I was recently made aware of an old industry that used to exist in Calstone – clock making. A man called William Lane was a clockmaker who lived in the village, and had a workshop here, for a number of years in the middle of the 18th century, before he moved to Calne where he died towards the end of the century. Unfortunately, I have been unable to determine exactly where he lived. His existence was brought to my attention by Keith Robbins, of Studley, who owns one of William Lane’s clocks (as a side note Keith’s family used to live in Calstone and it is thought that Robbins Piece is named after one of his ancestors). Keith tipped me off that he knew of another Lane clock for sale, which I was fortunate enough to purchase (see pictures above & below).
In the 18th century many villages and towns had clock makers, and so Calstone is not unusual in this regard. Producing them involved several people: typically making the oak case was given to a specialist, it is thought that Lane used a man in Bishops Cannings for this. Painting the figures on the dial was done by itinerant workers who would travel around from place to place painting a number of dials for each clockmaker so that they had a supply to last them until the next visit. A small number of standard dial patterns were available for the clockmaker to chose from. The real skill involved making the clock mechanism itself, the cogs, etc.
My Calstone clock was made circa 1750 and is unusual in that it just has one hand! There were a couple of reasons for this. Firstly clock mechanisms supporting one hand are less complex and so cheaper to make.
Before 1700, pendulums were not common in clocks making them inherently inaccurate, and so having a minute hand that could gain, or lose, up to 30 mins a day made no sense. Even when clocks with pendulums were introduced, which were much more accurate than earlier designs, people weren’t used to seeing a minute hand, and were therefore less likely to want to pay more to have one. Secondly in the 1750’s precise timekeeping was less important than it is today. There was no universal time across the country, each city and town had its own time which was set by a local sundial, and so varied by a few minutes for each town as you travelled from east to west. It was only with the coming of the railways, the Great Western Railway in particular in 1840, that there was a need for accurate timetables, which forced time to be unified across the country. With my one-handed clock you can see the quarter hour, 15 min, divisions and so can tell it is 12:30 ish, as in the photo above for example, which was good enough at the time. My longcase clock also shows the date, as you can see in the photo above.
William Lane also made two handed clocks and much more elaborate, and complex, musical clocks. This extract from the Wiltshire Times 4th Feb 1933 describes one such example—
“Local Clock with the Hopeless Tune
A queer grandfather, dating from 1740, is of local origin—it was made by “William Lane, Calstone” – and has an outstanding claim for mention here. It records the hours, the minutes, the phases of the moon, together with the age of the lunar orb in weeks, and the month. Last, but not least, every three hours it plays a tune. When I asked whether it was a hymn tune, or what the tune was, Mr Coventry replied that anyway is was “rather a hopeless tune.” It would appear, since numerous people have failed to identify it, that the tune was composed by the clockmaker for that particular clock.”
My clock was supplied by Paul Succony of www.wiltshireclocks.co.uk who has an encyclopaedic knowledge of clocks and clock making, with Wiltshire clocks his speciality.