About Time, page 12
There were twenty time signals around Britain’s coast itself, from Edinburgh in the north to Falmouth in the south, and a further fifty-one had been erected by that date in British colonies overseas, including installations in India, Singapore, Africa, Australasia, Canada, Malta, Gibraltar, Mauritius and the West Indies. It was by far the world’s biggest network of time-signaling stations, but by 1908 America was fast catching up as a world power, having built twenty-two coastal time signals on its own soil, with a further two in its port possessions in the Philippines.
The states of Norway, Denmark and Sweden, between them, had twenty-three time-signaling stations, but only around their own treacherously convoluted coastlines. Germany, France and Russia each had ten signals on the 1908 list, although only four of these were mounted in overseas territories: one in Germany’s imperial naval base at Tsingtao, China, and three in France’s possessions in Africa. By this time, the overseas empire of the Netherlands was focused on Indonesia, where two signals had been built, and Suriname, on South America’s northeastern coast, where there was one time disc. A further signal was available on the island of Curaçao, off Venezuela’s coast. There were four signals erected around the coastline of the Netherlands itself.
What of the other big European empires? By 1908, Portugal’s overseas possessions had dwindled to the point where the country operated only four time signals—in its colonies in Africa and the Azores—as well as one in Lisbon. Spain, having once been the greatest imperial superpower, had recently lost much of its last remaining territory in the Spanish-American War of 1898–99, and in 1908 only operated time signals at its home ports of Vigo and Cádiz. Austria-Hungary had built four signals on its lands in today’s Croatia and Italy, while Italy itself had come much later to the overseas imperial scramble, although it had, of course, long been a proud maritime nation. In 1908, it had no overseas signals but had built a network of eight around its own long coastline—including a time ball and gun at Catania, the Sicilian city that had provided ancient Rome with its first public timekeeper over 2,000 years earlier. A further twenty-one time-signal stations dotted the coastlines of China, Japan, Egypt, Cuba and Hawaii, with five more around South America.
Yet, while this geopolitical atlas of time signals can help shine a light on the shifting sands of maritime empires at the turn of the twentieth century, it can never reveal the whole story. Belgium only merited one entry in the 1908 time-signal register, a set of four circular discs mounted on the tower of a government building in the port of Antwerp, despite the fact that it had been engaged in the most vicious imperialism in the heart of Africa for over a quarter of a century. But until that year it had been a private colony, not a state one. In the 1870s and 1880s, Belgium’s king, Leopold II, had worked with the British colonialist Henry Morton Stanley to privately occupy what is today the Democratic Republic of Congo. For twenty-five years he made a personal fortune from rubber, ivory and minerals extracted from his possessions. But the sickening cruelty his agents perpetrated on the people of the region became hard for the international community to ignore. As evidence of the scale of atrocities mounted, in 1908 the Belgian state reluctantly took over the king’s private holding, giving Belgium a major overseas colony for the first time. Yet all this is missed if we simply look at the single time signal in Antwerp.
Nonetheless, whatever the individual histories of empires, this global infrastructure of navigation does give us a vivid sense of the overall scale of the imperial project as the twentieth century came into view. Each and every one of these time-signal installations was a major practical and legal undertaking, and involved complex engineering, scientific research, technological development, land acquisition, the recruitment of labor forces, legal negotiation, agreements, protocols, maintenance, record keeping, astronomical observation, instrument making and a quite extraordinary amount of expertise developed over decades or centuries. Each one was a heavy investment and a long-term liability and, taken together with the tens of thousands of shipboard chronometers for which they were built, and the global network of chronometer-testing stations, makers, retailers and supply depots, not to mention the astronomical observatories that found the time in the first place, we can see an astonishing global infrastructure of time—of clocks in one form or another—that have been all but forgotten. Plot all these time signals and chronometers on a map of the world and you can see how clocks enabled empires.
Or, better yet, look at the clocks that showed off empires for all to see and marvel at—and still do. In 2020, I was invited on a special visit to see behind a door in London’s Piccadilly Circus Tube station that is normally kept firmly locked shut. Keith Scobie-Youngs, who runs the Cumbria Clock Company and looks after some of the UK’s most important public clocks, had asked if I wanted to see an early electric-clock mechanism, hidden in a cramped cupboard on the station concourse, that he had been asked to refurbish. I was quick to accept. As I joined Scobie-Youngs in the little enclosure, I found a Heath Robinson–like assemblage of wheels, pinions, levers, motors, wires and electrical coils, which looked for all the world like a child’s Meccano dream. But as I came to understand what did what, and which part was connected to which mechanism, I realized it was a different sort of dream. It is the sophisticated device that drives the station’s world-time clock, a map of the world with a brightly illuminated horizontal band at the equator marked with the hour numerals of time that slowly rotates throughout the day and night. These days, passengers hurry past the clock without noticing it, intent on reaching the platforms deep below and onward to their destination. But when the clock was first set running, in April 1929, it showed the dream of a global empire, and it was besieged by onlookers.
World-time clocks like this show the time anywhere on Earth. All you need to do is find your place on the map and follow a vertical path with your finger to the illuminated equatorial band. The numerals there will tell you the time. But this one offered a little more than that, as London Underground’s 1920s managers picked out six places for special attention. Each one of the six was marked with a tiny light bulb and was connected to the time band by a polished metal spike, sharpened at the end like an arrow. But it could equally have looked like a stake, driven hard into the Earth to signify occupation and ownership. A news report in 1928 described the newly built Piccadilly Circus Tube station as “the Hub of the Empire,” and passengers ascending its new escalators were greeted by a huge painted mural of the world—with Britain firmly at its center.15 The world-time map installed on the station’s circular concourse should have looked like a chart of Britain’s imperial success. But when we scrutinize the six places picked out for the public’s attention we can see an imperialist’s dream turning into a nightmare.
Piccadilly Circus world-time clock being demonstrated in 1929
Greenwich sits dead center, of course: the seventeenth-century observatory that had been founded to serve an expanding empire by a king running an African slave-trading operation with his brother. Greenwich, the observatory that by the twentieth century had become the very center of time and space. But what of the other five spotlit cities?
The next place to be picked out with a light bulb and a metal stake on the clock is New York, which the slave-trading king and his brother had seized a few years before they built Greenwich its observatory, but which had broken away from the clutches of the British in such a decisive fashion a century later. Near it are the lamp and stake marking the city of Victoria, in Canada’s British Columbia. It was named after the queen who had colonized it in the nineteenth century, but by the 1920s it was almost free of British control. It was a similar story below the map’s illuminated equator. The fourth lamp on the map is Sydney, in Australia, a land that, like Canada, was finally sloughing off the British. La Plata, in Argentina, is the fifth lamp. This was no former British colony but had been the focus of intense trade diplomacy between Argentina and Britain in the 1920s—its lamp was symbolic of the new empires being forged that favored new worlds, not old ones. And the sixth lamp? It was Cape Town, and it, too, was finally throwing off the yoke of the British imperialists.
By the mid-1920s the imperial map of world power was changing fast. The US economy and naval strength were on the rise. Japan, Italy and Germany were all shifting into a high gear. By contrast, Britain lost control of both Egypt and the Irish Republic in 1922, and control over all its dominions was weakened in the 1926 Balfour Declaration. By the 1930s, South Africa moved away completely and India began moving toward independence. But the crowds at Piccadilly Circus Tube station in 1929 saw none of this. In this bright electrical clock, mounted proudly on a marble wall surrounded by lavish bronze fixtures, the traveling public saw Britain, or rather London, at the center of the world, and they saw the sharpened metal stakes of imperial ownership planted firmly and defiantly in Africa, the Americas and Australia. It was all a fiction by then, but it was a fiction many people still believed. Because what happened in Piccadilly Circus was happening on a vast scale in another hub of the 1920s British Empire. With clocks, the message of British supremacy was being transmitted not just to a Tube station but around the world. And this message was emanating from a field in the Warwickshire countryside.
BY THE 1910S a new technology was offering something that had once seemed like a miracle: long-distance communication without wires. Who needed to wait in port for the daily time signal when wireless came along? Sailors could check their chronometers every day while at sea, which meant they could go faster because their navigation was more accurate.
The first international time signals by wireless were broadcast from the Eiffel Tower in Paris from 1912. Ten years later a network of fifty transmitting stations around the world provided daily time signals for ships at sea. All the major maritime empires were served: there were wireless stations in British India, the Dutch East Indies, French Indo-China and Portuguese East Africa, among many others, but none in Britain itself, much to the consternation of Frank Hope-Jones, chair of the Radio Society and a leading manufacturer of electric clocks, who said in 1923 that “the Englishman, who regarded Greenwich time as something peculiarly British, has been getting it from the observatories and countries of his neighbours to an increasing extent for the last ten years.”16 But plans were afoot to right this wrong.
Rugby radio station was opened by the General Post Office in 1926 as part of Britain’s Imperial Wireless Chain, a project set up after the First World War to connect the whole of the British Empire together by wireless communication. It specialized in long-wave transmission, which could travel over very long distances as its radio waves followed the curvature of the Earth rather than radiating in straight lines and ending up in space, and was designed to communicate with the entire Royal Navy at once, reaching as far as Canada, India, South Africa and Australia directly from the UK. One of its first jobs was to transmit twice-daily time signals for navigation, under the call sign GBR.
It would be easy to see the GPO’s Rugby radio station as a technical solution to a communication and navigation problem. But it meant far more than that. As the British Empire was rapidly falling apart, Rugby was built as part of a government public-relations campaign to boost Britain’s sense of imperial pride, and it was impossible to miss the GPO in the 1930s. Its film unit made distinctive and innovative programming for cinemas around the country. It developed promotional services like a telephone talking clock. It invited newsreel cameras to the opening of every switchboard, exchange and radio station. But what it was really doing was trying to prop up the very idea of a united British Empire—or, rather, of Britishness itself.
In 1932, the GPO welcomed the Pathé news company to Rugby to film “The World’s Greatest Radio Station.” In one scene, as a Morse buzzer chatters away and its message spools out on a printed paper tape, viewers learn that:
whilst we are here, this transmitter is sending out news to liners in all the seven seas. No place is inaccessible to GBR. For those who can’t read Morse, this machine is signalling that the Post Office Rugby Station is the most powerful in the world.
What this scene was really signaling was that the British Empire still considered itself the most powerful in the world. The radio station’s transmitters were merely a proxy for the empire, and the film was made as a rallying call to the British people. But it was too late. After the Second World War ended, Britain was on its knees as America and the USSR became the world’s superpowers and each one geared up for the Cold War. One by one, Britain’s former possessions cut their ties with the mother country, with India’s independence in 1947 a particular blow to Britain’s imperialists. But empires cast long shadows, and we still live with them today.
The clock that was originally installed at the Greenwich observatory in 1927 to transmit the time to Rugby for broadcast to the British Empire was a type called a “free-pendulum,” which actually comprised two devices, one called the “master” and the other termed the “slave.” The master clock was free and did little work; the slave clock was forced to march to the master’s beat and carried out all the labor of time distribution to the radio transmitters. The terminology of slave clocks had been coined in 1904, by a British government astronomer, but not at Greenwich.17 It was in Africa, at the Cape of Good Hope observatory, at the height of the Western imperial scramble to carve up the continent and its people, that a white British official, working at an institution whose very walls had been built by enslaved people, chose to enslave clocks themselves. Over a century later, people still routinely use the racist terminology of master-and-slave systems in engineering and horology, yet it carries a violent weight of the imperial past, born in Africa.
In 1949, the original GBR time signal from Rugby was joined by another, known as MSF. The MSF signal is still broadcast today, though the radio transmitters moved from Rugby to Cumbria in 2007. When I was curator of timekeeping at the National Maritime Museum, I helped preserve the last ever Rugby MSF clock just before the service moved out. The clock had been built as recently as the 1990s and comprised a rack of electronic equipment the size of four wardrobes side by side, and contained three independent sub-clocks, each with its own chain of driving circuitry to the transmitter: one cesium atomic clock, one rubidium atomic clock and a third clock set right by GPS satellites. Three independent drive chains increased reliability and allowed the three clocks to be compared with each other, improving accuracy.
One carried a large plaque labeling it the “red drive chain.” One was captioned the “white drive chain.” And one carried the words “blue drive chain.” Red, white and blue. The white chain carried an additional sign that designated it the “master.”
The writer John Agard was born in 1949 in the Caribbean country known then as British Guiana. It was part of the British Empire until 1966, when it gained independence and took the name Guyana. Agard moved to the UK in the 1970s. In 2007, he was working at the National Maritime Museum as writer-in-residence and I showed him the Rugby MSF clock which we had just acquired. A few days later, he wrote a poem about it, entitled “The Rugby Clock”:
Today, if I may, I’ll tackle the Rugby Clock.
Sorry if rugby fans are suitably shocked
that I choose to scrum with the language of clocks.
I promise not to mention the All Blacks
But rather how metaphors transmit their tracks
onto Empire’s timebound timepieces.
How Britannia dwells in ticktock spaces
where radio-ruled time governed the dusky races.
Allow me to kick off with the red, white and blue
which is familiar as rhubarb stew.
Observe the red drive chain
the white drive chain
the blue drive chain.
All masters in their own relentless right.
All masters and equal in the sight
of cosmic time’s timeless curriculum.
But since some masters are more equal than some,
—if I may borrow an Orwellian dictum
without putting too fine a point on it—
note which drive chain takes the master credit
and how the master frequency control overseers
the—wait for it—white drive chain.
Now, I hear you ask, where does blackness fit
into this time-dictated continuum?
Am I, so to speak, winding you up for a scrum?
Blackness as mother of time will be my next thesis.
Meanwhile, time ticks its nemesis—
For aren’t we all chained by the wrists?
7
Manufacture
Gog and Magog, London, 1865
For over a month, the building at numbers 64 and 65 Cheapside had been missing its entire façade and roof while a major refurbishment and remodeling took place, and five stories of complex scaffolding shielded the site from curious bystanders on this crowded City of London thoroughfare that leads from St. Paul’s Cathedral to the Bank of England. John Bennett was expanding his clock- and watchmaking business, and he knew that to survive meant to innovate, so he was turning his Cheapside premises into a tourist attraction, filled with the latest horological technology that would draw onlookers—and customers—from far and wide. It was a Friday morning in May 1865, and the project was in its final fortnight. For the building contractors, this was a lucrative job. As a retail remodeling, it was unusual not just in its scale but in the nature of the work being carried out, and, that day, many of the workers were at the very top of the building helping the foreman install a huge piece of specialist equipment behind the roof parapet. It was heavy and difficult work, made harder by the cramped conditions on the highest level of the scaffold and the unseasonably warm weather London was enjoying. Everyone was tired, hot and fatigued from a long week when suddenly, without warning, disaster struck.
