The chimes of Big Ben do more than keep time to the second

The chimes of Big Ben have bonged a few seconds fast recently, and I suppose it matters about as much as the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Which is to say: it matters a very great deal.

An immutable law is that the important things are not useful. Tourists come to see Buckingham Palace (so useless that the Queen lives there as little as possible) and London Bridge (by which they mean Tower Bridge, which goes up to let through ships that no longer visit the Pool of London).

Most of all they come for selfies with Big Ben, as everyone, native or alien, calls the Elizabeth Tower. We British, but not foreign tourists, may climb its 334 steps, by asking our MPs. Below the 13ton 10cwt 3qrs 15lb Big Ben, sits a triple Victorian clockwork marvel: the going train, the chime train and the strike train.

Its timekeeping hiccup is being exploited in the low wrangle over the value of restoring the Houses of Parliament. Advocates of moving Parliament to the National Exhibition Centre outside Birmingham like to assert that Westminster’s historic building is, in that most annoying of phrases “not fit for purpose”.

Yet, while we patronise the Victorians, strutting about in their hats and smelling of horses, we don’t, by and large, understand the mechanism of a clock that has kept time pretty well since 1859. I won’t try to explain. Fundamentally it is like a cuckoo-clock, with weights to drive it and a pendulum to keep time.

The most cross-grained of all cross-grained Victorians, Edmund Beckett Denison, invented its double threelegged gravity escapement. Even the amiable architect George Gilbert Scott found that Denison had an “unpleasant way of doing things”, but his clock went well enough. As everyone knows, it is regulated by putting an extra pre-decimal penny on top of the pendulum. The mechanics of this are puzzling.

Anyway, few passers-by set their watches by the 23ft clock faces shining out 180ft above the pavement, if only because not so many people wear watches. They tell the time by their mobiles. But they don’t always like to rummage for a phone, and fear having them snatched by the Corbynites, juvenile drug gangs and trained Romanian pickpockets who in their imagination fill every public spot. So they are glad of public clocks.

In any case, Big Ben’s chimes are not about telling the time. During the Second World War, when 20 million out of 48 million Britons listened to the 9 o’clock news at night, the full chimes and strokes from Westminster preceded the voice of the announcer. Even The Radio Times listed it as the Big Ben Minute.

When the chimes were abbreviated in 1960, listeners to the Home Service went bananas. Thousands wrote in. Some elevated the chimes to a spiritual experience.

I don’t know that we need go that far. Public clocks reflect the best of public sentiment, and many a blue-faced, gold-lettered clock was put up for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. Of public clocks, Big Ben is the most public, with all its associations of new year crowds or the misty Thames. It is never so powerful as when it is stopped, as it was for the funerals of Sir Winston Churchill and Lady Thatcher.

However many pennies, old or new, it takes to keep it as a focus of national feeling we should hang on to it.

Carpe horam! Six seconds fast or slow, its presence is always timely.