roman buildings, he manifested much ingenuity and produced some light and graceful forms of almost endless variety. The Third Church. The present Cathedral of St. Paul is the third church in London dedicated to that saint, and is built very nearly upon the original site. The first church was founded in the year 610 by Ethelbert, King of Kent, and was destroyed by fire in 1037. The second church, better known a s "Old St. Paul's," was damaged by fire' in 1137. A notable feature of its architecture was its tower and spire, which rose to a height of 520 feet, which is 116 feet higher than the spire of Salisbury Cathedral, surpassing the height of the Great Pyramid of Egypt and higher than the Monument placed upon the cross of the present cathedral. That spire was completed in 1221. In 1561 the cathedral was partly burnt, but was restored in 136 G except the spire, which was never rebuilt. Cromwell made the Old St. Paul's a horse quarter for his troops. Wren's design of' new St. Paul's provided for a dome, but not a steeple, and the dome is described as "standing supreme on earth." But new St. Paul's had its clock, remarkable for the magnitude of its wheels and fineness of its works. It was made by Langley Bradley in 1708. It has two dial plates, one south, the other west, each 51 feet in circumference, and the hour numerals are 2 feet 2| inches in height. The minute hands are 9 feet 8 inches Jong and weigh 751 b each. The hour hands are 5 feet 9 inches and weigh 441 b each. The pendulum is 16 feet long, and the bob weigh 1801 b, yet it is suspended by a spring no thicker than a shilling. Its beat is two seconds—a dead beat, 30 to a minute, instead of 60. Big Ben. Of all London's clocks Big Ben, of course, has a world-wide reputation. Not only may its resonant note be heard over the greater part of London, but it has become familiar to Australian listeners-in when London broadcast are being given. The clock tower housing .Big Ben is one of the exterior features of the Houses of Parliament. It overlooks Westminster Bridge, is 316 feet high and 40 feet square. When the House is sitting a light is shown from the clock tower by night, and a Union Jack flies from the Victoria tower by day. The clock, which has four dials, each 22$ feet in diameter, was constructed by Dents, under the direction of the late Lord Grimthorpe. It is one of the finest timekeepers in the world. The minute hands are 14 feet long, and the hour hands 9 feet. The figures are two feet long, and the minutes spaces one foot square. The hours are struck on. the famous Big Ben, so named in compliment to Sir Benjamin Hall, First Commissioner of Works at the time the bell was cast. It weigiis 13. J, tons The quarters are struck from four smaller bells.

Perhaps equally as notable as Big Ben is tho famous peal known as Bow Bells—in Cheapside. It was the sound of Bow Bells, so tradition has it, that lured the runaway apprentice Dick Whittington beak from Hillgate to be Lord Mayor of London. In 190.3, after a long interval of disuse, the Whittington chimes were restored from a setting provided by Sir Charles Stanford. The church was rebuilt by Wren after the great fire, the steeple, 235 feet high, being generally considered his masterpiece. Many authorities indeed regard it as the finest Renaissance companile in the world. A. nerson, born within the sound of Bow Bells is considered to be a "Cockney," or Londoner pure and simple. All Saints, Margaret Street, which was designed as a model church in art development and "in strict conformity with all the distinctive tenets and limitations of the pure reformed church," was built 80' years ago, and its tower and spire, one of the noblest features in the design, rise to a height of 227 feet. St. Anne's, Soho, built in 1680 has a spire, rebuilt in 1806, and has a clock which is described as "a. whimsical and ugly excrescence." In this church is a tablet to the memory of Theodore Anthony Neuhoff, King of Corsica, who died in this parish in 1756, soon after his liberation from prison for an act of insolvency. St. Bride's, Elect Street?—the newspaperman's church—one of Wren's churches, is remarkable for its graceful steeple, which more than onco has been struck down by lightning. In the north face of the tower is a transparent clock dial, first lit with gas in 1827, and one of the earliest in the metropolis. Christ Church, Newgate Street, is perhaps les.s noted lor the Wren steeple, which stands 153 feet high, than for the celebrated Dr. Parr's Spital Serman on Easter Tuesday, 1799, which occupied three hours in its delivery. St. Clement's Danes of "oranges and lemons" fame, in.the'Strand, so named because Harold, a Danish King, and other Danes, were buried

there, has a steeple only 116 feet high, but it has a clock with the peculiarity that it strikes the hours twice, "the hour being first struck on a larger bell and then repeated on a smaller one so that had the first been miscounted the second may be more correctly observed." Dr. Johnson whoso statue stands outside the east wall of the church looking down Fleet Street — was a constant attendant at the services at this church, as is recorded in an inscription on the large pillar besides which he always sat. St. Dunstan's. St. D'unstan's-in-the-East has a stone tower and spire which was regarded as Wren's best work in the Pointed style, but it generally resembled the spire of St. Nicholas's Church at Newcastle-on-Tyne, built in the fifteenth century. John Carter, a critic, however, declared "St. Nicholas's" tower is so lofty and of such a girth that to compare great things with small our London piece of vanity is but a molehill to the Newcastle mountain, the pride and glory of the Northern Hemisphere." After a dreadful storm in London on the night of November 26, 1703, Wren, hearing next morning that some of Londortfs steeples and pinnacles had been damaged, replied, "Not St. Dnstan's, i'm quite sure." Old St. Dunstan's-in-the-West, in Fleet Street, had a clock which was one of London's wonders. It had a large gilt dial overhanging Fleet Street, and above it two life-size figures of savages each bearing in his right hand a club with which they struck the quarters upon two suspended bells, moving their heads at the same time. This clock and figures were the work of MiThomas Harrys in 1671, who received for his work £35 with the old clock, and he was paid £4 per annum to keep the whole in repair. This unique clock subsequently passed into the possession of the Marquis of Hertford, and was placed in the grounds of his villa in Regent's Park. Recently the clock was re-erected at LSt. Dunstan's. The present St. Martin's-in-the-Fields, near Trafalgar Square, is built on the site of a church erected by Henry VIII because he disliked the funerals of his people passing Whitehall on their way to St. Margaret's, Westminster. The tower and spire rise out of the roof behind the portico.