(This is a duplicate of the article on my main blogsite - see below)

In the Seventeenth Century the longcase clock grew out of the brass ‘chamber clock’ or  lantern clock which had a removable wooden hood (it had to be taken off every time the clock was wound up). The introduction of the pendulum, linked to a change from a balance wheel to an anchor escapement, led to much greater accuracy of time-keeping. Early pendulum clocks had to accommodate a swing of 100º which necessitated the use of  ‘wings’ at the side of the clock. In time a standard 39 inch pendulum was introduced (known as the royal or seconds pendulum). This swung every second and needed an arc of between 4º and 6º, so clock cases could be narrow, but needed to be long enough to hold the pendulum. In time the cases moved on from being a plain box into being elaborate and beautifully embellished carcasses. In England their style was much influenced by craftsmen from Holland, who came over with William of Orange in 1685.

In the early years of the 17^th Century the time keeping devices had been known as horologues – the clock was simply the striking mechanism but over the years the term ‘clock’ was applied to the entire mechanism. The terms "grandfather", "grandmother", and "granddaughter" have all been applied to longcase clocks. Although there is no specifically defined difference among these terms, the general consensus seems to be that a clock smaller than 5 ft is a granddaughter; over 5 ft is a grandmother; and over 6 ft is a grandfather. Other names are tall-case clock, or floor clock.  

Typically these longcase clocks of the latter part of the 17^th Century were adorned with corkscrew or twisted pillars, and the cases were elaborately embellished with marquetry, The wood was usually pine or oak, often blackened to look like ebony, with fruitwood decoration. The early clocks only had an hour hand and there were double circles where the numerals were, dividing the hours into quarters, the half hours being indicated by an ornament of extra length, like an arrow-head or fleur-de-lis. The engraving on clock faces and on the brass plates at the back was highly decorative. Borders, intricate rings about the winding holes, birds and flowers, were all introduced into the decoration, and the spandrels or ornaments at the corners became incredibly ornate. Early dials often had a line of verse in each corner such as one form 1681 bearing the words 

 

 

   "Behold this hand,
   Observe ye motion tip;
   Man's precious hours
   Away like these do slip."  

In time verses gave way to angels heads, and cupids, and these made way for the scrolls and rococo designs of the 18^th Century. 

Thomas Tompion, known as the " Father of English watchmaking," had by 1658 attained much fame and status. He was succeeded by Daniel Quare, who had a shop at St. Martin's le Grand, London, in 1676. Then came George Graham, an apprentice and protégé of Tompion, and he succeeded to his business in 1713.  

The early clocks were thirty-hour mechanisms (i.e. they needed to be wound up once a day, with a six hour lee-way). Then came the eight day clock – much more expensive, and therefore immediately sought after. Eventually month and even one-year clocks were introduced. 

By the middle of the 18^th Century mahogany made an appearance, and then swept the board thanks to the efforts of men like Chippendale. Oriental styles were also popular, with lacquered painted decorations on an oak carcass. 

 

                                                         

The early clocks all had square faces, made of brass. In time more elaborate features – such as phases of the moon, date, silent/chime controls etc - led to an arc being added above the square (particularly after 1710). And then a total change came in – the vogue for painted dials. These started in the 1770s and within thirty years had largely replaced the brass dial. These early dials had simple decorations, such as birds or strawberries. By 1830 small painted scenes, in the corners and arch, were depicted on dials.  

  

 

 

 

Throughout the 1800’s the longcases got smaller. The finials disappeared and designs became simpler and less embellished. Manufacture in London slowed down and largely switched to Birmingham and the Midlands, and to Bristol and the West Country. Even worse, the vogue was for clocks with circular faces and hence rounded tops to their cases - a loathsome abomination which to my mind marked the end of the development of the longcase clock! 

 

All the clocks featured here come from P. A. Oxley Antique Clocks. They have an excellent site at www.british-antiqueclocks.com and I am grateful to them for setting out a  helpful history of the longcase clock on their site.

 

(This is a duplicate of the article on my main blogsite at http://blog.mikerendell.com  please go visit, so I can close this one down!)

 

The year: 1661

The season: high summer

The place: Upper St James Park (now Green Park)

The occasion: a few drinkies on the Terrace to impress  friends, courtiers and ambassadors.

In attendance: King Charles II , knocking back a few vol au vents and ostentatiously clinking his glass to draw attention to the ice rattling round.

Picture courtesy of http://www.andybrain.com/

Ice in the summer? Yes, thanks to the ice house which the king had commissioned to be built immediately after his return to England the year before. In this he was following in the footsteps of his grandfather James I who had built an ice house in Greenwich in 1619 and another at Hampton Court five years later. But  come the revolution and fripperies like iced drinks, chilled sorbets and summer ice creams went out of favour with those killjoy Puritans, and it was left to the new King to revive the tradition.

 It certainly impressed the poet Edmund Waller  in 1661 when he eulogised:

ON ST JAMES'S PARK (As lately improved by His Majesty)

Yonder the harvest of cold months laid up,
Gives a fresh coolness to the royal cup,
There ice, like crystal, firm and never lost,
Tempers hot July with December's frost;
Winter's dark prison, whence he cannot fly,
Tho' the warm spring, his enemy draws nigh:
Strange! That extremes should thus preserve the snow,
High on the Alpes or in deep caves below. 

The King’s subjects were also  mightily impressed (with the ice house, if not the poem) and went back to their stately piles determined to emulate the royal example. Over  the course of the Eighteenth Century many ice houses were built, often to the same basic design. The King James’ version was little more than a well, 30 feet deep and 16 feet wide, brick-lined and covered with a thatched structure. In the winter ice would be collected from ponds and lakes and piled into the well and then covered with straw. Later versions were commonly brick-lined, domed structures, constructed mostly underground. They were often conical or rounded at the bottom to hold melted ice, and more elaborate ones were paved at the bottom, with a drain to carry away the melt-water.

Ponds were often created artificially, close to the gated entrance of the ice house, to enable the labourers to load the structure during the deepest part of winter. It must have been a thoroughly unpleasant and arduous task man-handling sheets of ice and shovelled snow into the dank, dark structure, alternating it with layers of straw. Some of the structures had successive chambers linked by passages to a central ice vault, and apparently they could be extremely efficient, with the majority of the ice making it through to the summer so as to be used for ice sculptures, chilling drinks, making sorbets and so on.

By the end of the Georgian era many ice houses were being constructed  on the basis of the design of John Buonarotti Papworth. He was one of the founder members of the Royal Institute of British Architects and published this icehouse design in 1816.  

 Papworth's Design

    

I have always loved Georgian (and Victorian) boxes: be they sewing boxes, tea caddies, writing slopes, jewellery cases, make-up boxes or whatever, preferably ones with all the original contents! I am fortunate enough to have a small collection – none of them actually belonged to my ancestor Richard Hall, but some of them are right for his period (late Eighteenth Century).

Occasionally I come across a box which is a real delight – I may never get to own anything like it but it is worth a detailed look for the information it gives us about the period. One such item is the splendid antique apothecary’s box featured by Hampton Antiques at their site at http://www.hamptonantiques.co.uk/

The item shown here was manufactured in 1800, is English made from wood, tin, zinc and glass and is in a lovely condition. It has double opening (lockable) doors with a working lock and tasselled key. Open it up and what a treasure trove of delights – something that even a hypochondriac like Richard Hall would have marvelled at! There are 25 separate glass bottles inside, along with a glass pestle and mortar, a stirring stick, brass and iron scales with various weights, and a number of hinged boxes made of tin.

In this cornucopia of delights the apothecary would no doubt have all sorts of potions, lotions, unguents and pills. There would doubtless have been ground harts-horn, and Jesuits Bark (otherwise Quinine).There would no doubt be opiates to calm the nerves, perhaps extract of viper oil to calm and soothe, extract of rhubarb for that upset stomach, and cures for everything from sprains and bruising to a hacking cough.

                        

It would be fair to say that my great-great-great-great grandfather enjoyed ill-health for much of his long life. If it wasn't his gout it was his digestion (and I shall blog another time about that delightful topic of 'oppress'd wind') and if it wasn't that it was his nerves, or his tooth-ache. He enlisted friends to recommend their favourite cures and I have listed some of them in The Journal of a Georgian Gentleman. He invariably jotted down the latest tittle-tattle about illnesses and complaints suffered by the Royal family ('a Worm was voided through the nose of the Princess...!'). He collected prescriptions made out for him by friendly physicians, and, as mentioned in an earlier post, he copied down the apothecary’s symbols so that he knew what they were on about!

  

                                    

So, if you have a few bob to spare do have a look at the excellent Hampton Antiques site. There you will see that Mark and Sara Goodger specialize in antique boxes. Apparently they currently have two apothecary's boxes on their books - so if you buy one for yourself perhaps you can get me the other one as a Christmas present!

In 1708 an Italian living in Cologne sat at his kitchen table mixing up a few drops of citrus oil – from lemons, tangerines, grapefruit and oranges. He added bergamot and a few chopped orange tree leaves, then some lavender and rosemary, added a tincture of jasmine and a dash of diluted ethanol, and hey presto, he had arrived at a miracle water! The only trouble was, he didn’t know what to do with it – take it as a medicine or splash it all over, as the saying goes. So he wrote to his brother extolling the wonders of the concoction saying : "I have found a fragrance that reminds me of an Italian spring morning, of mountain daffodils and orange blossoms after the rain". He named his fragrance Eau de Cologne, (or ‘Kolnisch Wasser’ in German) in honour of  the town where he was living.

The inventor was Giovanni Maria Farina and his product became a sensation throughout Europe and almost certainly would have been known to Richard Hall. And let’s face it, with his aversion to washing, any attempt to mask natural odours was to be encouraged!

Farina set to and sold the expensive phials of perfume from his Cologne premises. He died in 1766 and in 1806 his grand-grand-nephew Jean Marie Joseph Farina opened a perfumery business in Paris. This is now owned by Roger & Gallet and that company owns the right to call its product Eau de Cologne extra vieille.

Meanwhile there had appeared a number of imitators on the scene - perfumiers claiming that they too were selling the ‘original’ eau de Cologne. Numerous court cases followed and at least two separate products emerged – one belonging to the Parisian branch of the Farina family and the other to a Wilhelm Mülhens who claimed to have bought the name from another member of the Farina family (actually not even related, but that’s another story). He started selling eau de Cologne in 1803. Finally the courts ordered the Mülhens  family to stop passing their product off as having anything to do with the name ‘Farina’ and they therefore hit upon the idea of naming it after their original  house number – ‘4711’ (Glockengasse).

                                 The original watchglass bottle

Mülhen had claimed that the secret formula for his ‘aqua mirabilis’ had been given to him in 1792 by a mysterious Carthusan monk as a wedding present but when it was re-launched as 4711 the idea of it being used as a perfume, particularly for gentlemen, rather than as a medicine, really  took off.

The business was later acquired by the Proctor & Gamble but five years ago they sold it on, together with the original Glockengasse building, to the perfume company Mäurer & Wirtz of Aachen. They are entitled to use the description ‘original eau de Cologne’. The Glockengasse is a veritable shrine to the product with a gold fountain spurting forth the famous product in the foyer. 

For me, the distinctively coloured label is a link to a fragrant past – of great Grannies and indeed even further back to the times in which my great-great-great-great grandfather lived.

                        The 4711  building in Glockengasse

Stanley Spencer´s picture of a Cotswold Farm (O.K  it wasn't done until 1945, but at least it is in the Cotswolds, and has a waggon in it! Besides, I like it and it's my blog.)

In 1795 Richard arranged for Mr Ward, carrier, to deliver to him

March 9 – a basket from London, 6 oranges, 2lb tea, Bird food.

Watch etc    1s. 0

June 20  - a small parcel of grocery etc..  1s. 0

Aug 8      - an empty trunk up to London                          

Aug 31    - a small box with Grocery

Later in the year the entries are less mundane: 

Oct 17  - a Grate, Shovel poker and Tongs                              √

               - a Smoak Jack & fly    √

Dec 11   - a barrel of Oysters      √

        25  - a barrel of Oysters      √

               - a bag of Grocery         √

              - 2 cheeses sent to London 24th – weight about 33 lb.                            √

Note that the waggoner delivered on Christmas Day itself. The cheese consumption was prodigious – sometimes Richard bought several hundredweight at a time and then parcelled it up into smaller units to pass to family and friends. Think of it though - buying thirty three pounds of cheese, as a gift, at one go! Last time I bought cheese I baulked at the price of four ounces of Cheddar!

Picture courtesy of lincolnshirepoachercheese.com

The perquisites for the fire (new grate, shovel etc) reflect the fact that he had recently moved into the larger of the two cottages opposite the New Inn at Bourton and the fireplace needed re-furnishing. The smoke jack was a complicated device inserted into the throat of the chimney, with vanes which could turn in the rising heat from the fire, in order to rotate the spit.

 The original smoke jack as designed by Leonardo da Vinci. Fitting it was complicated particularly if the throat of the chimney was narrow, or, as in this case, where the jack was to be fitted in an old and soot-lined chimney. The advantage was that a properly fitted jack would obviate the need for a servant to stand by the fire for hours, laboriously turning the spit by means of a handle.

In March 1794 Richard sent an empty cask up to London (at no charge) and records that two weeks later he received

 a Cask of Currant Wine - ten Gallons   at a delivery charge of four shillings. The cask was returned, empty, five months later.

During that same year he also took delivery of

Nov 4  - A Carpet

                A piece Russia Sheeting

                A small parcel Grocery etc  delivery charge £1. 0. 4

And then on the 20^th November – another cask of Currant Wine weighing a hundredweight. That just left time for the usual order of groceries and oysters in time for Christmas….

Things didn’t always go according to plan and in 1798 we get

April 14   A Glass in a Case}

            A Wire fender    }      4s. 0

A Georgian wire fender.Picture courtesy of www.brightwells.com

April 30  A Stove, Grate, Shovel, poker & Tongs

May 7   a Cask Currant Wine

June 16   A bag of Grocery

                  Weight 56 + 19 = 75

 3cwt 0 quarter 21 lbs at 4s.      0. 13 0

                                                               0. 18. 0

Abated for fender broke             0.  1 . 0

July 12 1798 Paid Mr W.            0. 17. 0

In other words anything delivered broken was at the cost of the haulier

Richard had access to four different forms of candle – beeswax, tallow, spermaceti and rush-light. At a time when the world was either dark or it was light, choosing the correct candle would have been very important. Candles formed a significant part of Richard’s budget since his accounts show that in 1797 he was spending £4.8.04 p.a. on candles (roughly equivalent to  £250) as against more than double that amount for coal. (£10.17.00).

By far the best and most expensive candles were made from beeswax – they would burn with an even, sweet-smelling light but they were a luxury. Tallow candles were made from suet (animal fat from beef or mutton usually) and these had the disadvantage of spitting and spluttering as well as smelling pretty foul. They had the added drawback of being soft, particularly in the heat of the summer, meaning that the stems would bend and become useless.

The purchase reflects the huge increase in whaling in the latter part of the 18^th Century. Whales meant far more than just meat and blubber, and in the case of the sperm whale it was found that it contained an odourless waxy substance which could be used to make candles. The spermaceti was extracted from the whale´s head (in a large whale there could be several tons of it). It could then be poured into a mould  and allowed to crystallise. Spermaceti candles  had the added advantage of being more or less odourless, and being a much harder substance they withstood the heat of summer. They also burned more brightly than tallow candles, and at a far more constant rate, and their light became a measure of brightness for scientists – one candela being the amount generated by a “standard candle”.

For Richard there was also a fourth alternative – rush-light candles. These would have been home made, and were probably used as lighting for dark corners rather than for reading. The inventory of Richard’s house in Bourton, made after his death, showed that there were various rush-light holders in use. Sometimes these were like pliers (with a spring-loaded clip which fastened around the rush-light) and a spike at the other end so it could be nailed into the wall. 

Rushlight holder courtesy of Cerediggion Museum in Wales

Other holders were more like a conventional table-mounted candle holder. Either way they would burn for perhaps 40 minutes before needing to be replaced.They would have given off a dim and often fluctuating light.

I still have Richard’s pen knife (literally, the knife used by him to make a quill pen out of a goose feather) and it is easy to imagine Richard going down to the River Windrush at Bourton, pulling out the knife, and cutting down several dozen rushes and taking them back across the meadows to his home. Here he would split each rush in four, peeling back the green outer layer to reveal a white pithy substance inside. These white strips would be placed in the sun to dry .

 

Whenever any spare fat was available, e.g. from cooking, the strips would be dipped in the fat and left to cool. They could then be clipped into the holder and lit – no good at all for reading or sewing but acceptable for residual background light.