Clock

Railway-related items remain one of the staples of the collectables market, with rarity and links to locomotive history among the key factors determining demand. Here ATG selects a small group of items from the healthy supply of lots on offer at two auctions taking place this week.

Dr John C Taylor, the horologist, inventor and clockmaker, has been given the Harrison Medal by the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers for his services to horology.

Berlin online auction house Auctionata set a house record when this Chinese enamel, ivory-mounted and paste-set musical and automaton clock was sold for €2.8m (£2.15m), or €3.37m including premium.

Two lantern clocks engraved with the signature ‘Thomas Loomes at ye mermayd in Lothbury’ recently appeared at auction within days of each other.

What is billed as “the best collection of English clocks that has come to the market in living memory” will go on sale later this year at Winchester dealers Carter Marsh.

All five of John Harrison’s famous timekeepers will be on display in a new exhibition at the National Maritime Museum this summer.

Gents of Leicester, the first company to market electric bells in the UK, began to produce the electric clock system, known eventually as the Pulsynetic in the first decade of the 20th century.

As single disciplines go, English clocks are among the London summer fairs’ strongest suits.

Bids in the region of £1000-1500 are expected at Plymouth Auction Rooms on May 9 for this Eureka four-glass electric clock.

JOHAN Ten Hoeve, a professional development diploma student on West Dean College’s clocks programme in West Sussex, has made a replica of a Thomas Tompion clock for the Royal Observatory Greenwich.

Positive news from Dreweatts' clocks sale at Donnington Priory, Newbury on February 10 which posted a 92 per cent selling rate.

When first unveiled at the International Exhibition in London in 1862 (and subsequently shipped to Paris in 1867 and Vienna in 1873), the St James’s Clock, as it became known, was heralded as the second largest clock in the world after E.J. Dent’s Big Ben.

A substantial reward is being offered for the return of a George III ormolu and white marble table clock by Matthew Boulton stolen from Knightsbridge dealership Hotspur on the afternoon of Wednesday, August 22.

Four antique clocks and two barometers were stolen in a raid on Chislehurst Antiques in Kent in late December.