How the public kept 'Clotherholme's Big Ben' ticking
THE public appeal to keep the Ripon Grammar School clocktower chiming continues a long tradition of community support for our iconic building.
As today’s donations towards caretaker Matthew Buller’s restoration project reach more than £1,000 of its £1,500 target, it is heartening to look back on the support it has had in the past.
Often affectionately, and jokingly, referred to as ‘Clotherholme’s Big Ben’, there is actually a connection.
The designer of the RGS clock’s working parts was Sir Edmund Beckett, otherwise known as Lord Grimthorpe, who also, in 1851, designed the machinery which controls the Big Ben great bell and works the clock in the Houses of Parliament.
The new tower building, designed and constructed from 1887 to 1889, was intended to advance the school’s rising fortunes, as a celebration of the formidable reputation the school had established in the North of England.
Constructed of expensive pressed red bricks from Leeds and stone from Rainton, it cost £6,600 to build – equivalent to £750,000 today.
But since the endowment funds released to pay for it were intended entirely for the provision of education, as the building neared completion, the Charities Commission announced it would not release the money to pay for a purely ornamental clock and its turret.
Past pupils came to the rescue in 1889 when the Charities Commission agreed to pay for the turret, with its expensive decorative brickwork, and former students of Ripon Grammar School and Bishopton Close School, which had occupied the buildings until 1872, raised the money for the clock.
Designer Lord Grimthorpe, an eminent lawyer with a special ecclesiastical practice in York, was also an enthusiastic mechanic whose patented designs were installed everywhere from St Paul’s Cathedral to the clocks displayed in the Great Exhibition of 1851.
While Lord Grimthorpe, elected President of the Horological Institute for his command of the subject, held the patent for the RGS clock design, William Potts and Sons of Leeds constructed it.
There was a grand ceremony on market day, October 10, 1889, when the Marquis of Ripon, in the company of the Dean, Mayor and Mayoress, Headmaster Mr Haslam, governors and others, opened the new building and invited his wife, the Marchioness, to start the clock.
At that time, it only had south and east dials, but soon afterwards the north dial was added thanks to a donation from past pupil and governor John Kearsley.
The announcement of this addition at a Great Meeting in Ripon’s Victoria Hall specified that this dial would be ‘of great advantage to the numerous passengers along the Kirkby Malzeard road’, stressing the public nature of the clock.
Over the next 100 years, with a few pauses mostly caused by ice and snow, it continued to tell the time, even surviving breaktime competitions in the early 1900s to see who could hit the hands with a thrown stone, with no reported successes.
When it broke down in 1979 there was, again, some controversy over the expense of maintaining a mechanism which has no essential educational purpose.
Once more, emphasising the public value of the clock, donations ensured its repair.
As Dr Bill Petchey wrote in his 1991 article on the history of the school: “Many residents in the area look up to tell the time when they are gardening or on their way to work, or hear it strike during the evening and early morning and many of them contributed to the restoration fund at a time when the future of the school was in doubt.”
*You can donate to our Clocktower Restoration Fund here
Ripon Grammar School, 16 Clotherholme Road, Ripon, North Yorkshire, HG4 2DG
Tel: 01765 602 647
E: admin@ripongrammar.com
