That's brilliant .
I was in awe of my grown up cousin when i was small in the 60's . And he thought the world of me , always buying me Dinky toys and showing me " Magic tricks " .. He worked at Chatham Dockyard refitting submarines. He made a skeleton clock ,(in dockyard time…) it was under a glass dome in his mums house . Corrr , I thought , he must be really clever ..all those wheels filed out and shiny , and it worked… Then he got married and moved away to Rosyth when the dockyard closed , we kinda never saw them again , i was heartbroken ! Forward a few decades , he's retired and he comes down south to visit relatives , and we meet up . I mention my memory of the clock .
. " Christ no " he says " I didn't make just one ..I made dozens !! Well i didn't actually make them
, I only cut out the frames
..you see , Chatham High Street was being developed and in every skip would be a shop clock..Fusee movement wall clocks ..they were worthless then..So me and my mate would pull out all these clocks , take them to work , get a sheet of brass from the dockyard stores… take the clock to bits ,mark out where the wheels go onto the sheet off brass , draw a pretty frame and cut it out . Then reassemble it with the new frames and then you've got an 18th century clock !! Whatever you do you mustn't leave any file marks..or else you get rumbled! We'd go over it for hours with flour paper . Then you'd got to a junk shop and buy a Victorian stuffed bird in a glass dome,chuck the bird away and use the dome for the clock .. And it didn't matter if , you got it wrong and they didn't work , as no-one expects an old clock to run !! "
"Then we'd send them to an auction….slip them in with other junk we'd found ..
Until one day the auctioneer said to me ' Ere ' 'Arry , where are you getting all these antique clocks from then ? ..
So i stopped doing them .
What a fraud ! And i idolised him !!
Edited By Hacksaw on 10/01/2022 17:53:41