Jeweller’s shop regulator with Greenwich time signal, 1872

In depth

The jewellers Arnold & Lewis took over the fashionable address of 7 St. Ann's Square, in the heart of Manchester, after the jeweller Isaac Simmons retired in 1870. Two years later, they installed an elaborately decorated clock above their shopfront. This was surmounted by a time ball, which dropped every day at 1pm precisely, in the process providing accurate time to passers-by. Both the public clock and the time ball were connected to this highly decorated shop regulator which, in turn, was fitted with a galvanometer to receive the daily time signal from Greenwich. When the signal came through at 10am, shop staff could adjust the regulator manually to ensure it remained perfectly synchronised with GMT.

The number of public clocks increased dramatically in Manchester over the course of the nineteenth century, especially after the passage of the 1844 Factory Act, which (among other things) regulated working hours in the nearby cotton mills. The provision of synchronised ‘Greenwich Time’ therefore became increasingly desirable, and Arnold & Lewis seized on the opportunity: from the mid-1870s, they had adopted the strapline ‘The City Clock and Time Ball’ in their advertising. It is clear from the elaborately gilt pierced scroll-form beat scale, velvet-lined piano black case and prominent branding that this ‘city clock’ was intended to function in some sense as a public resource, as well as a powerful indicator of the reliability and precision of the company who owned and maintained it.

Although Arnold & Lewis continued trading into the 1930s (moving in 1906 to number 21), the time ball had disappeared from the shopfront of Number 7 St. Ann’s Square by the first decade of the twentieth century. It is not certainly known what became of the regulator between this period and 1982, when it was recorded by Clocks magazine in the collection of antique timepieces assembled by broadcaster Stuart Hall. The Stuart Hall collection was initially displayed in the Last Drop Village, near Bolton, but moved to St George’s Craft Centre in 1983; it is presumed to have been dispersed in 2014, shortly before Hall left prison after his high-profile conviction. By 2021, the regulator had moved to the collection of the Manchester-based bookmaker and animal rights campaigner Selwyn Demmy, who, from the 1990s, assembled a significant collection of timekeepers alongside paintings of local Manchester scenes by L. S. Lowry (1887–1976) and Arthur Delaney (1927–87). Given the Mancunian focus of his collection, Demmy is likely to have appreciated the prominent appearance of ‘MANCHESTER’ on the clock’s white regulator-presentation dial, which identifies this clock as a proud and prominent part of Manchester’s timekeeping heritage.