When my parents got married over 60 years ago my father purchased an antique grandfather clock at an auction for the bargain price of five pounds. Since then it has stood in the corner of the dining room in my parents house ticking away reassuringly. The clock brings back many lovely memories of the times we spent in the house and is still a much loved and prized family possession.
When they bought it, it was a pile of pieces on the floor of the auction house but my father did some clock repair on it and managed to get it working.
I remember using the gap behind the grandfather clock for hide and seek (until I grew too big) and hiding my grandmother's handbag in the case so she couldn't go home one day! The gentle tick tock has been a comfort on many occasions, particularly on sleepless nights, the unmistakable grandfather clock chime letting me know the time without having to disturb anyone else.
Generations of children and grandchildren have all peeked inside to be mesmerised by the pendulum swinging or to watch when Grandad went through the ceremony of winding the weights each week at 7.25 am precisely on Sunday. This was the one and only time in the morning that he could fit the key into both of the keyholes on the face of the clock because only then were the grandfather clock hands aligned in the right place and cleared the holes!
Age has taken it's toll on the grandfather clock I'm afraid and it has had to have the clock repair guy come and give it some tender loving care many times. 20 years ago my parents moved house and they decided that it would be a good opportunity to have the clock cleaned and serviced before it took it's place in the new home. The clock repair specialist who did the work became interested in the clocks history because he noticed that the casing was relatively modern compared to the movement, which probably indicated early 20th century.
He was interested enough to take a photograph of the movement and send it to the British Museum. The response we got from the British Museum was a real surprise. Our much loved grandfather clock really wasn't a grandfather clock at all! It had started off life as a wall clock, but it must have been a very large one.
The maker of our grandfather clock was a Dutchman called A. Fromanteel although we are not sure which one, the father Ahasuerus who came to England in 1620 and developed the pendulum clock in 1658 or Abraham, it certainly has a much finer pedigree than we do!
From very scanty research on the Internet we have found out that the Fromanteel family were innovators and were the first to produce a clock that was accurate and not affected by the weather. Each clock that they built had some new feature on it. Our own grandfather clock has a pillar movement although I know that the date feature no longer works.
Has this information made a difference to us? No. To us it is still the grandfather clock of our childhood, a comforting reminder of happy memories and life and time moving on.
