I am going back to one of my old subjects as it has reared it’s head again. My picture is the electric clock that used to be on the front of the Council Offices on Post Office Corner. It was replaced by a fancy clock on top of the new bus shelter. The old clock was very reliable but I'm sorry to say that its replacement has not been as good. For months it has been stopped but recently was restarted. So far so good but unfortunately it was five hours adrift. It appears to be slowly correcting itself and is improving but at last sight was still about four hours out.
That's the current situation but what triggered me in the first place is that the Council Office clock had some history behind it. Go back to a time before the mid 19th century when time was not as important. People regulated their lives by the sun and if they were near a church, the sound of church bells signalling a service. Some of the better off had clocks but these were not accurate or reliable and there was no easy way to set them at the correct time. In 1840 the electric telegraph was invented and within ten years private companies had set up systems where they would, for a payment, transmit personal messages.
In 1870 the General Post Office took over control of all existing private telegraph services on the grounds that the government had a monopoly on all forms of public communication. Apart from the railway telegraphs which were not affected, this meant that the Post Office also had a monopoly on the daily time signal which was transmitted each day from Greenwich Observatory. This coincided with the start of the factory system which required good timekeeping in order to function. From then on all post offices had a public clock that had to be visible from the street outside and this was the first time the public had a means of setting their own clocks and watches accurately.
There was a problem, Railway time was derived from a different source and did not coincide with Post Office time. The mill engineers relied on the time relayed to them by the Manchester Men who travelled to the exchange in Manchester each day and they set their watches by Railway time. This led to a situation where the engineers were starting their engines before the workers had arrived as Post Office time was always behind railway time.
I have evidence from the Calf Hall Shed Company minute books that they instructed the engineer to run to Post Office time and not Railway time to correct the situation. At the same time he was taken to task for striking a coal carter over the head with a shovel but that was a different matter..
Today every electronic gadget tells us the time so public clocks are no longer essential. The funny thing is that I don’t think people are as punctual now.
The old clock on the Council Offices.
[Click on the images for larger versions]
