SCOTTISH CLOCKS

Greymouth Evening Star, 12 October 1939, Page 4

SCOTTISH CLOCKS

TRUE CALVINISTIC DECORUM It is interesting to know that old clocks can be adapted, possibly even while retaining their original faces and cases, to electrical working in the home, states the “Manchester Guardian.” It would also be interesting to know if the more complicated sorts of striking clocks and processional clocks, and clocks that keep other things besides hours and minutes by way of time —as. for example. 1 he phases of the moon—-could be electrified in the same way. Ono such old clock having a lunar dial and other complications, together with special chimes, which was presented to the King and Queen by the city of Glasgow when they were Duke

and Duchess of York, has arrived al 145 Piccadilly, for the Exhibition of Royal Treasures. The Scottish clockmakers who first learned their trade from a. Frenchman who settled in Edinburgh, were, and still, are, second to none. They used to spend many years in making a single clock, which they would then exhibit, charging a shilling entrance fee to visitors, after which the masterpiece was raffled. Several of Scotland’s finest clocks were acquired by the Duke of Buccleuch. One of them, in true Calvinistic fashion, played a series of tunes every hour of every weekday, but at midnight on Saturdays all such levities ceased until midnight on Sunday nights, when the tunes were resumed. Other clocks indicated the tides or exhibited a royal procession at certain hours. Edinburg is perhaps the only city in the world where every inhabit- < ant is able to correct clocks and i

batches by the sound of a gun. Each (lay, when Muckle Meg fires from the Castle at L o’clock, thousands of watches are consulted in the streets to make sure that they are on strict time. Thus, there is never a good excuse for being late for an appointment in the Athens of the North.