Tears flow as our chimes of freedom are silenced

SO often the harbinger of something else – a New Year, an armistice, the start of some great national occasion – it was finally Big Ben’s turn not to be the messenger but the centre of attention himself yesterday.

Watched by a large, applauding crowd and live television networks around the world, the Great Westminster Clock clanged out a dozen bongs on the stroke of noon and then fell silent until 2021.

We are told that the chimes cannot ring during repair work – scheduled to last an incredible four years – for health and safety reasons, bar guest appearances on Remembrance Sunday and New Year’s Eve.

By the time normal service resumes, we will have had another Olympic Games, the England football team will have crashed out of another World Cup, America will have had another presidential election and Britain will have left the European Union. A species or two will have disappeared from the face of the planet.

Many people had made a special journey yesterday to hear the last chimes. A few in Parliament Square were actually in tears yesterday lunchtime. In times of uncertainty, we are reassured by the constants in life, by dependable old friends just being there. ‘It is a desperately sad moment. You don’t know what you have got until it has gone,’ said Stephen Pound, Labour MP for Ealing North, one of a handful of MPs who had turned up to mark the moment.

Others were not remotely bothered. ‘Worse things happen at sea,’ shrugged Mr Pound’s neighbour, Rupa Huq, Labour MP for Ealing Central and Acton, who said she just happened to be passing. Left wing activists took to social media to condemn those mourning Big Ben for not being more upset about the Grenfell Tower.

AMONGthe crowds, the prevailing view was one of pragmatism but regret. ‘It is something that we are famous for – especially during the war. But the whole building is falling to bits,’ said retired helicopter engineer Brian Wadsworth from Yeovil, Somerset. His wife Rona agreed but could not accept such a drawn-out process, saying: ‘I think four years is such a long, long time.’

You don’t have to be a dewy-eyed sentimentalist to question the extended silencing of what effectively serves as our national sound. It transpires that none of the parliamentarians who formally approved the snail-paced £29million repair schedule for Elizabeth Tower and its clock had any idea the works would involve gagging Big Ben for four years. It doesn’t say much for their powers of scrutiny, does it?

The cessation of the bongs is, rightly, now a political issue. On the one hand, we have the Prime Minister urging a cracking of the whip. On the other, we have the Opposition leader, Jeremy Corbyn, saying that it is no big deal and the welfare of the contractors should trump all else.

But why should it take longer to repair the tower than it originally took to build it? I have yet to sense any urgency. Rather, Big Ben seems set to become Britain’s tallest traffic cone, sitting idly by a building site for years while nothing much goes on behind.

The fact that news channels around the world were broadcasting the farewell chimes live is testament to the global affection for one of our greatest landmarks. We so often overlook the appeal of rock-solid historic institutions like Big Ben and the Monarchy to parts of the word which have enjoyed nothing like the same stability and continuity. It does not say much for Britain as a can-do, modern kind of place if it takes us four years to overhaul a clock. Are the chimes really such an insuperable problem for a 21st century workforce? A few years ago, I was lucky enough to spend an afternoon at the top of the tower and experienced what it is like to stand right next to Big Ben on the hour as that 400lb hammer comes thwacking down on the 13.7tonne bell. I might only have been there for four bongs but it left me jangling like a wind chime for the next hour or so. The sound travels ten miles in all directions. You wouldn’t want to endure that every hour of every working week for four years but it cannot be beyond the wit of man to switch the chimes on at nights, weekends and public holidays. After all, Big Ben is full of quirks and fascinating solutions to seemingly insoluble problems.

When commissioned in the 19th century, the authorities demanded a clock accurate to within one second every day. ‘Impossible,’ said the clockmakers of the day until a man called Edmund Beckett Denison devised a new mechanism.

The bell was designed to play a perfect E when it left the foundry but an early crack means that it has been slightly out of tune ever since. Hence its unique timbre. It is also five bells rather than one. The four quarter-hour bells play the lines from Handel’s Messiah: ‘All through this hour,/Lord be my Guide./And by thy power,/No foot shall slide.’ Big Ben – named after either the Commissioner of Works or a prize-fighter of the day – is

the whopping great bell which comes crashing in on the hour.

When the keepers of the clock needed to adjust the time, they devised an easy solution – placing a pre- decimal penny or two on the head of the pendulum. The hour hands on the four clock faces, by the way, weigh 600lb each, three times more than the much larger minute hands which are made of copper.

Of course, there needs to be repair work and a period of silence. We had one in 2007 when they last serviced the clock. And while the Luftwaffe never put Big Ben off his stride, there were unscheduled silences during the war. In 1944, for example, the clock was halted by a huge flock of starlings which decided to roost on a minute hand.

But no one has ever shut down the Big Ben bongs for four whole years. And they do matter.

‘These are the chimes of freedom,’ said Mr Pound yesterday. He is not wrong.