Turning back hands of time is mammoth task REAL WIND-UP FOR CLOCK FAN
IT IS a race against time for Richard Kendrick who has to turn back the country’s largest collection of grandfather clocks.
Richard has almost 1,000 of the giant timepieces and each one must be stopped or wound on an hour twice a year.
He’s been busy this weekend as the UK switched from British Summer Time to Greenwich Mean Time.
The mammoth task – reversed in the spring when clocks go forward – takes more than four hours.
Richard, who runs BilliB, a clock retailer in Bournemouth, has 170 grandfather clocks in his showroom and more than 800 in storage.
The 49-year-old said: “To change all the clocks by moving the hands would take ages. “We would spend days doing it. “When you change the hands on a grandfather clock, you have to push the hands round to each quarter hour and wait for it to finish chiming.
“And you cannot change it back otherwise you will badly damage the mecha- ALEX MATTHEWS nism.” To change each of the 170 clocks that way, Richard would have to push the hands through a quarter hour a staggering 15,640 times, and listen to that many chimes.
But he has a cunning trick to cut down on such a time-consuming job. He said: “When you are moving the clocks back, what you can do with a grandfather clock is just stop the pendulum from swinging for an hour. That stops the clock.
“It can still take up to four hours, going through the showroom and making sure you stop them all and then restart them an hour later, especially as the showroom is split over two floors, and the warehouse is beyond that. But it’s by far the most sensible way to do it.”
Despite changing the clocks being a big task, the most stressful part of the job for Richard is getting the clocks perfect for when customers visit.
He said: “Most customers have spent time searching for a clock when they come to us, so they will be looking seriously.
“They are likely to spend a couple of hours here.
“That’s when we need to run the clocks perfectly so customers can see them and listen to them.”
He got his love of clocks from his late stepfather Bill Dawe who began collecting and then selling them in the late 1960s.
Richard, who says there is still a place for grandfather clocks in today’s houses, said: “It started off as a small importing business and grew from there. He loved it just like I do, as it’s specialist and different.
“Now we have the largest collection of grandfather clocks in the UK. Nowhere has a collection like ours.”