OLD LONDON CLOCKS.

Waipa Post, Volume XXI, Issue 1339, 9 January 1923, Page 6

OLD LONDON CLOCKS.

CURIOUS AND INTERESTING. The church clock in London has lost something of its significance and usefulness since Big Ben began to beat out the hours of the day and night (says a Morning Post writer). But still a clock is a clock, and it is pleasant to note that in two churches, at least, the duty of a clock to tell the time and tell it plainly has been recognised. The clock face of the church of St. Clement Danes has been repainted in blue and gold, colours, we are told, which symbolise eter-

nity, but the great thing is that it is now easier to tell the hour by this particula timepiece. At St Margaret's Church, Westminster, the clock is to be made to go. For many years the hands have pointed to noon or midnight—make your own choice—and it has been a marvel how. with such a contrary piece of mechanism in the tower, the brides and bridegrooms managed to arrive punctually for their weddings. The trouble has been that the clock required winding up once a day, and the cost was prohibitive; now it has been made to go for eight days at a time, and it will 110 longer be like Captain Cuttle's watch —"Put it back half an hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the afternoon, and it's a watch that'll do you credit." The clocks of London have received far too little attention, but one at the end of Wine Office Court some two hundred years ago must have been very popular among the denizens of Fleet Street. It was an automaton—"with three figures or statues, which at the word of command poured out red or white wine, represented a grocer shutting up his shop, and a blackamoor who struck upon a bell the number of times asked." "Poured out red or white wine," a much more useful kind of clock than that of the neighbouring St. Dunstan, which hung out its ugly face over the footpath of Fleet Street, as if to see that Dr Johnson duly touched the posts in his superstitious way as he passed along.