Haward Musical Clock, 1730

Hello, I'm back in the Grand Hall of the Museum of Timekeeping here on a fairly cool December afternoon. I'm going to talk to you today about this beautiful 18th century Japanned clock. Made by William Heywood in 1730, this type of clock was not really designed for common domestic use. This is the kind of clock that would commonly have been seen in a stately home and if any of you regularly visit stately homes, you'll know that most of about this era feature a Chinese or a Japanese bedroom or drawing room. That's because at this time, early 1700s, we see the first time that trade with the East really opened up through the East India Trading Company and other merchant ships. So this clock would have denoted status, power and wealth. If you were rich enough and well connected enough to have one of these in your drawing room, it showed that you knew the right kind of people who could bring this wonderful, exotic furniture back from the East. Or at least that's what it leads you to believe because actually this clock was made in London, so not in the East at all. However, it was using a very popular style. This kind of lacquerwork, known as japanning, was incredibly popular during this era. We can see here that the lacquer itself appears very dark, bluey green with gold and a few little red hints over the top. Now we've done a little bit of conservation exploring, I suppose, of this clock and we've found that whilst it now looks this murky blue colour, originally it would have been a wonderful lapis lazuli blue and if you can see from where you are, the parts that don't catch the sunlight, so inside this section of the hood here, remains that wonderful blue colour here. So in its heyday, this clock, standing nearly eight feet tall, would have had blue paintwork with real gold gilding of the birds and the flowers and these lovely patterns up the side here, along with reds and greens. It would have been absolutely spectacular. This clock was designed to be seen by candlelight. It would have probably been pride of place in a drawing room of an aristocratic home. After dinner perhaps, you can imagine the guests retiring to one of the rooms. This clock would have been there glittering by candlelight, not only glittering but also showing off the latest technologies within domestic clocks. We can see here that unlike some of the earlier longcase clocks, this clock has four separate wind holes and this is because it has several functions above and beyond just the function of telling the time. So we've got the hours, the minutes, the seconds as you would expect of the clock of this period and we now also see a date ring as well, which would tell you the date rolling through each month. We can also see that when we look at the top of this dial, we've got another hand here and using this hand and the strike and the chime functions, you can set this clock to play any one of a dozen different songs on the hour. This is a musical longcase clock and really was an outstanding piece of its time. Now I'm going to wind the clock now to show you how that looks and if I open up the main door here, you'll be able to see the four different trains which I will now wind up. So as I wind the four different weights, also known as trains, these have four different functions within the clock. First is to tell the time, the second is to tell the date, the third is to strike the hour, the quarter, the half and the three quarter hour and the fourth is to play the music which can be set to play every hour. So up goes the third train there and then lastly the fourth here. This is the heaviest of the four. Now what we'll notice about this clock is that while the outside of the case is absolutely beautifully and incredibly skillfully decorated, the inside of the case leaves a little more desired. We can see that the wood is really quite rough and ready and this caused a lot of these clocks to be scrapped. I'll explain why. This particular style, this particular fashion, very quickly became seen as rather gaudy, a bit too showy and people stopped ordering clocks of this type. But they were incredibly expensive to purchase in the first place and having these wonderfully complicated fine escapements and fine dials meant that people didn't want to do away with their investment entirely. So what you often find is that people wanting to keep the clock but to update it to be more in line with current tastes is that people try to remove this wonderful lacquer. They expected to find underneath a beautiful mahogany, oak or walnut case which they could then refinish and continue to show. However what they actually found was more like the 18th century equivalent of chipboard. We can see here on the inside of the door that it's made of several pieces of rough hewn wood glued together. Not only that, the bracket here is very roughly put onto the door and the lock box itself has a huge gap around the outside. So when people removed this wonderful lacquer they found a clock of very poor quality in terms of furniture beneath. This led to a lot of these clocks actually being destroyed because once you've removed the lacquer you've in essence ruined the clock's appeal. Not only that, the process of japanning a clock is inordinately expensive. Even today it's one of the most expensive types of lacquer work you can you can have done. These days that's partially because so few people are still doing it. Now if I close this up again you can get a look at the case as a whole and you'll see that this is really typical of this kind of style. The birds, the flowers, the peonies and the japanese buildings again really speak of that status and that contact that you are trying to show your visitors that you have had with the east. Whilst this is our tallest clock in the collection we do believe it used to be taller. Most clocks of this kind of date would have had a kind of decorative pelmet on the top of the hood here and when you are above this clock looking down you can quite clearly see the footprint of where one would have been. Now it's quite likely that this has been removed for one reason. Modern homes getting smaller and ceilings getting lower. Nobody unless you're incredibly fortunate really has room for a clock like this in a domestic setting these days and so people began to modify them as they were passed down through the generations. It's very common for clocks to either have the top of the hood removed or the last couple of inches of the foot just to make them more usable in a modern home. Despite the fact that these clocks were popular for such a relatively short space of time they really are things of beauty. It's very rare that you get such attention to detail on a case like this and they are just so impressive in their size, in the sound that they produce and in their sort of overall presence within the room. When it comes to midday and the museum is open this clock always always draws attention. You can't help it you'll hear in a minute the wonderful chimes playing out from the selected song and there are as I've said a dozen here that you can choose from. I do change them up every couple of weeks through open season so if you do come and visit and come back later it probably will be playing a different song to the one it was playing the first time you saw it. I hope you've enjoyed watching this video about our beautiful William Hayward of London clock dating from 1730. What I'm going to do now is set the time on the clock. I'm going to take it all the way around the dial once so that you can hear the different quarterly chimes. Now this clock has been misbehaving a little bit so there's no guarantee that when we get to 12 o'clock it's actually going to strike 12 but we'll see how we go. Hopefully you'll be able to hear it strike regardless of the number it incorrectly does it for. So three quarters first of all then I'm going to take it than I could have hoped. It always goes on for a lot longer than I give it credit for which can make for some pretty awkward pauses in the middle of a group tour. There we are so that is our wonderful Japan'd clock from William Hayward of 1730. I'm really glad that that all worked out and you were able to not only hear the 12 o'clock strike correctly but also the wonderful piece of music that plays afterwards and you really get a feel for just how magical this clock would have seemed back in the 1730s.