CLOCK WATCHING
Posted: 10 Apr 2026, 01:13
CLOCK WATCHING
03 May 2002
Two items triggered me off in this week’s paper, one on famous local men and the other on the repairs to the clock on Holy Trinity Church. The exhibitions on famous locals have been done now and so I can’t persuade them to devote some time to one of my heroes, John Albert Pickles, founder of Henry Brown Sons and Pickles which is now incorporated in Gissing and Lonsdale.
What’s this got to do with the clock on Holy Trinity Church? Simple, Johnny Pickles made it and also the clocks for St Joseph’s RC Church and Riley Street Methodist Chapel in Earby. The picture I’ve found for you this week shows Johnny in his workshop behind 35 Federation Street putting the final touches to the Holy Trinity Clock before it was installed. The clock is his own design but has the same double three-legged gravity escapement as the turret clock at the Houses of Parliament. This mechanism was invented by Edmund Beckett Denison (later Lord Grimthorpe) in 1854 when he was given the task of drawing up a specification for the new clock and found that no clockmaker could guarantee an accuracy of within one minute a week. Eventually Dent’s built the Parliamentary clock to Denison’s design and it was very successful so Johnny followed in his footsteps.
One question that might occur to younger readers is why would the owner of a successful engineering firm have a workshop in his back garden? Surely he’d want to leave work behind at the end of the day? I suppose the answer is that it all depends on how interested you are in your full-time occupation. John Pickles never lost his love for engineering or his curiosity about anything mechanical, he would go home for lunch and spend half an hour in his workshop and when he came home at night would be out there again as soon as he had finished his tea. He became interested in turret clocks and this explains why he made the church clocks we see today and in the course of his research inspected many of the clocks in the area.
He decided that the clock for Holy Trinity should have an electric self-winding mechanism and this entailed fitting a maintaining gear to keep the clock running whilst the weights were being wound up. The only example of this mechanism he knew about was in the Science Museum in South Kensington so one Friday night he told his son Newton to fill the works van with petrol as they were going to London the following day. Newton drove his father down to London and they parked outside the museum in Exhibition Road (Try doing that today!). Johnny said “Wait here, I’ll only be ten minutes”. He went into the museum, took the particulars of the item he was interested in and on climbing back into the van said to Newton, “Right, let’s get going, if we look sharp we can get to Bury Market before they close and get some black puddings for tea.” Happy days!
Horace Thornton of Earby told me an interesting story about when Johnny visited Carleton Church to look at a very old turret clock there. Horace was the verger and he said that when Johnny saw the clock he said that the story that it was made by a farmer could be true as it was a very simple and unusual design. He noticed that there was a free-wheel on the governor mechanism and said that he had never seen this mechanism used on a clock so old and it must be one of the first uses in clock-making.
Newton told me that when they installed the clock in St Joseph’s Johnny went in one morning to see how the job was going and was just in time to hear some fairly ripe language from his men as they struggled to drill a hole through the wall by hand for the spindle which drove the hands. He stood there with his bowler hat on and shouted “Less of the bloody language, don’t you know you’re in church!”
The Riley Street clock was made and installed in 1937. Johnny started his engineering career as an apprentice with Henry Brown in Earby and the clock carries a brass plate on the frame with this inscription; ‘IN MEMORIAM. LAUS DEO (Praise be to God.) To Henry Brown of this parish, master mechanic 1848-1903 and Elizabeth his wife 1847-1924. This clock was installed by their family. Made by his apprentice John Pickles and given to his memory in appreciation of a good master and an able craftsman.’ When George Preston bought the redundant chapel in 1960 Johnny took the clock back to Barlick and installed it on the Wellhouse Machine Works, facing Skipton Road, in 1981 Henry Brown Sons and Pickles was taken over by Gissing and Lonsdale and the Wellhouse works was demolished. The clock found a new home in G&L’s offices on Wellhouse Road and was fitted with two extra dials. Up to 1988 it was wound manually but on April 4th 1988 it was converted to electric winding. (Later on it was transferred to the Bancroft Engine House when G&L changed hands.)
Under John Pickles’s direction, Henry Brown Sons and Pickles did some wonderful engineering jobs but it seems fitting that the longest lived examples of Johnny’s craftsmanship are his turret clocks. It’s significant I think that they were made in his spare time because he loved his work and was an enthusiast. I was in a traffic jam the other day with Terry Gissing and commented on the fact that most of the people we were looking at were in cars they couldn’t afford, sitting in traffic they didn’t like, going to jobs that gave them little satisfaction and in many cases, that we could well do without. I don’t suppose they have workshops at the bottom of their gardens! We might have lost something along the way. (Eight years later I wrote the story of Brown and Pickles and published it on Lulu.com.)
03 May 2002
03 May 2002
Two items triggered me off in this week’s paper, one on famous local men and the other on the repairs to the clock on Holy Trinity Church. The exhibitions on famous locals have been done now and so I can’t persuade them to devote some time to one of my heroes, John Albert Pickles, founder of Henry Brown Sons and Pickles which is now incorporated in Gissing and Lonsdale.
What’s this got to do with the clock on Holy Trinity Church? Simple, Johnny Pickles made it and also the clocks for St Joseph’s RC Church and Riley Street Methodist Chapel in Earby. The picture I’ve found for you this week shows Johnny in his workshop behind 35 Federation Street putting the final touches to the Holy Trinity Clock before it was installed. The clock is his own design but has the same double three-legged gravity escapement as the turret clock at the Houses of Parliament. This mechanism was invented by Edmund Beckett Denison (later Lord Grimthorpe) in 1854 when he was given the task of drawing up a specification for the new clock and found that no clockmaker could guarantee an accuracy of within one minute a week. Eventually Dent’s built the Parliamentary clock to Denison’s design and it was very successful so Johnny followed in his footsteps.
One question that might occur to younger readers is why would the owner of a successful engineering firm have a workshop in his back garden? Surely he’d want to leave work behind at the end of the day? I suppose the answer is that it all depends on how interested you are in your full-time occupation. John Pickles never lost his love for engineering or his curiosity about anything mechanical, he would go home for lunch and spend half an hour in his workshop and when he came home at night would be out there again as soon as he had finished his tea. He became interested in turret clocks and this explains why he made the church clocks we see today and in the course of his research inspected many of the clocks in the area.
He decided that the clock for Holy Trinity should have an electric self-winding mechanism and this entailed fitting a maintaining gear to keep the clock running whilst the weights were being wound up. The only example of this mechanism he knew about was in the Science Museum in South Kensington so one Friday night he told his son Newton to fill the works van with petrol as they were going to London the following day. Newton drove his father down to London and they parked outside the museum in Exhibition Road (Try doing that today!). Johnny said “Wait here, I’ll only be ten minutes”. He went into the museum, took the particulars of the item he was interested in and on climbing back into the van said to Newton, “Right, let’s get going, if we look sharp we can get to Bury Market before they close and get some black puddings for tea.” Happy days!
Horace Thornton of Earby told me an interesting story about when Johnny visited Carleton Church to look at a very old turret clock there. Horace was the verger and he said that when Johnny saw the clock he said that the story that it was made by a farmer could be true as it was a very simple and unusual design. He noticed that there was a free-wheel on the governor mechanism and said that he had never seen this mechanism used on a clock so old and it must be one of the first uses in clock-making.
Newton told me that when they installed the clock in St Joseph’s Johnny went in one morning to see how the job was going and was just in time to hear some fairly ripe language from his men as they struggled to drill a hole through the wall by hand for the spindle which drove the hands. He stood there with his bowler hat on and shouted “Less of the bloody language, don’t you know you’re in church!”
The Riley Street clock was made and installed in 1937. Johnny started his engineering career as an apprentice with Henry Brown in Earby and the clock carries a brass plate on the frame with this inscription; ‘IN MEMORIAM. LAUS DEO (Praise be to God.) To Henry Brown of this parish, master mechanic 1848-1903 and Elizabeth his wife 1847-1924. This clock was installed by their family. Made by his apprentice John Pickles and given to his memory in appreciation of a good master and an able craftsman.’ When George Preston bought the redundant chapel in 1960 Johnny took the clock back to Barlick and installed it on the Wellhouse Machine Works, facing Skipton Road, in 1981 Henry Brown Sons and Pickles was taken over by Gissing and Lonsdale and the Wellhouse works was demolished. The clock found a new home in G&L’s offices on Wellhouse Road and was fitted with two extra dials. Up to 1988 it was wound manually but on April 4th 1988 it was converted to electric winding. (Later on it was transferred to the Bancroft Engine House when G&L changed hands.)
Under John Pickles’s direction, Henry Brown Sons and Pickles did some wonderful engineering jobs but it seems fitting that the longest lived examples of Johnny’s craftsmanship are his turret clocks. It’s significant I think that they were made in his spare time because he loved his work and was an enthusiast. I was in a traffic jam the other day with Terry Gissing and commented on the fact that most of the people we were looking at were in cars they couldn’t afford, sitting in traffic they didn’t like, going to jobs that gave them little satisfaction and in many cases, that we could well do without. I don’t suppose they have workshops at the bottom of their gardens! We might have lost something along the way. (Eight years later I wrote the story of Brown and Pickles and published it on Lulu.com.)
03 May 2002