All Events

7th November 2024

Gordon Hoare

‘The Idiosyncrasies of working on Chronometers’.

Some of you attending the South London branch open day, on Saturday the 5th of October, may have stopped to talk to Gordon with his terrific display of fine chronometers in the Garland Hall of Soper Hall. Gordon has been fascinated with horology for over 60 years, being a longstanding member of the Sussex branch of the BHI and attends the AHS meetings at West Dean.

He has been lucky to have the support of expert chronometer craftsmen. When starting on chronometers he was given support by Robin Thatcher and later when suffering Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, cleaning one of his chronometer balances, the jewels fell out when the shellac failed. Roger Stephenson came to the rescue and expertly tutored him putting the jewels back into their rightful places. Gordon wishes to share some of the idiosyncrasies and problems he has experienced while working on and maintaining his collection of chronometers and will bring along some examples for us to admire.

Gordon is 7th Dan Kyoshi, Black belt, Senior Instructor of the Horsham DKW Wadoryu Karate club, which he helped to set up. He is also interested in electrical horology and inexpensive watches.

Duncan Greig

Doors open at 19:30, Starting 20.00 hours.

The meeting will be held at The White Hart Barn in Godstone.

THE WHITE HART BARN (Godstone Village Hall)

GODSTONE

SURREY RH9 8DU

7.30pm for 8.00pm Start

5th September 2024

The Beresford Hutchinson Memorial Lecture.

Darlah Thomas.The Condliff Family, four generations of clockmakers. Their Lives and Business.

As this is the Beresford Hutchinson Memorial Lecture, we will be having our customary light buffet of food and clock oil of your choice

I first met Darlah and Steve Thomas at Lyme Park 2014 with the Manchester Branch of the BHI and the Northern section of the AHS. We had another encounter in 2019 when the Northern section AHS had a full day celebrating 50 years of existence, Darlah giving the closing lecture.

Darlah and her husband Steve are collectors and researchers having published The Gloverstone Clockmakers of Chester, (their hometown), Joyce of Whitchurch, 1690-1965. The Turret Clocks of T Cooke & Sons of York, and many other articles www.inbeat.org

During Lockdown 20 years of compiling information, in my opinion, the best Skeleton clockmaker James Condliff brings to light a family who were prolific 19^th century clockmakers of Liverpool. They not only produced domestic and board room clocks, Skeleton clocks but Regulators and Turret clocks. Researching information on the family has been difficult as they did not advertise or produce catalogues and lived quietly. There emerges more to the story as Dealers, clock makers, restorers and conservators alike have shared their photographs and information.

Remembering as we do Beresford Hutchinson in our lecture tonight, I am sure there would be many more recollections he would have contributed from his encyclopaedic mind.

Duncan Greig

Doors open at 19:30, Starting 20.00 hours.

The meeting will be held at The White Hart Barn in Godstone.

THE WHITE HART BARN (Godstone Village Hall)

GODSTONE

SURREY RH9 8DU

7.30pm for 8.00pm Start

1st August 2024

Richard Steedman.
‘How Computers tell the time’.

Richard is Hon Secretary of the BHI Wessex Branch and a strictly amateur horologist. He works as a consultant in the semiconductor industry and has a keen interest in electrical horology. His talk arose from a request by the Technical Editor of the HJ, Justin Koullopis, for an article about how NTP (the protocol that computers use to synchronise their clocks over the internet) works. Richard prepared the talk during Covid lockdown to get his thoughts straight and eventually produced a written article which was published in the January 2024 issue of HJ.
Richard’s talk will cover in detail the various messages that computers send to each other over the Internet to set their clocks as accurately as possible. He will conclude with some photos of his electrical horology collection, some of which use the NTP to keep accurate time.

Doors open at 19:30, Starting 20.00 hours.

The meeting will be held at The White Hart Barn in Godstone.

THE WHITE HART BARN (Godstone Village Hall)

GODSTONE

SURREY RH9 8DU

7.30pm for 8.00pm Start

Please note we have a date and venue change, due to the Election.

The May Meeting will be at

Soper Hall Community Centre, Harestone Valley Road, Caterham, CR3 6HY.

11th July 2024

Douglas Bateman BSc FBHI
‘Timekeeping: A hobby of a Lifetime’.

Doug has been a horologist for over 50 years, his first interest was precision horology which grew and grew into an extensive career. He has an extremely active scientific mind and an understanding of mathematics that led to him contributing to the 2nd edition of A J Rawlings book The Science of Clocks and Watches.

I first encountered him around 1978 when he handed over one of his radio check rate machines to Martin Burgess, creator of the Harrison clocks A and B after a Science Museum lecture. This was to my mind the infancy of the GPS clocks that we take for granted today. Douglas not only provided Martin with a state-of-the-art time base on which to test his Harrison masterpieces, but he also became involved in the 1990s with The Greenwich Time Ball when Jonathan Betts asked if it was possible for the Rugby radio time signal to control the raising and lowering of the ball. Doug is not only proficient with the making of a precision mechanical clock, i.e. temperature compensation and barometric pressure compensation, but also with electronics that are sometimes used to provide impulses and digital recording of time. He also understands the quality (Q) factor of a pendulum and he will bring along several Bob shapes to illustrate how a pendulum interacts with the air that surrounds it giving it a better Q. He was a lifelong friend of Philp Woodward and would have had many a discussion with Bob Holmstrom the long-term editor of the Horological Science Newsletter who recently passed away. Doug has a parallel interest in trig points and the history of Ordnance Survey. He was also involved with measuring Big Ben in the 70s when the fly shaft sheared, he has written many an article on horology including “The Trouble with John Harrison” He is an inaugural member of the British Sundial Society, a Fellow of the British Horological Institute and a Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

Doors open 19:30 Starting 20.00 hours.

6th June 2024

‘The Clock and Watchmakers of Stow on the Wold’.

Barnaby Smith

Barnaby gives a lot of his time to being our treasurer and is also chairman/treasurer of the South-East Section of The Antiquarian Horological Society. He is also a member of the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers.

He worked for 38 years for the in-house bank of PSA Peugeot Citroen.

During the last year, Barnaby has written and privately published an informative work on “Clock and Watch Makers of Stow on the Wold”. Some of my introduction comes from his Preface. In 1986 shortly after moving into their new home, he purchased a lantern clock signed “Archer, Stow”. Inquisitively he wanted to know more of the Archer family and started to keep records of their clocks and also to collect some of them. This he thought would only be a dozen or so but he now has records of over 240 Archer family clocks, as well as those of other Stow makers.

This evening Barnaby will share with us his fascination for Stow on the Wold clocks. He will cover the three generations of the Archer family of clockmakers and will outline the different styles of clocks made by them, as well as the other clockmakers in the town.

Doors open 19:00 Starting 19:30 hours.

Please note we have a venue change, due to the Elections.

The May Meeting will be at

Soper Hall Community Centre, Harestone Valley Road, Caterham, CR3 6HY.

2nd May 2024

The South London Branch is delighted to welcome back Malcolm Archer Tutor from West Dean.

He will give us a short introduction on how he has been coping with teaching horology to the students over the last year and then individually introduce one of four student presentations.

Titles as follows:

Doors open 19:30 Starting 20.15 hours.

4th April 2024

The Antikythera Mechanism and a Modern Reproduction

Stephen Phillips, B Eng, C Eng, MIET

Doors open at 19:30, Starting 20.00 hours.

The meeting will be held at The White Hart Barn in Godstone.

THE WHITE HART BARN (Godstone Village Hall)

GODSTONE

SURREY RH9 8DU

7.30pm for 8.00pm Start