On clock chimes and raindrops

In 1872, a clock was designed and installed for Tuam town hall by John Brady, watchmaker &c.[1] The clock had been commissioned to celebrate the arrival of the railway in the western town, topping out the reconstructed town hall, as part of a new self-confidence of increasingly empowered town commissioners. High up above the town, illuminated by a jet of gas, it promised to dispense time-discipline to the western town’s residents night and day in ticks and tocks. But the new era did not arrive as planned. The clock was nearly always slow; on some days it was five minutes slow, others fifteen, sometimes it chimed five times at six o’clock. Complaints abounded from people who missed their trains, were late for mass, or needed to know when to leave for market. The town wags soon got to work; in the summer of 1888 a chalk sketch of a clock mysteriously appeared in the market square ‘with the hands persistently pointing at two’. Under the clock appeared ‘the sublime scroll “time to go home boys”’.[2] The same year a letter appeared in the Tuam Herald, bemoaning the stillness of the clock’s hands: 

When Mr Brady climbed the spiral stairs to the clock tower to scrutinize the workings, he found that the problem was the rain. Instead of regular ticks and tocks the clock tower resounded with the sonorous splash of rain on brass. All this water was shifting and transforming the materials of the clock tower; due to summer heat the timbers of the clock tower had shrunk and no longer fitted properly, meaning that in winter rain poured in, collected in pools, and rotted the beams of the tower. These structural changes meant that ‘on the day of our visit the water was coming over the lead in large quantities and dashing on to the clock works with considerable force.’[3] The gas flame lighting the clock also compounded these problems; the glass in the clock face was loose and letting rainwater in, but it could not be tightened up or it would break ‘from want of expansion room when the gas is lighted’ while when the flame was extinguished moisture from the air was condensing and dripping over the workings.[4] Experts were brought in, from Galway, Dublin, and Germany to examine the mechanism, but no adequate solution could be found; the clock was repaired and repaired throughout the nineteenth-century until the tower was destroyed in the War of Independence in 1920. But reconstruction of the tower did not bring an end to the problem; the clock continued to lose time due to the continued issues of damp and condensation. In 2017 it stopped altogether when the clock face was covered in a thick growth of moss.

There’s a number of ways this story can be read. In a way is a story about the extension of time-discipline to Tuam, and the way that this was subverted by the agency of the weather. Towns function through daily and seasonal rhythm: shops open in the morning, scavengers do their rounds, church services are held, traders and consumers do their rounds of shops, until darkness comes and quiet descends. At moments of crisis and revolution these urban functions are cut through by crisis and drama in the streets which breaks the cycle of ordinary time. The weather disrupts these rhythms: shoppers tended to stay away from markets on wet days, builders downed their tools, and middle-class women stayed indoors. Urban innovations from pavements to covered markets (all maintained by an army of oilskin clad laborers) were introduced to mitigate the impact of bad weather, and to keep the city functioning even when the rain fell. In 1880s Tuam, the rain-drenched clock played a role in preventing the rhythmic cycles of the day from playing out as they should: trains were missed, shops opened late, pubs didn’t call time. Moreover, the clock slowly breaking down reveals the myriad urban agents at work in this town; alongside the commissioners and clock makers, water dripped, air expanded, bryophytes crawled across stone, iron rusted, and timbers expanded. These movements had a particular momentum in places like Tuam of high rainfall and high mobility, and as notions of urban modernity in moved across Ireland they needed to—somehow—be regulated.

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[1] Tuam Herald, 27 Jan 1872, p. 2.

[2] Tuam Herald, 21 July 1888, p. 2.

[3] Galway County Archives (GCA), Tuam Town Commissioners, 26 June 1888.

[4] Tuam Herald, 11 August 1888, p. 3.

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[1] Tuam Herald, 27 Jan 1872, p. 2.

[2] Tuam Herald, 21 July 1888, p. 2.

[3] Galway County Archives (GCA), Tuam Town Commissioners, 26 June 1888.

[4] Tuam Herald, 11 August 1888, p. 3. alongside commissioners and clock makers, dripping water, expanding air, encroaching bryophytes, rusting iron, expanding timbers, all played a role in creating puddles, slowly shifting stonework, and making people miss their train.

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[1] Tuam Herald, 27 Jan 1872, p. 2.

[2] Tuam Herald, 21 July 1888, p. 2.

[3] Galway County Archives (GCA), Tuam Town Commissioners, 26 June 1888.

[4] Tuam Herald, 11 August 1888, p. 3.