Stories of Change: The past, present and future of energy

Future Works Library item 23 May 2017

Smith of Derby: The Clockmaker's Tour

Photo Credit: Future Works/Stories of Change

Photo Credit: Future Works/Stories of Change

In November 2014, students from the Masters Architecture 'Future Works' studio based at Sheffield, led by Renata Tyszczuk and Julia Udall, were taken on a tour of the clockmaking company, 'Smith of Derby'. Amongst Guinness World Records and surprising statistics (Smith of Derby's clocks are reportedly looked at 8,979,000,000 times a year!), the proud history of this over-150-year-old family firm is brought to life.

Interview Transcript - Key

JU: = Julia Udall

GL: = Group Leader

V: = Video

MN: = Mr Nick

E: = Employee

P: = Participants

[time e.g. 5:22] = inaudible word at this time

[IA 5:22] = inaudible section at this time

[word] = best guess at word

… = interruption in sentence, trailing off or short pause

GL: If it’s OK with yourselves I’m going to run a short video. Now this video just gives you the numbers and I think I spoke to one of the gentlemen earlier on, it was you wasn’t it, and we talked about the Guinness Book of Records, biggest this, longest that, and I said I would show you something, so just bear with me, I’ll just start this up for you.

[Video plays]

V: “Time for the numbers. Founded in 1856 Smith of Derby is a sixth generation family business. We are the largest and oldest tower clock company in the world and one of the most revered names in English horology. For over 150 years we have applied ingenuity, originality and English attention to detail in all four areas of our company, traditional creative, interior and iconic.”

[Laughter]

“The Queen of Tonga is a proud owner of a Smith of Derby timepiece which happens to be the world’s most remote public clock.”

[Laughter]

“We install timepieces in over 50 countries, all of which are splendidly supported by a hand-picked and scrupulously vetted network of 25 international partners. We have two prestigious Guinness World Records for the tallest freestanding and the largest steam driven clocks in the world. We’re also guilty of other world beaters and landmark installations, like the clock on Sir Christopher Wren’s St Paul’s Cathedral, the world’s highest public clock above sea level, the largest inclined clock, highest building-mounted clock and largest mechanical tower clock, with dials two and a half times larger than London’s Big Ben.”

[Laughter]

“Eight global patents for new technology are registered in our name which are appropriately applied in our continuing quest to give our customers the perfect timepiece. Following some advanced mathematics our numbers department have calculated that, if laid end to end, our clock hands would stretch almost 24,000 miles, enough to circumnavigate the globe.

Back in England we employ 60 people in our time team” –

GL: 68 now –

V: “… who have between them 923 years of clock making experience. 20 of these people look after a total of 4,750 clocks on service contract, climbing 35,625 steps every 365 days to ensure our timepieces work perfectly 31,536,000 seconds every year. Except, of course, in a Leap Year, where they work perfectly for 31,622,400 seconds, meaning that horologists climb a further 98 steps just to make sure. We conservatively estimate that 24,600,000 people look at our timepieces each and every day meaning that our clocks are looked at 8,979,000,000 times a year!

Our clocks are precision engineered in our 12,500 sq. ft. manufacturing facility but prior to this our timepieces were built in our original premises which incidentally were the former residents of the first Astronomer Royal and home to no fewer than two Fellows of the highly esteemed Royal Society. We maintain the same pioneering spirit of former generations of Smiths, working with, rather than just for our customers, to deliver the very best clocks all over the world, because our business is time.”

GL: And there we have it!

[Applause]

Goodness knows who came up with all those numbers, I rather suspect it might be the finance director, because only he could have a calculator that big, so there we have it.

[Laughter]

It gives you a general idea of what we do around the globe, how big we do it, how many, who we do it for. So we’re very proud of that.

OK, we’re split down into four sections of the business and the arena we’re in in world time and I think I spoke to a couple of people earlier on and talked about heritage clock making. We make clocks largely for interiors, like interiors of schools, hotels and many other large buildings, but as I mentioned earlier on we also do a lot of street architecture and work with artists, designers, outside of our normal scope of clockworks to create features like this particular type of clock here, and not necessarily also a clock, we can make street furniture that’s not necessarily a timepiece. And then of course we do private commissions, so somebody will come along with an idea, be it an artist or just somebody who says to us, like indeed that particular clock on the end there, ‘I want something that’s a modern, contemporary grandfather-type clock, I don’t want the long case of wood and that kind of thing.’ So we came up with a design, you can see from Eric it was quite a tall clock, but that particular clock is in 24 carat gold, so it’s on brushed stainless steel, 24 carat gold plate, so it just shows that we work with different materials, different types of finishes, everything from interior to exterior.

Very proud of the one above St Paul’s Cathedral because there won’t be anybody in this room that’s not heard of St Paul’s Cathedral and back in 1893 Smith of Derby designed and built and installed the clock in St Paul’s Cathedral. It still maintains that wonderful clock to this day and looks after the restoration of the dials as and when required. Back in 2005 we were asked to completely refurbish the mechanical clock and when we go out of here in a short while I will show you in our museum some of the parts that we’ve kept from that landmark, iconic clock.

This is where we start to get creative, we’ve got our own in-house team of artists, designers, design engineers, our engineering designers and we also work outside of our own company with artists and designers and indeed architects. So it quite often starts from a rough sketch and then becomes something more of a watercolour kind of picture to sort of get in there, working with a client and they say, ‘Yes, we’re almost there with that.’ And then we’ll move onto the next process.

That particular clock we made for Cairo. We don’t just make clocks that are, if you like, analogue or even digital, quite often some of the clocks we make are very bespoke and quite unique and in some cases people can’t always quite tell the time on them until we point out which is which, for example the minute hand and the hour hand in respect on there. That particular project somebody came to us from Cairo and said, ‘We’ve got a big hotel and we want something very different.’ And we asked the questions, ‘Where’s your hotel?’ And they said, ‘It’s by a marina,’ so straightaway our design team at the far end of the building there are already starting to get to work on a bit of a theme. And that theme there as you can quite easily see is the spinnaker, the sails and that’s how it started to evolve from a rough sketch to a drawing, a painting, they accepted that, engineering drawings. We fabricate it, we take it to pieces and we take it… Our same team who fabricate them by the way, will go all the way out there with that clock and install it out in, be it Cairo or Iraq or wherever we’re going at the time. So that’s how we start with the business of clocks, so it’s not just the old, mechanical tower clocks, we are actually very heavily involved in making iconic modern day clocks.

I was talking about a rough sketch, that was a project I did a year last August, I was approached by a universal design company in London, went to meet them a couple of times and they said, ‘We’ve got a client, Fortnum & Masons, not many people will have not heard of Fortnum and Masons, they want a new outlet in St Pancras Railway Station,’ and we threw a lot of ideas and bounced them off each other and we came up with the idea that because they wanted… They’d got a vaulted arch inside the building, if you’re ever down at St Pancras do go and have a look in the corner at Fortnum & Masons, it’s a wonderful building, wonderful architecture in there, lots of ironwork, brickwork, very typical of the 1800s. And so we decided we’d give them something modern in respect of the movement, but incorporate it into something that was more in its day of the railways clocks and back then what they had was the typical cage clock with a lot of wheels in it. So we started off by just the basic drawing and then started to go towards the hand-sketched engineering drawings before the CAD [09:40] got involved, but as you can see from all the equations up there, we still cut gears ourselves and make all the… I mean I can’t understand any part of that, but the design guys back there do and they do all the equations, I’m sure Mr Nick understands that too, for all the gears, pinions and everything that’s going to create time. They made it very difficult for us on this occasion because the client demanded not only did he have two clocks joined together by a con rod going through the vaulted arch, but they also wanted sweep hands too and that really, really raised the bar on that one. That’s a photograph within Fortnum & Masons, as you can see from there it’s not the best photograph, but it gives you an idea of how that sketch suddenly became a crafted, engineered piece of clockwork that is in there today. That’s looking at… you see the vaulted arch there and how they wanted a clock one side of it and a clock the other side of it and then we interlinked the two, so that both could be driven opposite ways to each other via a con rod. So that just goes to show how we can work with artists, architects and we had to work around the construction guys at the same time to deliver something very, very quickly for them. What I’ve neglected to say was towards the end of August they then said to me, ‘By the way we’re opening November 7th,’ so it was a big ask to turn that round so quickly.

Back to clocks that are… As I said earlier on, we don’t just do analogue clocks, a pair of hands or digital numbers, sometimes we’re asked to do something very, very unique and this was a school in Lincoln, it was at Burghley House. And they said to us, ‘We want something that’s really quite different, contemporary. It probably started from a little bit earlier in time and we’ve got a theme, we want a bit of a historic theme as well.’ So the guys scratched their heads and we came up with the idea that… OK, the clock, how are we going to give them all that they’re asking for, contemporary but with old themes and something that can tell the time? So we came up with that large ring on top of the copper-bodied structure and that rotates around on the hour, it spins and turns the glass the other way, so the sand starts to fall and you can see from when it’s a quarter way up it’s quarter past, half way up you get half past, but in actual time unfortunately, you can’t see it from this side but on the other side there, there’s a window. And so what they wanted to achieve was the youngsters being able to go up to it and tell the time by looking at something historical. Inside the window there’s another disc being driven by that rotating disc there and it’s got pictures and things. And you can just see a bit of a bronze image down there with some of the images on there. Say, for example, eight o’clock, they use Henry VIII, so when they look through the window, they can see the picture of Henry VIII and indeed, looking at the ring on the outside there, they could tell whether it was the quarter past or the half past. And the school were very pleased with that, it’s a wonderful piece of engineering, but what I try to get across to people sometimes is we’re not all about a pair of hands and digital numbers. There are many ways to get really creative in the clock industry and deliver something to somebody that’s really quite unique. Yes, hard to tell the time by but it’s still unique.

OK, one last school clock. This particular school came to us and we did a lot of designs for them, we got the creative people together, and in doing so we actually gave them too many designs to choose from. It became like an overpopulated lunch menu. So what we said to them was, ‘We’ll tell you what, why don’t we hold a bit of a competition for all your students? And what we’ll do is they’ll all come up with some sort of a design and then the best six designs they can come and work with us and work with our design team and we’ll put something together. They’re taking ownership of it then.’ So they bought into that, they loved it. Cut a long story short, eventually it was decided upon the design, we manufactured it, we installed it, so one really rather nice piece. It doesn’t do it justice when you actually look at it in the hall, it’s very imposing, it’s a lovely job that is.

Going back to schools, I got approached by some people down in New Cardington which is near Milton Keynes and the new housing development. They wanted to do something local for the people and the community and they wanted to draw the school into it as well and have something of a landmark but their community had some say in what was there. So they were quite… We’d liked to have given them something a little bit more contemporary, but they said, ‘No, we really do want one of your turret-type things on the top and lots of brickwork and you come up with some ideas.’ So our design team said, ‘Tell you what, the local school can buy into this one by simply holding an art competition and then you choose all the pictures and when you’ve chosen them we’ll actually convert them into something like a DXC file or something very close to that and we can etch it onto bronze. So where you see those inlays there we’ve actually put bronze inlays, we’re currently doing this job at the moment, and what they’ll simply have is all the pictures they’ve made have been etched into bronze and will go into all the four facets and forever those pictures will be there. So the young child probably the age of its mother in 20-odd years’ time and having his own son or daughter with them, saying, ‘That was my picture all those years ago.’ So it was a great way to get the pupils and the local community to buy into that particular project, it wasn’t just suddenly stuck there and said, ‘That’s for you.’ And there, you see, that’s typical of the kind of drawings. This wasn’t done for this particular project, we did this for a railway station in Holyhead, but a similar thing really where the local people drew a few pictures and we had it etched into bronze for them. Believe it or not that is a clock. I’ve always struggled to tell the time with that one!

[Laughter]

But it’s a wonderful piece. It’s known as the DNA clock and now that will start to come to you as you see that, you can see the DNA helix. And the way to tell the time on that is that the red balls or the atoms, light up on the hours and then the white balls at the bottom represents the minutes and that’s how you tell the time. But out of shot there, there is a standard, analogue clock, so for those of you who just can’t get their heads round it, they can still see the time. We made two or three of those, one for a… I’ve forgotten the name of the hospital now, on the Northeast, it’s eluded me the name of it, and we’ve also made a couple for universities in the Middle East. Redcar! Redcar is where that is placed. A university clock, they came to us and said, ‘We need a clock on the front façade of our building, we want it very big, thank you very much, we want it to be quite imposing, but we want it to be contemporary, we want it different.’ By the time we’d gone through their wish list we said to them, ‘I’ll tell you what, why don’t you come up with an idea or a design with our guys?’ So they came up with this idea, it’s what we call the Flyback Clock, so it gets to the twelfth hour and once it’s there, it drops all the way down to the nought again, so six o’clock is actually the nine o’clock position. And I’ve had quite a few people come to me and say, ‘I can’t work out that clock you did on that building.’

[Laughter]

But once you know how to tell the time on it… And also the relation between this modern, iconic clock and our very early clocks, probably going back even before the Smith clocks, was that they only ever did have the hour hand in the early days, they were never that accurate in time, so the clocks themselves just had the hour hand and consequently very similar there, they don’t need to be that accurate with the time, as long as the students know it’s time to go and learn. It looks wonderful at night time. It can light in different colours. We use a lot of LED lighting in everything we do now, everything we back light, front light, we tend to use LEDs for many reasons, I won’t bore you with all the reasons, but that’s what we do.

When we go out that way I’ll introduce you to the electronics team, I think a couple of them are out on site at the moment, but Kevin’s still there. We’ve got designers, electronics designers, they are hardware, software and electronics technicians. They design all their own controllers, circuit boards, and put everything together. So we don’t outsource bits out to other people, everything we do, we do under our own roof here, with the exception of special finishes like gold.

OK, moving on from the education side now to the hotel side of things, two rather remarkable clocks. There again, they came and asked us, said, ‘We’ve got a hotel lobby but we don’t want the typical, clichéd, New York, Paris, Rome, that kind of thing, behind the counter, that you see everywhere else; we want something really rather remarkable. We’ve got this very old building, we’re going to make into a hotel and we want to keep, if you like, the tradition of the old building, but we want something that will blend in, that’s modern, but not spoil what we’ve got.’ So that was the idea we came up with, similar to the university that you’ve just seen with the Flyback Clock, we have the same there, you can’t see it so well, the photograph doesn’t do it justice, but the hand is actually at the bottom, I believe, on that one. It works its way up the time and on this side there it’s got the world time. It revolves round like the Burghley clock you saw, the one with the hour glass on it, that’s revolving round giving the different world times. So that’s how we overcame that one. A little bit better you can see that from a close-up, reading half past eleven. The world clock as you can see on there, that’s rotating round giving you the time around the regions of the world.

Now that looks a bit like a diving helmet, it’s not, it’s just a very, very large piece of cast bronze. We were asked by the Waldorf Astoria to design and create a magnificent piece to go in the central lobby of their hotel in Ras Al Khaimah. We do a lot of work out in the Middle East and a lot of it is very high end too. That’s Kevin looking like he was going to snatch the camera out of my hand, I think he was at the end of his tether with the electronics side of it! It’s gone from that base colour to… and I spoke about how we work with different materials, different finishes, that’s a bronze casting, been painted and now it’s been finished in champagne gold leaf. The outer traceries in the corners are actually gold plate, 24 carat gold plate, and then on the centre on the dials, the opal glass curved dials there, that’s also 24 carat gold. You look at the bottom here, you’ll see a movement that is an original clock movement designed by us and is also 24 carat gold. The main body of the clock as I swiftly move through these, as I realise you might be against time slightly, they have a bit of a better close up of the magnificent gold structure of that clock. All those wheels, pinions, gears, whatever you want to call them, they’re all gold, not solid gold, they’re 24 carat gold plated. Now what’s really quite magnificent is because of where it’s placed you’ve got the five different Muslim prayer times, they wanted to be able to tell the time in real time but they also wanted from us a means of being able to incorporate the different prayer times of the region which I believe is five during the day. We’ve got five rotating tumblers or barrels on there, so not only have we got one magnificent, mechanical clock, but the electronics guys had to come up with a solution to maintain time on that with the design guys who would design all the cut gearing that would enable those to go round. So in a sense you’ve got six clocks in one. They also designed the mood lighting that would actually change the lighting effect as the lighting goes down during the evening in the lobby of the hotel.

There you see it in its entirety, you get a sense of scale, it’s 7.5m tall, weighed 4.5 tons, cost £500,000, they thought it was worth it. We did too, we loved it, a great project!

[Laughter]

Very, very hard work, so as you can imagine, designing, constructing it here, such clever guys out there and all the testing and then dismantling it, putting it on a lorry and taking it out to the Saudi States is something else. And as I say, the same team following it out there to assemble it and to commission it working. What you can’t see on there is when the lights go down in that place, because there’s an atrium at the very top of that lobby and as it gets darker outside, the lights go down with it, the lighting on the clock does exactly the same. It gives a better perspective there in the lobby, very opulent. Not somewhere I’d stay!

A rather amazing feature, that is what we call the Horse Clock in Ebbw Vale in Wales, an artist came to us, Marianne Forrest, a very famous artist said, ‘We want to commission a 10m clock, it stands in a street, overhangs the road, it’s in the market square area.’ A lot of criteria. She said, ‘It’s got to look fantastic.’ It did. ‘It’s got to be well lit by LEDs.’ It was and is, and all that’s constructed and fabricated inside these works here, so all done in stainless steel, welded, sectionalised, clock’s made, the clock movements at the top there and then delivered on a lorry in its sections and assembled by our team. But it just goes to show there’s no bounds when it comes to design, it’s just endless what you can do and create and how you can incorporate that into your architectural world, whether it be the urban development, that kind of thing where you’re inside atriums.

Another clock, we were asked by a hospital, I’ll cut it short, to create a clock for Derby Royal Hospital. Now most of you won’t know this particular person but Florence Nightingale was a very famous nurse going back to the Crimean War. And in their tough times there was a lot of very badly injured service men and she would walk the wards at night with a lamp in hand and she was actually known as the Lady with the Lamp, she was very famous a very long time ago. But what we did, we took the theme because she was a Derby lady, we took the theme of Florence Nightingale and made this modern street furniture in the shape of a lamp, so it signifies the Florence Nightingale, Derby Hospital, etc. At night time it has LED lights and they flicker so it gives the impression of a flame at night time.

On the video you saw earlier on we had, I think it was two, I think I actually wrongly said to you we had four Guinness World Records, it was actually two, so I made a few mistakes, it’s now three I think. It just gives you a scale of size of these guys were climbing all over it and they constructed that clock, but yes, we made the world’s largest inclined clock and that’s it in its entirety.

So what I’ve done with these, I’ve taken you, just to summarise, from the very beginnings of our time, of our business, where we’ve evolved from, so where we’ve been where we are, probably where we’re going. It knows no bounds in what you can create for time design. So when you’re back in university and you’re thinking creatively as architects and you might get that moment where you’ve got some sort of urban development, a big atrium-type thing and you think, ‘Do you know what? I don’t know what I’m going to put in the middle of that now. I know, probably a fountain with a few rocks around it or something like that.’ Very 1980s. ‘A clock! ‘

[Laughter]

You just think Smith of Derby then, alright?

[Laughter]

It’s got to be easier than any of it. Somebody said, ‘I’ve got all this area, what can I fill it with? A clock!’

[Laughter]

So you know where to come back to. So I’d just like to thank you very much for listening.

[Applause]

So what we should do now, I don’t know if anybody wants to take a comfort break, the toilets are down there, and then we’ll just split up into two groups. Are we OK with that, Mr Nick?

MN: Yeah, that’s fine. I was thinking that after that very encompassing speech we really know it all now. I do anyway. I’ve learnt a lot watching you!

[Laughter]

GL: So are we saying we don’t need to bother now, we can all go home!

[Laughter]

MN: I was just thinking while everybody’s settled I think for the last 5, maximum 10 minutes, I would just make one or two comments to really add to what you’ve been saying. Does that suit, can everybody last a final five minutes, because it’s going to be short, I think, really.

MN: I think the one thing that Martin didn’t say is that a clock is actually the most cost-effective way of giving decoration to an outside building and so actually it’s a very effective way of decorating inside or outside a building or indeed a public space and people often forget that. But I think from my point of view I’m fourth generation as I mentioned and we are still family owned and Renata knows all about that because she’s married to one of the family and a very important part too, because she’s just bred a few children –

[Laughter]

That’s the sixth generation!

[Laughter]

But the main point I’m making is that it’s a very… family business and we’ve all been involved with it right from the start. I suppose I went up my first towers with my father when I was probably five or six and I carried on doing it ever after and indeed, I’ve just been reading his diaries, some 17 of them spanning whenever he went away on business or on holiday and the funny bit about it is not only do I recognise so many of them but I followed in his footsteps maybe 10, 20, 30 years later doing precisely the same visit and not meeting the same people, because he mentioned who he met, but it was this continuity.

The other thing which is so nice about it as a business which is unusual is that it is historically very important. Our business is social history on the move and it always has been, so it is not only mechanically interesting and architecturally, but it’s also about the local area, why somebody wanted to put a clock in, because they’d made money with wool or with cotton in Lancashire or for whatever reason or they drained the Fens and they want to say, ‘Thank God!’ literally. I do remember a rather naughty story about my grandmother visiting from The Works and she came in occasionally because she really ruled the roost at that time and we had a domestic side which looked after domestic clocks until comparatively recently, but the large roll of very strong, brown paper was stored in the ladies loo upstairs. And she came back down one day having visited and she said, ‘By Golly, I knew the Smiths were tough, I didn’t know they were that tough!’

[Laughter]

I leave your imagination to work on what she was referring to, but that’s just a light moment. But we have actually been totally committed to what we do.

We are by far the largest now, we started as the smallest in the 1850s but we have steadily grown. And the difference that’s taken place in recent years is that for a long time we always did business abroad, I doubt whether there’s a country in the world which hasn’t got something of ours and there are some very funny stories associated with that, which there isn’t time now unfortunately… [laughs] But it’s been the continuity of family total commitment with some interesting gaps. When my grandfather died there was a gap when the employees carried on running the business in the name of my father and my uncle and so on until they were of an age.

Moving on the historic aspect is one of the two items to do with the archives and I’ll just mention it briefly because it is a point of interest for the company. Next door is a tiny office which is… I call it the archive room, they all move me to one side and say, ‘You can be archivist,’ so I’m the most dangerous person around because I’m untrained, a total apprentice but I’m the archivist, but I do know where most things are. And a couple of years ago I began to realise that we weren’t using all this vast information we’ve got tucked away, we have a very good database, we have about 35,000 records on the database of different primarily where there are clocks, but also where there might have been and the source of information over the years is quite interesting. Just down here, I’m only going to show you one thing, we’ve got a whole range of sources of information - the black book, please, that one - and that little book… I’ve just pulled one of eight and this is dated August 1894 – August 1898. Inside there are a lot of paper cuttings which they were having found for them by agencies who used to search and I can actually research a clock that we installed and I can go back over the previous year, 18 months, whatever, I can probably find the origin of the enquiry, so that I actually can trace the history of how it arose in the first place, who was involved and then what happened over the installation by us, because I pick that up in our sales ledger which is - I think I put one down there - which has the entries right the way from the 1880s right the way up to the 1940s and then it began to change in the 1950s. So that’s all I’m going to say about archiving because it has two particular principles, one is historic and the other is the future potential for contacting people where we know there’s a clock but we haven’t had recent contact.

So I think I’ve said enough, I think you now get a break but you may have to queue, I’m afraid, because it’s for small numbers.

[End of Interview]

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