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The Church Clock and the People Who Kept It Wound

For centuries, the rhythm of Faversham was set by a single sound rising above the rooftops of the medieval market town. At the church of St Mary of Charity, the hourly strike of the tower clock ordered the working day, called townsfolk to market, and punctuated every wedding, funeral and Sunday service. Behind that familiar chime lay a quiet army of bell ringers, sextons, vergers and clock keepers whose small daily acts of attention kept the mechanism alive. Their story is one of duty, craft, and a stubborn refusal to let the town fall silent.

Clock winding was rarely glamorous work. It asked for a steady ladder climb in all weathers, a feel for the right tension on a heavy iron key, and a memory for the small eccentricities of a particular machine. Many of those who took on the task did so for decades, learning the clock's temperament as one learns the temperament of a horse or a stubborn relative. By the twentieth century, the role had passed largely into the hands of devoted amateurs and retired craftsmen, people who prized regularity over recognition.

This is also a story that travels well. Visitors who arrive at the church from the other side of the world often find unexpected kinship with a small English town that organised itself around a tower clock. In Sydney, a similar devotion once attached itself to the time ball at Fort Denison, while Melbourne's GPO tower keeps watch over commuters in much the same way the Faversham clock once watched over shepherds driving cattle to market. The mechanics differ, the devotion is the same.

A mechanism above the rooftops

The clock at St Mary of Charity sits high in the church tower, mounted in a robust cast-iron frame that has been overhauled more than once across the centuries. Mechanical tower clocks of this kind rely on a heavy weight-driven train of gears, regulated by a pendulum or, in earlier examples, by a foliot and verge escapement. Each swing releases just enough energy to keep the hands moving while the dial faces below show the hour to the town. The whole assembly is balanced to run for a set number of hours before the weight reaches the bottom of its pit and the mechanism must be re-energised.

In Faversham, the winding interval shaped everything else. Whoever took charge of the clock had to be available on a strict schedule, often twice a week at first and later once a week as the gear train was improved. Missed windings meant stopped hands, missed strikes, and the slow embarrassment of a silent tower on market day. Parish records from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries note the occasional gap and the swift return to routine, as if the clock itself had been sulking.

Australians who have travelled through the colonial-era towns of New South Wales will recognise the same anxiety. When a town clock stopped in a place like Maitland or Windsor, the silence felt almost indecent. The Victorian Country Press logged complaints whenever the Wangaratta post office clock failed, and the Melbourne Age regularly carried letters from readers who refused to trust a public building that could not tell the time. The cultural weight of a reliable public clock, set down first in places like Faversham, travelled intact to Australian shores and stayed there.

Winding intervals through the centuries

Bell ringers, sextons and the keeper of the keys

The clock did not look after itself. Its care fell across several overlapping roles within parish life, each of which carried its own title and its own corner of the tower. The sexton swept the churchyard, dug graves and lit the lamps, but also held a master key to the tower stair. The verger prepared the building for services and sometimes doubled as the clock keeper when no one else could be found. Above them stood the steeple keeper, and occasionally a bell captain whose real passion was the ringing chamber but whose duties crept downward into the clock room whenever the mechanism began to grumble.

Clock keepers, when they existed as a named post, were often local tradesmen. A blacksmith who understood iron could read the wear on a winding key. A carpenter who knew how timber moved could spot a cracked beam in the bell frame before it brought a corner of the ceiling down. Several Faversham clock keepers in the nineteenth century were wheelwrights or whitesmiths by trade, men whose day jobs dealt with shafts, bearings and the patient turning of metal. They brought those skills into the tower without ceremony, week after week, year after year.

The relationships between these roles were not always smooth. Bell ringers complained when a clock keeper tightened the striking hammer too sharply, because the jolt travelled down into the belfry and knocked the ropes out of true. Sextons grumbled when ringers left the trap door open and let the draught whistle down through the church in midwinter. Quiet negotiation, occasionally a firmly written note in the parish magazine, kept the system from falling apart. Those notes survive in the parish chest at the church's dedication history page, where they speak of a working community bound as much by irritation as by affection.

The weekly winding ritual

Winding a tower clock is not a quick job. The key itself, often a heavy iron bar with a squared end, fits onto a winding square set into the main weight drum. The clock keeper turns it, usually in a fixed direction, counting revolutions by feel as the weight rises back up the pit. A large Victorian-era clock can demand around a hundred and fifty turns of the key before the weight returns to its working position. The work is tiring on the arms and unforgiving on the back, which is why most clock keepers worked in pairs.

The ritual came with its own quiet courtesies. Winding was done at a regular hour so that other tower users could plan around it. The clock keeper wiped the key, oiled the winding squares twice a year, and listened, always listened, for any new noise from the train. A faint scraping might mean a worn pivot. A heavier thud could mean a cracked tooth in one of the wheels. Reading the clock by ear was as important as reading it by sight, and the best keepers could describe their machine's health in a paragraph after a single ascent of the stairs.

Australian readers might be reminded of the orderly queue at a suburban bottle shop on a Saturday morning, where everyone knows roughly whose turn it is and the system works because nobody tries to jump in. The same unspoken etiquette governed winding days at St Mary of Charity. When a regular keeper fell ill, a substitute would be found without fuss. When a visitor wanted to climb the tower, the keeper would explain, patiently, that winding came first. The clock had to run before anything else, because the clock was what kept the rest of the parish honest about the time.

Sounds the tower clock still makes

Repairs, restorations and the watchmaker's art

Every tower clock eventually fails in some way. Escapements wear, suspension springs fatigue, and the cast-iron frame itself can crack where the bolts pass through. The history of the St Mary of Charity clock is a sequence of small repairs punctuated by a handful of major restorations. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, work was carried out by travelling clock makers who toured the south-east of England from workshops in London, Canterbury and Rochester. They left their marks on the dial, the movement and sometimes on the bell ropes, in the form of small punched initials that can still be found with a torch and a little patience.

By the Victorian period, clock keeping in England had professionalised. The Worshipful Company of Clockmakers, founded in 1631, maintained standards and kept records of dishonest repairers, while the British Horological Institute, founded later in London, trained a generation of specialist restorers. Australian horology, which grew along similar lines, produced its own institutes in Sydney and Melbourne through the twentieth century, and Australian restorers have worked on tower clocks from Perth to Brisbane. The trade is small enough that names pass easily between hemispheres, and a restorer in Kent will often know a counterpart in New South Wales within a single phone call.

Restoration today is more conservative than it once was. Where earlier generations replaced worn parts with brand new ones, modern practice aims to retain as much original material as possible, repairing rather than replacing. The justification is partly heritage, partly pragmatism: an original tooth, even a chipped one, has proved itself over centuries, whereas a fresh replacement is an unknown quantity. Visitors who climb the tower can often see the layered history of repair in the contrasting colours of brass, the patina on iron, and the small handwritten dates scratched into the frame by successive keepers.

Era Who wound the clock Typical interval Tools of the trade Main risk
Medieval and Tudor Parish sexton or verger Every 24 to 48 hours Hand key, lantern, ladder Missed winding, fire in the tower
Stuart and Georgian Local tradesman, sometimes a wheelwright Once or twice a week Hand key, oil can, basic tools Worn escapement, cracked frame
Victorian Professional clock maker or trained keeper Once a week, sometimes less Calibrated key, hand tools, log book Striking hammer damage, bell frame cracks
Twentieth century Volunteer or contracted horologist Once a week to monthly Hand key, electric winder, gauges Wear on synthetic ropes, corrosion
Twenty-first century Contracted specialist with parish liaison Scheduled visits, electric assist Motorised winder, diagnostic tools, conservation plans Loss of craft knowledge, component obsolescence

Hearing the clock in the modern town

The clock still runs, and the tower still marks the hour across Faversham. Winding is no longer done by a parish volunteer climbing a ladder in the dark; the mechanism is now tended under a service contract, and the heavy weights are raised by a small electric motor on a timer. Yet the human chain that kept the clock alive for so long has not quite snapped. Volunteers from the church still meet the horologist on routine visits, learn the basic checks, and pass on the small knowledge of which pivot to oil and which to leave alone. The clock is, in a real sense, still looked after.

This continuity matters more than it might first appear. Heritage legislation in Australia, from the New South Wales Heritage Act to the Victorian Heritage Register, treats working mechanical clocks as significant industrial artefacts rather than mere decorations. The same instinct is visible in the way English parishes treat their tower clocks: as living pieces of engineering that deserve the same care as a medieval rood screen or a Tudor chest. On both sides of the world, the practical and the sacred sit comfortably side by side.

Anyone planning a visit can find out more about the church, its clock and the wider heritage project through Built To Inspire, where opening times, access notes and the story of the building are kept up to date. Standing in the churchyard on a still evening, with the last strike of the hour fading into the rooftops, the long line of keepers feels suddenly close. The sound is theirs, and ours, and for a few seconds the town keeps time together.