Surrounded by Owls

Surrounded by Owls

by Tim Brookes

            My first impression, as Ray Bates, the British Clockmaker, led me into the sunny, cluttered workshop in his house in Newfane, was that we were surrounded by owls.

            The dials of several dozen clocks stared at us, unblinking: clocks sitting on other clocks, clocks on walls and shelves and brackets and on the floor, clocks painted with rural scenes and classical scenes, clocks bearing bronze cherubs, clock dials without hands, clock faces without their movements. It had never struck me until now how apt it is that we refer to a clock dial as a face. I felt as if we were being watched–and at once the multiple meanings of the word “watch,”  too, struck me one after another like a series of quiet chimes.

            On a glass shelf in one window stood a peculiar clock–at least, I thought it was a clock–with three faces in a row, and under them was what looked like a sloping brass shelf or treadle with an odd zigzag pattern running across it. Ray chuckled. This, he said in his soft Scots burr, was a reproduction of a Congreve rolling ball clock, invented soon after 1800 by the British Army engineer who also invented the modern military rocket. He produced a brass key, wound the mechanism, and placed a small ball-bearing on the zigzag track. Propelled by gravity, the ball zigged and zagged across the tray. When it reached the downhill end of its track it struck a lever, which reversed the tilt of the tray, starting the ball on its way back again, and simultaneously advanced the right-hand dial ninety degrees. Aha. The three dials showed hours, minutes and seconds, and the whole apparatus had been designed so the ball took fifteen seconds to complete its journey. Well, more or less.

            “Most Congreves are inaccurate,” he said, “but this one’s really unreliable.”

            The clock might be unreliable (the track gathers dust, he explained, and the ball gathers static electricity), but it was fascinating. It had the hypnotic quality of an executive desk toy. When Ray was a boy, long before he ever became interested in clockmaking, he saw one in the window of a jeweler’s store in Princes Street, in Edinburgh. “I remember being fascinated by it.” He wasn’t not using the word “fascinated” lightly: he has seen people come out of the nearby Newfane Inn after dinner, catch sight of the Congreve in action in his window, and become mesmerized, standing watching it for (he says) as much as an hour. An original in working condition, he said, is worth a fortune these days: one changed hands at Christie’s for ninety thousand pounds. This is part of the mystery of a clock: what is it that we find so compelling the steady certainty of machinery, even if–perhaps especially if–we don’t understand the metal labyrinth of its working?

            As if to endorse his low opinion of the Congreve’s unreliability, the clock abruptly stopped.

            Nearby perched something that looked like a goose egg in a tall eggcup. It turned out to be a French night clock or candle clock from around 1800. The mechanism rotated the egg-shaped globe, which had the hours painted around its equator: the numerals passed over an arrow that indicated the current time. The trick was that the whole thing was translucent and hollow, and contained a candle. In the night, then, in an era before electricity, it acted as both night-light and bedside clock.

            Here and there were salt box clocks (“because the case looks like a salt box, I suppose”); small French carriage clocks, made to be taken by the wealthy in their carriages; bracket clocks that stood on wall brackets and were often fitted with handles so they could be carried upstairs; Napoleon’s hat clocks (“Really not very good clocks. Pretty awful, in fact”); anniversary clocks, with an arrangement of four gilded balls oscillating back and forth beneath the mechanism, which supposedly needed to be would only once a year (“They’re terrible. Absolute bastards”); gallery clocks, such as might be mounted on the gallery of New England town halls for all below to see; atmos clocks, originally driven by changes in atmospheric pressure; banjo clocks, an American invention with a fancied resemblance to America’s instrument of the late 19th century; Swedish clocks, German clocks, postman’s alarm clocks, box clocks and English tavern clocks.

            The room would have been remarkable enough if it featured nothing but clocks, but clocks were only the most identifiable of the mechanisms hereabouts. One wall alone also offered binoculars, sundials, a barograph recording air pressure on a drum of graph paper, clockwork feathered birds ready to sing in gilt cages, and a stout squareish brass-bound wooden box perhaps eight inches by eight by eight that bore the words Hamilton Watch Co., Lancaster, PA.

            Not a watch at all, he explained, but a top-quality marine chronometer. (“The ultimate. Just beautiful. Incredibly accurate. Beats out all the others.”) So accurate, he went on, that even though this specimen is of Second World War vintage, it was almost taken out of dry dock during the Cold War. The Navy realized that in the event of atomic war, nuclear explosions would broadcast an electromagnic pulse that would knock out the electronic navigation systems of U.S. ships and submarines. To counter this effect the Navy was considering, so he heard, bringing the Hamilton chronometer back into production. He paused, shaking his head at the thought that the last of what he called “the rockets of Armageddon” might be shot off using a chronometer from the age of clockwork.

            I was only just beginning to grasp the importance of Ray’s broader sense of the importance of instruments in general, of the principle that instruments are invented as part of the constant human struggle between chaos and order.

             Ray was born in Edinburgh, left school at sixteen and became one of the last generation of apprentices, farmed out to a company of gold- and silversmiths who, like many in their trade, did instrument repair as a sideline. He and the other apprentices were sent out every Monday to knock on the servants’ entrances of the rich people’s houses and be admitted to wind the clocks–eight-day clocks, that is, which needed winding once a week.

            The Second World War had just ended, but military service was still in force. Ray chose the RAF, where half by accident he was put in charge of the photographic unit. After military service, again half by accident, he decided to cycle across America. Once in the U.S., he stumbled into several careers or fragments of careers. He taught English. He shot assignments for National Geographic, for whom he once built a mechanical camera operating device that allowed him to take photographs of his Vermont landscape at regular intervals, day and night, for more than a year, to study the effect of sun on the earth’s surface. He became an American citizen so he could vote against Goldwater. He marched on Washington and was tear-gassed. And more or less by accident he fell back on his old trade of repairing and making clocks. He moved to Newfane, where he and Beverly bought a house that was once a mill that made wagons, wagon wheels and sleighs. More machinery, another part of the movement of history. In the barn Beverly built a fine-art photography studio and Ray built what he calls “our wee pub,” complete with British beer bottles and glasses, bar cloths and towels, now obsolete even in Britain.

            Now he makes clocks, clocks that start at $10,000, yet he seems curriously uninterested in them.

            “Making clocks is obsolete. A new clock is a kind of vanity, like having a monogrammed Rolls-Royce.” The clocks he makes, he said, are so traditional in style and manufacture that in a sense they’re not new clocks: they’re imitations of old clocks, made in much the same way as clocks were made 300 years ago but using machines instead of apprentices. “That’s a very small part of what I do. The main part, the most interesting and important part, is restoring.”

            By now I’d been with him long enough to get the first inklings of what was meant by the word “restoring.” Two hours previously, it had been a dull word to me, meaning no more than “fixing.” Now I was starting to see that in order to bring a clock back to working life he had to understand its mechanisms, which in turn were an expression of the beliefs and aspirations of its maker. And to understand its maker, he had to understand its maker’s time, and what time meant to its maker, and why it was so important to its maker to measure time. Instead of a clock being only an instrument, it was becoming clear that it was a map to the invisible dimension of time.

            He took me into his son Richard’s workshop, a complete contrast to his father’s. Richard acknowledged that his working habits are different from Ray’s (“I couldn’t stand it,” he laughed, talking about the clutter) but he has inherited his father’s dry sense of humor. Dressed in hip modern working clothes, he looked like a successful acoustic engineer for recording studios, maybe.

            Richard’s workshop was dominated by a wooden gantry, something like a tall sawhorse, set up across the room for the dials and movements of grandfather clocks, removed from their tall, heavy cases. There was something curiously anatomical about these thriving innards: they had the air of working models of the human digestive system made by some high-tech bio firm for medical schools. But less messy, more dignified: their minimal, graceful motion, their quiet tick at 60 beats a second, capable of slowing the frantic heart–a skill utterly beyond the more digital clock, silent, its workings hidden, flipping numbers that bear almost no relation to the rotation of the earth, the orbit of the moon.

            As we talked, the clocks quietly went about their ageless work, speaking the slow, reassuring, authoritative passage of time.

This essay was first published in Vermont Magazine.