The Haunted Palace Blog

In the centre of Bristol, there stands on Corn Street, a handsome and richly decorated Georgian building. This building, which once housed the Bristol Corn Exchange, has a very unusual feature – a clock with dual-minute hands.

The clock was installed by the City of Bristol in 1822 [1] and is the last remaining clock of a type that may once have been a common sight. Unfortunately, one of the only other clocks known, that would have been housed in St John’s Church in Exeter, was destroyed by a bomb during World War 2 [2]. The Bristol clock has a red hour hand and a red minute hand that show the correct time. There’s also a third hand in black, which points to a time 10 minutes later than the red minute hand. This means that when the red hands show the time as 12:10, the red and black hands together appear as if it’s 12:00.

To understand why such a clock was needed, we need to step back several hundreds of years, to when life revolved around the rising and setting of the sun and the changing of the seasons. An era when sundials were all that people needed to tell time. The issue with telling the time using the sun was that as the sun’s position varies depending on where you are in Britain, this meant that just because it was noon where you were, didn’t necessarily mean it was noon 30 miles down the road. For example, Oxford was 5 minutes and 2 seconds behind London time or Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), Leeds was 6 minutes 10 seconds behind GMT, Exeter 14 minutes and 12 seconds behind GMT, and Cirencester, 4 minutes ahead of GMT.

When agriculture and cottage industries were the main ways that people earned a living and most people never left their village or town, this difference in time didn’t really matter. People simply compensated for the time difference. For instance, stagecoaches would carry a timepiece such as a clock with them and as they travelled adjust it by 15 minutes every 24 hours. This meant that as the stagecoach travelled west to east, 15 minutes were gained every 24 hours and as they travelled east to west, 15 minutes were lost every 24 hours. That way they could create a timetable based on regional differences [3].

However, the time difference could be very confusing. For instance, polling booths opening and closing at different times or a dated telegraph wire arriving before it was sent. There could also be legal nightmares such as trying to work out which of 2 babies born at the same time but on different days had the right to an inheritance [4]. Furthermore, there were certain industries that began to find this disparity in time increasingly challenging to manage. These were the telegraph companies, the post office, and of course the railway companies. For the railway companies, the consequences could range from people missing their trains to possible collisions if the signal men forgot or miscalculated the time differences.

These issues eventually led to the Great Western Railway issuing an order in November 1840, that London GMT was to be used in all its timetables and stations [5]. Seven years later the Railway Clearing House recommended that every railway company adopt GMT. By this point, momentum was gathering and on 1 June 1880, a Bill was read in the House of Commons which gave Royal Assent for the first time in British history for a standardised time to be used throughout Britain [6].

Nevertheless, as was to be expected, not everyone liked the change. Some people felt that it was just another instance of London meddling and trying to control them. It took Bristol at least 5 years to get used to the new, standard time, hence the clock to help with the transition [7], and based on how even today some people still haven’t accepted the metric system for quantities introduced in Britain in 1965, some people may never have. The Dean of Exeter, for example, was so angry with London that for years he stubbornly refused to change the clock of the city’s cathedral, sticking rigidly to Exeter time [8].

In the end, the new time system was accepted throughout Britain and now the idea that once a city, 30 miles away, would have been in a different time zone seems hard to imagine. So, the next time your train is late, and you start to get angry, just bear in mind that if it wasn’t for the railways we would be in a right pickle.

Bibliography

Corn Exchange Dual-Time Clock, Bristol, England, https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/corn-exchange-dualtime-clock#:~:text=For%20those%20five%20years%2C%20when,the%20local%20one%20in%20black.

Bristol Time, https://greenwichmeantime.com/articles/clocks/bristol-time/

Railway Time, https://greenwichmeantime.com/articles/history/railway/

Bristol Time and the Corn Exchange, https://citydays.com/places/bristol-time/

Why Britain Sets Its Clocks to London, https://londonist.com/london/history/why-britain-sets-its-clocks-to-london

Exeter Local Time, https://www.devonheritage.org/Places/Exeter/ExeterLocalTime.htm

Tick tock: The importance of knowing the right time (BBC News), https://www.bbc.com/news/business-39129620