The AHS Blog

Journal Volume 35 Issue 1

On the trail of a turret clock

This post was written by Dale Sardeson

Many readers will no doubt be aware of the Thwaites archive transcription and investigation project that James Nye and Keith Scobie-Youngs have been working on for the last few years.

As part of my own research into the turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Bond-Street watchmaking partnership Allam & Caithness, I asked James if he would look into the Thwaites documents for me and see what he could find pertaining to the pair.

I knew there was bound to be something, because in the Society of Antiquaries in London there is an Allam & Caithness table clock with a stamped Thwaites movement. I just didn’t know what or how much else the archive might reveal.

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Table clock signed for Allam & Caithness in the library of the Society of Antiquaries of London, Thwaites movement no. 4153.

The period of daybooks that Keith and James have transcribed runs from 1780 to 1798, finishing three years after John Allam and Thomas Caithness went into partnership. With no Allam & Caithness entries in the daybooks for this period it appears that the pair did not have anything made for them by Thwaites during their first few years of trading, though unsurprisingly the partnership of William Allam (John’s father) and Thomas Clements did turn up a few entries in the transcribed period.

Undeterred though, James located a handful of pages from the Thwaites estimate book in the early 1800s pertaining to Allam & Caithness. All for turret clocks, among them was the following, dated September 1804, for an eight-day turret clock to be supplied for the Halsey Estate at Gaddesden Place in Hertfordshire.

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Thwaites estimate book entry for Allam & Caithness turret clock for Gaddesden Place (image courtesy of James Nye)

James kindly did a search of the turret clock database and found that an Allam & Caithness turret clock is in St. John-the-Baptist church in Great Gaddesden, just down the road from Gaddesden Place...

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Visitors to Gaddesden Place in 1926 (image courtesy of gaddesdenplace.com)

...so to Gaddesden we must go.

To be continued.