Bedford

 

Clock and bull story

Like my previous post, this is another Victorian shop facade that caught my eye on a rainy day in Bedford not long ago. Actually it was the clock and its accompanying bull that attracted me first. ‘A fancy job,’ I thought to myself. ‘I wonder if the shop below belonged to a jeweller.’ Jewellers often combined their craft with that of clockmaker and would put a clock on their premises as a way of showing off their wares while also attracting attention. The building did indeed house a jeweller, and was built in 1878. The style is unlike that of Adkin’s building in my previous – Venetian Gothic has been replaced by a version of what became known as Queen Anne – red bricks, terracotta decorative panels, and a lot of fancywork using special bricks to form pilasters, pediments, keystones and other details. The gable is still elaborate, but this time in a classical way, in contrast to the Gothic form of Adkin’s building. There was once a figure of Father Time in the niche above the clock, but he seems to have been overtaken by the very time he represented, and is no more.

As for the clock, it certainly worked for me in that it attracted my attention. The fancy gilded decoration. and the iron scrolls around the edge of the case do the business, as does the golden bull. What is he doing there? Was the building later home to a butcher? Well, the occupant’s name was John Bull, so this imposing creature is a rebus, a symbol of the family name, not an indication that this address was once home to a butcher (although, as it happens, it was). Pevsner tells us that he is a replacement. So someone has been caring for this elaborate bit of street decoration, although not to the extent of getting the clock to show the right time. Accuracy in timekeeping was of course a major concern to clockmakers like John Bull. Apparently there was once a vertical pole set behind the clock, with a ball set near the top of it. At precisely 10.00 am every morning, the ball slid down the pole, striking a bell in the process. The mechanism was activated by an electrical signal from the Royal Observatory at Greenwich, thus providing guaranteed accurate time, from which locals could set their watches. Alas on the day I took this photograph, the clock did not display the correct time, but maybe this lapse has by now been rectified.

Grantham, Lincolnshire

Bling and beer

Grantham when I last passed through (a few years ago on a summer evening), was as closed as it must have been recently: hardly any shops open, St Wulfram’s church closed, nowhere much opening hospitable doors. Drifting along the quiet High Street, I spotted this, above a shop door adjacent to the facade of what was once the George Inn, a building mentioned in Nicholas Nickleby and bearing a plaque to Grantham’s most famous son, Sir Isaac Newton. The front of this building looks much later than the George. It seems to speak of the fashion for small paned bow windows and restrained classical fancywork that was popular at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. The shop window below fits with this but with more ornate detail including foliate carving and some eye-catching glass.

Back in the Victorian or Edwardian period, then, this place was a jeweller’s and one keen to display its upmarket credentials. ‘Goldsmith’, one panel says, while another declares ’Silversmith’. What more could an Edwardian with an appetite for bling require? Diamonds, naturally, and the glass panel in my photograph, directly above the door, reassures us that this is the place to get them. This kind of effect is made by either etching or cutting into the glass to create the lighter areas. The glassworker can then grind the surface to make it opaque, and then add gilding or colour to help the etched lettering stand out.* The result is redolent of the ideas of brilliance and the skilful working of hard, bright surfaces that’s common to diamonds, both glitzy and well made. It’s impressive, to be sure, although not perhaps as upmarket as it seems nowadays. But we get the jeweller’s message, especially when the glazing is backlit by the lights inside the shop so that it glitters invitingly. Who can blame later owners of the premises for retaining the panel?†

And yet this sort of decorative-informative glass was not so exclusive in the 19th century. It’s just the sort of thing we’re apt to find on the most loudly decorative of Victorian pubs, saying ‘Public bar’ or ‘Ales and stouts’ and often garlanded with etched images of flowers, foliage, and even songbirds. How appropriate, then, that this building was recently in use as a Pizza Express and glittering not with diamonds or best bitter but with the fizz and amber glow of Italian beer. Alas! I read online that this branch of the restaurant chain was closed permanently last year. Quiet again.

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* For more on these glass techniques and their use in 19th-century public houses, see Mark Girouard, Victorian Pubs (Yale Uinversity Press, 1984).

† The building seems to be listed as part of a group with the George, but the shop front is not mentioned specifically in the text of the listing.

Gloucester

An Englishman, a Scotsman, and…

Having started a short series on clocks, I couldn’t end before sharing this one, the veritable grandfather of all shop clocks, on Baker’s Jeweller’s in Gloucester. It’s as if the ‘Practical Watchmaker’ of the shop sign had had enough of making miniature timepieces and decided to take his one chance to make something really big. As well as an ornate round clock face (above the figures and not included in my picture), he created a series of five figures, representing each of the four countries of the United Kingdom plus Old Father Time himself, who stands in the centre. These figures strike their bells at each quarter. They are usually known in the trade as ‘jacks’, although this masculine term seems inappropriate for the Welshwoman and the Irishwoman. Are the women ‘jills’? Whatever we call them, I call them impressive.

The person who carved them – someone who specialised in those highlanders outside tobacconists,* perhaps – went to town on this set. The details of the dress, the musical instruments (that harp, especially), and the characterful faces are all done with verve. Father Time has a magnificent Shavian beard and what look like well carved wings (though it’s hard to see them in the gloom); his scythe is at the ready behind his right shoulder, and he also has a symbolic hourglass. The hourglass, of course, is not strictly necessary with all the hard work that’s being done by Edwardian clockwork.

These figures have stood in their niche at the front of Baker’s shop, right in the middle of the city, since 1904. Their position in the niche means that as one approaches, they’re not all immediately visible, and discovering them up there is a process of steady revelation as one walks along the street. The arch also means that quite often the figures are in shadow, but the bright colours help them to stand out and their bell-ringing display still inspires amazement from tourists as it joins Gloucester’s other bells, ringing out from the cathedral and some of the city’s other medieval churches, across the shops and offices of the modern city.

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* I did a post about a fine tobacconist's highlander here.

Bridgwater, Somerset

Still pressed for time…

So how about a couple of posts about clocks on buildings? Like my previous couple of posts at this time of frantic activity, this one is a kind of reprise. I’ve used the picture before, but I’ve written a bit more about it this time…

The gift of time is one that has been made architecturally for centuries. Church clocks and sundials were the first widely available public timepieces. They were a guide to the canonical hours at a time when clocks were a scarce luxury and most people did their basic timekeeping by looking at the sun. In the 19th and 20th centuries, commercial companies continued the tradition started by church and civic clocks. So a clock on a shop could be both a public service and an advertisement, something more compelling and commanding of attention than a mere owner’s name sign.

Jewellers and clockmakers were of course well placed to put clocks on their shops. Many of these clocks survive on shop fronts, even when the original jewellers who placed them there have gone. This example is from a multiple jeweller, H. Samuel. It’s very much an Art Deco design: the square clock face, the stepped form of the case, the style of the lettering, and the cross-bracing on the bracket all have the look of that decorative style that was prevalent in the 1930s and that lasted in places into the post-war period. The Roman numerals are more old-fashioned, but it wasn’t unusual for otherwise rather modern-looking Art Deco clocks to have such figures on the dial – and here they are given a modern twist by being distorted so that they follow the line of the pointing hands.

My British readers will be familiar with the company name on the clock. H. Samuel is a ubiquitous high-street multiple jeweller: hundreds of towns have a branch of Samuel’s. If many people know the name, though, few will know what the ‘H’ stood for. Not Henry or Herbert or Hugh – but Harriet. Harriet Samuel took over the business of her father-in-law Moses Samuel in 1862. Perhaps she used the initial in those time of prejudice to disguise the fact that her business was run by a woman. Whether or not that’s the case (and apparently she was sometimes referred as ‘Mr H. Samuel’ in Victorian newspapers), the business throve and countless people who have not been in a jewellers for years have cause to be grateful for a free time check courtesy of H. Samuel.

Worcester

More of the black stuff

As a brief follow-up to my post of a butcher’s shop from Ashby de la Zouch, here’s a jeweller’s in Worcester in a similar style. Again black cladding has been combined with these rather classical letters – here surviving in full apart from a pesky detached bracket. There are very effective and no doubt early display units in the window too. And I especially like the black and white striped blind that complements the colour scheme of the shop front.

The whole ensemble – which continues around the corner – creates a facade that is eye-catching, drawing in the window shopper to admire the watches and jewellery on display. Perhaps this attractive and shiny frontage, which must surely be very effective at stopping passers-by and drawing them in, is one reason why the business has survived so long.