GOING CHEEP
...but not cheap, these ornate cuckoo clocks attract considerable fees on auction blocks
WHAT’S the connection between cuckoo clocks and Donald Trump (apart from the word cuckoo, that is)? It occurred to me while walking through the arrivals hall in Geneva airport last week past advertising hoardings boasting private banking, wealth management and some of the most expensive watches in the world.
A few days earlier, the US President had announced swingeing import tariffs on Boeing competitor, Bombardier, all part of his “America First” policy, which could cost thousands of Belfast jobs.
The same thing happened in the 19th century when demand for cheap, domestic clocks soared and American makers such as Chauncey Jerome and Eli Terry introduced mass-produced shelf clocks with conveyor belt-like efficiency.
Vast numbers flooded the market, their mechanisms machine-stamped from sheet brass housed in architectural cases made from pine but veneered in rich red mahogany to make them look grand. Skilled clock making was virtually killed off almost everywhere else.
England was never again to enjoy the eminence it had achieved by the end of the 18th century, while Switzerland’s clockmakers survived only by turning to highly specialised horology and watch-making, industries that they still enjoy world leadership in today.
The humble wooden cuckoo clock might have ended up another victim of this US invasion, had it not been for the craftsmen of the Black Forest region of southern Germany.
Their unique idea of adding a little hoo hoo-ing bird to sound the hours and half hours of their timepieces was enough to save it – and their livelihoods – from oblivion.
But as you see, this ultimate Swiss souvenir isn’t Swiss at all, it just worked its way into people’s psyche. In his travel book A Tramp Abroad, published in 1880, American author Mark Twain describes the Swiss town of Lucerne as the “nest of the cuckoo-clock”.
Despite having an aversion to them, he bought one to take home to give to a particular man to whom he wanted to do an ill turn.
He wrote: “What I meant was that I would break one of his legs, or something of that sort; but in Lucerne I instantly saw that I could impair his mind.”
And in a memorable quote in the 1940 film The Third Man, Orson Welles says: “In Italy, for 30 years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed – they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance.
“In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!”
Don’t think that 19th century cuckoo clocks were as weedy as the ones souvenir hunters buy today though. The one illustrated above, is almost three feet tall and typically smothered in skilful, ornate carving.
It depicts dead game, crossed guns, branches and leaves, surmounted by a stag’s head. Imagine the cost of employing a craftsman to execute such carving today. I confess, however, it’s not to everyone’s taste.
The cuckoo in this particular clock, incidentally, is an intricate automaton affair whose voice is controlled by a tiny leather bellows.
Beware damage here, affecting a repair would frustrate the best of clock restorers.
The Black Forest is in the Baden-Württemberg area of south west Germany, an area of mountains and forest with France in the west, and Switzerland in the south, bordered by the Rhine valley.
Schwarzwald, to give the area its German name, is also the location of the source of the River Danube, which rises there.
Aside from its delicious gateaux, the area is also the true home of the cuckoo clock, and while opinions differ, it is generally accepted it was invented in 1738 by Franz Ketterer (1676-1749) in the Black Forest town of Schönwald.
Certainly Ketterer designed the system of small bellows and whistles that imitate the cuckoo call, which he added to the mechanism of a standard Dutch clock. Later refinements of the design changed the clock’s shape to the familiar birdhouse or chalet.
In the latter part of the 19th century Black Forest carvers hit on the idea of using imported Swiss clockwork movements and began producing heavily carved cuckoo clocks, which became instantly popular.
Ketterer’s descendants continue to reside in the area, manufacturing barometers and other weather measuring instruments.
Not to be outdone, Swiss woodcarvers began producing their own versions in the same style of the German clocks, which they cheekily marketed as “Black Forest” clocks.
Soon, not only cuckoo clocks but all carvings from Switzerland became known generically as “Black Forest” and the term has stuck.
However, it has now been established that all such carvings were the sole province of the Swiss, the industry originating in the picturesque town of Brienz, a pretty lakeside town near Interlaken.
Starting as a cottage industry in the early 1800s, woodcarving grew to become the industrial driving force of a whole community with some 1,300 carvers working there by 1910.
The industry was almost entirely tourist driven, the area being popular since Victorian times with the wealthy, keen to escape the foul weather and smog of the cities.
The brown bear was a particularly popular subject, being the symbol for the city of Berne, but musical boxes, furniture and associated works of art ranging from the religious to the amusing and whimsical all featured.
Swiss “Black Forest” carvings received international exposure and royal patronage when they were exhibited at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851, and at many of the other great international exhibitions of the late 19th and early 20th century including the Chicago World Fair in 1893, and in Paris in 1900.
Other Black Forest clocks to seek out include the round-dialled, so-called postman’s alarm with its white or, more rare, mauve coloured enamel dial and the delightful arch dial wall clocks that look like an English longcase clock minus its case. The latter has a thick wooden dial, brightly hand-painted in a primitive style, featuring colourful floral designs executed with enthusiastically broad brushwork.
The works of such clocks are fitted with crude wooden count wheels and arbors, notorious for gathering dust, and are driven by weights, most likely iron ones cast in the shape of pinecones.