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The
Tavern Clock, ancestor of the dial-clock, became popular
when King
George III ("Mad King George"), introduced
a government tax on all clocks and watches in 1779. This
made timepieces very expensive to buy or to own, so people
relied more and more on clocks in public places. There
were very large clocks on churches and public buildings,
but smaller clocks were needed for smaller buildings such
as taverns, which were popular with ordinary people of
the day.
The
faces of Tavern Clocks were originally of the same dark
wood as the clock case, or painted as shown in the example
on the left. This is a typical Tavern Clock made by John
Harrison of Norwich in the second half of the eighteenth
century. But these faces could be difficult to see in
dim, smoky taverns. So the Tavern Clock style developed
over the following decades into the English Dial Clock,
with its characteristic round white dials and brass bezels.
The earliest examples began to appear at the beginning
of the nineteenth century.
While
the older clocks needed long cases to accomodate the weights
which were used to drive the mechanism, better quality
metals and engineering gradually made it possible to build
high quality spring-driven movements. These were housed
in a small case behind the clock, so the long-case style
gradually disappeared, though a shorter case was retained
in the "drop-dial" style for purely ornamental
reasons. The
spring-driven mechanism incorporated a device known as
a fusee, which uses a tapering spindle to deliver
a constant amount of power to the mechanism from the mainspring,
no matter whether the clock is fully wound, unwound, or
anywhere in between.
The
illustration bottom left shows a typical Victorian English
Dial Clock made in around 1880 by A Bromwich of Coventry.
Clock-faces were almost always inscribed with the maker's
name and the town where they were made. The wooden case
was usually mahogany or oak, and the face was covered
by the "glass" to protect the hands, and to
make the face easier to clean. The edge of the glass was
protected by a brass rim called a "bezel".
The
basic dial-clock design remained unchanged right up to
the 1930s, when the last ones were produced. It became
so popular that at the turn of the century, the Bank of
England and St. Pancras Station in London each had over
300 Dial Clocks on their inventory, an amazing number
when you consider each clock required weekly winding and
regular maintenance.
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