Stepping into Matthew Read's workshop leads back into a
brief history of time and forwards into future prospects.
Michael Hickling reports
Just as the clocks that strike 13 at the opening of George
Orwell's 1984 were correct, so is the one on the wall of
Matthew Read's workshop which in the late afternoon shows
the time to be 6.95. It's a decimal clock, his own invention,
which is destined for the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich.
Now that other measurements have switched to decimal,
it might seems good sense to divide the day into ten hours,
the hours into 100 minutes and the minutes into 100 seconds.
Would this be a surer and quicker way of calculation than
our 24-hour system and having to ponder when, say, the
19.49 train will actually depart from the railway station?
The French believed a radical time shift was required at
the time of the Revolution. Spurred by a furious desire to
ditch everything to do with the old regime, they aimed to
re-start the clock again at Year Zero. Their decimal experiment
between 1793-95 revealed only that when time is out of
joint, society loses its bearings - a notion that Orwell picked
up in his creation of a dystopian future in 1984.
The ever-rational French were reluctant to concede that the
creation of terror and genocide in their midst was a reason
to deflect them from their enthusiasm. In 1867 some Paris
watchmakers tried again to persuade the world of the logic
of the ten-hour day by producing decimal watches for the
Paris International Exhibition. They didn't catch on.
Matthew Read doesn't think anyone is likely to follow his
invention either. "The concept is good and people would
get to understand the decimal clock within a week. But it
would be turmoil - the transition from one system to another
is impossible."
His clock is designed to intruct schoolchildren on science
courses. "It's a bit tongue-in-cheek to get students talking
about units and measurements of time. Also the works of
the clock are visible - showing them about energy-transfer -
and the action of the pendulum can teach them about gravity.
Essentially it's an English long case clock, the movement
is a tried-and-tested formula."
Underneath it, propped against the wall, is a sketch-plan
for his next project. It shows the workings of John Harrison's
Regulator. Matthew intends to make a limited edition, maybe
a dozen clocks inspired by this timepiece invented around
1750 by his great Yorkshire forbear and intended as his
masterpiece, claimed by Harrison to be accurate to one
second in 100 days.
Maybe there's something in the water round here. Matthew
comes from Goole which is a few miles upstream from where
Harrison, at Barton-on-Humber, helped change the course
of history with his marine clocks. These were the proto-
chronometers that revolutionised navigation by allowing
captains to get a fix on their ships' longitude and gave
Britannia mastery of the waves.
Until then, mariners out of sight of land had been able to
work out their latitude by meauring the height of the sun
or stars. But failure to crack the longitude question led to
such a loss of lives and ships that all merchantile nations
were ready to throw money at anyone who reckoned they
had solved it. The British government offerered the biggest
cash prizes of all in 1714.
The physics were straightforward. Since the Earth rotates
by 15 degrees an hour, a two-hour time-difference would
represent 30 degrees of longitude. So if the local time is
10:00 am on a ship and noon at Greenwich the navigator
knows he is 30 degrees west of Greenwich. But the
practicalities of keeping time accurately at sea defeated
everyone until Harrison, a carpenter by trade, came along
and eventually collected his due full reward in 1773.
The clockmaking gene in the Reads does not extend so far
back. Matthew is third generation and by the time his father
came to retire from the family shop there didn't seem a
great future in it. He told his two sons, "The business is
not up to much, it's there if you want it." Not words to
inspire anyone although Matthew was not discouraged.
"We got the keys and went in next day."
His brother has taken on the running of the family shop in
Goole. Matthew's road diverged and took him on a remarkable
journey back in time. While studying horology at West Dean
College in Sussex his interest in marine chronometers and
John Harrison led to a meeting with Jonathan Betts, the
man in charge of clocks at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich.
The contact led to a job there with dual curatorial and
conservating responsibilities. "I was in the right place at
the right time," he says. In nearly four years he did
presentations here and abroad and got research published.
But there was no time to spare on the work bench - in
national collections it seems people in curatorial jobs are
frowned upon if they get their hands dirty.
Dissatisfied, Matthew left to start his own business back
in his native Yorkshire where he and his wife wanted bring
up their two children. But the parting was on good terms
and retained the side of the Royal Observatory work that
passionately interested him. "My replacement was a graduate
who concentrates on curatorial work. So I go back there
now as a contracted conservator." As well as winding up
John Harrison's historic sea clocks in Greenwich he also
has the job of looking after some of the the National
Trust's clocks in this region.
At the Selby workshop where he runs Horology Conservation,
Matthew took on the task of completing the first replica of
John Harrison's H2 (made in 1739 and one of his five sea
clocks numbered H1 to H5). The engineer who had begun
the job 19 years earlier had fallen sick. The replica was
finished and sold, with some fanfare, at Christie's last year.
Advances in computer-aided design programs mean that
the clocks Matthew plans of Harrison's Regulator won't
take as long to make - maybe 'only' two years. Time is an
elastic concept in the world of horology. Although a computer
can handle the design and even the making of a brass wheel,
to attain the required perfectly square, flat edges means two
to three days of hand-finishing in the workshop to bring it
up to standard.
When he started out in the busisness in the 80s he admits
that people warned him that mechanical horology was dead.
Of course it was, it stood to reason. If people could buy a
quartz watch with an LED read-out at a petrol station which
for a couple of pounds was both cheaper and more accurate,
why would they want to bother with something with fiddly
wind-up works and a dial?
But reason has only ever played a bit part in the making
and buying of clocks and watches. The point is illustrated
by a valuable George Margetts chronometer from 1783
(one of two known to exist) which Matthew is repairing
for a client. "It shares genes with a hardworking marine
chronometer, but it's a rich boys' toy, like so many
wristwatches of today. It was made for the Chinese
market for an owner who could say, 'Look what I've got
- the latest technology from England.'
"It's about the power of marketing. In more recent times
the Swiss got it right by going upmarket to see off the
two-quid quartz watch. We went bust, despite having at
the time the best-known brand in the world, Timex. It
was a classic example of how we missed a big trick by
sitting on our laurels. It's happened time and time again
in this country. We led the way in chronometers. Our last
manufacturer, in St Albans, was making a chronometer
in the 1950s which was essentially an instrument from
the 1790s."
From the 12th century, blackmiths made clocks of a sort
which called people into prayer but until 1657 they were
hopeless as timekeepers and accurate only to within 10-15
minutes a day. "So to correct it you had to rush out and
look at you sundial or observe a sidereal transit."
Galileo designed a clock-like mechanism and his son put it
into metal. But it was a Dutch mathematician, Christiaan
Huygens, who took the big step forward by patenting the
first pendulum clock, greatly increasing the accuracy of time
measurement because it was controlled by gravity which
is a constant. Soon Italy, Germany, Flanders and Britain,
where Huygens was living when he registered his patent,
were home to flourishing clockmakering industries. By the
end of the 17th century, London was pre-eminent.
Matthew is clearly in direct line of succession to that tradition.
The tools he uses date from Victorian times and it's clear
to see that just holding them in the palm of his hand gives
him a buzz. "How much I love the patina of tools - if I lost
them I'd be bereft. I'm paranoid about putting them down
and leaving them behind when I go out to do my National
Trust work.
Ironically perhaps his main lathe is Swiss, a Schaublin, is
40 years old and perfect for the job. "It's deeply satisfying
to sit down at a lathe and in two hours you've made a wheel.
" Another tiny lathe is worked by a treadle. So see him sit
at it and pick up a tiny file is to watch a man entirely
absorbed by his work. "It's so terribly out of fashion. But
God, it's nice to turn a piece of metal round. Is it right to
be passionate about machine tools?" He picks up a pair of
pliers probably from his grandfather's time. "Aren't they
lovely to hold?"
He does not make clocks from scratch - but as he points
out, most clockmakers never did. "It has always been
about division of labour. A man doesn't sit down with a
piece of brass and make a clock. You might seem one
clockmaker's name but 50 to 100 people could have
contributed. People in the trade would maybe make just
one type of spring all their lives." The same even applied
to a genius like John Harrison who principally designed,
finished and tested his clocks.
It can be tricky getting hold of metal of the right standard
because because the quantities he requires are so small.
The brass foundry he used, the last one in Sheffield, has
closed. Gut, for suspending clock weights, comes from a
firm in King's Lynn which makes it for professional tennis
players' raquets. But he is excited about discovering a
wealth of tiny, unsung companies who might be interested
in collaborating in the making of the replica John Harrison
Regulators. "John Harrison was a Yorkshireman and it would
be nice to make something in Yorkshire with specialist
engineering companies from Yorkshire. It could be a
worldwide export."
Apparently there are three Englishmen, two on the Isle
of Man and the other in Switzerland, who do currently
make an entire watch from scratch. They can cost £205,000
So what makes us so emotionally attached to the look of a
traditional clock face which is really obsolete? For that you
have to go back to the Babylonians and Egyptians who
devised it based a hexagon, the simplest geometical shape.
Take a set of compasses and see how the radius of a circle
divides its circumference into six and then subdivides into
twelve: result a clock face.
Conversation pauses in his workshop pauses on the hour
and the quarter and half hour as clocks start to chime.
The place is full of the kinds of clocks for repair which only
their owners could love. Why are people prepared to spend
maybe £300 to get ugly timepieces working again? "They
come along and maybe say it's the earliest memory they
have of grannie's house. They want it going again even if
they could buy something cheaper on e-Bay. They say it
brings the house to life, got character. I have people come
into the workshop and say 'isn't it lovely, I'd love to work
to the sound of ticking clocks'. It's like a beating heart
people can relate to."
Matthew has an 'official' workshop timepiece to set all the
other clocks by. This receives an automatic signal from
Frankfurt to keep it accurate to a couple of nanoseconds a
day according to the International Atomic Time scale which
is based on a weighted average of data from 230 atomic
clocks kept in 60 national laboratories worldwide. Impressed?
There's no need to be. These days it's just a bog standard
piece of technology which costs a fiver from Argos.
Telephone 01757 213181
e-mail matthewread@btconnect.com