Last time, we looked at Manchester clockmaker and jeweller, Thomas Ollivant. This time we’re looking at another Manchester clockmaker, Peter Clare.
Portrait of Peter Clare Jr. (date unknown) by Joseph Allen ©Manchester Art Gallery
Just as Thomas Ollivant came from a clockmaking family, so, too, did Peter Clare. Peter was named after his father, Peter Clare Senior. Peter Clare Sr. was born in 1729 in Hatton, Cheshire to a Quaker family. He was a clockmaker along with his two brothers, Samuel Clare, and Thomas Clare. He moved to Manchester and by 1763 he had a shop on Deansgate.
“There is a cottage of Peter
That cunning old fox
Who kept the sun right
By the time of his clocks.”
- Palatine Notebook, July 1884
Clock face by Peter Clare Sr. (source)
Peter Clare Sr. was not only a clockmaker, but a scientist, lecturer, and inventor, too. On December 24th, 1770, he gained the King’s Royal Patent for an improved type of smoke jack. Smoke jacks were mechanical devices used for roasting meat on a spit over a fire. The current of hot air rising up the chimney flue set a fan spinning which, in turn, through a system of cogs and chains turned the spit automatically.
Diagram of a smoking jack. William Dwight Whitney, PhD, LLD The Century Dictionary: An Encyclopedic Lexicon of the English Language (New York, NY: The Century Co., 1895) ©2024 by the University of South Florida (source)
According to his advertising, he claimed any servant could maintain his improved version without having to send anybody up the chimney for years.
When he died in 1799, his obituary called him “one of the society of Quakers and a man of intrinsic merit as a philosopher and a mechanic.”
Born in 1781, his son, Peter Clare Jr., also became a well-known member of Manchester scientific community. He gave scientific lectures on philosophy, electricity, pneumatics, and mechanics, as well as expanding his business to fix electrical conductors on houses and other buildings to protect them from lightning strikes.
From an early age, Peter Clare Jr. helped his father to give his lectures and even conducted his own electric experiments with something like the Leyden jar he is holding in his portrait by Joseph Allen. He used to lure neighbourhood dogs with bits of meat before giving them electric shocks. However, it wasn’t long before the dogs learned to avoid his house.
Peter Clare (1838) by Henry Cousins, after William Bradley, mezzotint © National Portrait Gallery, London
Peter Clare is listed as a clockmaker and Smoke Jack maker at 50 Quay Street, where he lived with his mother, Alice, until she died in 1817. He never married.
He was, however, active in the many of other of Manchester’s scholarly societies. In 1810, Peter joined the Manchester Literary and Philosophical Society and by 1821 had become its secretary. It was there that he met Dr. John Dalton, one of Manchester’s most celebrated residents, and ‘the father of modern chemistry’. The two struck up a close friendship and were often inseparable. Peter Clare often seen out and about supporting his elderly friend, “walking at a slow pace owing to the Doctor’s feebleness... Peter Clare was always remarkably neat and well dressed in a suit of black, wearing knee breeches with silver buckles, which showed his fine, well-shaped legs, and a broad-brimmed hat. His linen was of the purest white, and he presented a clean, happy and cheerful looking face.”
In 1835, Dalton and Clare were present at the beginning of the Athenaeum Club. “The principal speakers were Alderman Cobden, who responded to the toast of Prosperity to the Manchester Athenaeum. Peter Clare responded on behalf of Dr. Dalton to the toast of his health…”
In 1839, Clare was commissioned to install a system of house bells in the Royal Manchester Institution. He was also the auditor for the Portico Library and, in 1841, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Astronomical Society.
When Dalton died in 1844, Clare was at his side and Dalton left Clare an interest in several properties as well as several other items in his will.
Clare was also a prominent abolitionist. In 1840 he attended the World Anti-Slavery Convention at Exeter Hall in London. The Quakers were at the heart of the abolitionist movement. In Manchester, they hosted many meetings at the Friends’ Meeting House. Clare supported the Quaker’s Free Produce Movement there, aimed at dissuading people from using of slave-produced goods. It sought alternative sources of cotton from India, Africa, Australia, and the West Indies produced by people who were not enslaved. By 1849, he sat on their Free Produce committee.
The Anti-Slavery Convention (1840) by Benjamin Robert Haydon ©National Portrait Gallery, London - Peter Clare junior circled in red.
His interest in science also extended to the weather, like his fellow Quaker, Luke Howard, also a close friend of John Dalton. Howard’s essay on classification of the clouds in 1802 revolutionised climatology. In 1850, Clare read a paper he had written to the Literary and Philosophical Society entitled An Account of Some Thunder-Storms and Extraordinary Electrical Phenomena that Occurred in the Neighbourhood of Manchester on Tuesday 16th July 1850.
But Clare’s most famous contribution to Manchester was the Old Town Hall clock, commissioned in 1847 and delivered in 1849. The city council passed a motion to spend £100 to buy a clock and place it” in an accessible position in the Town Hall… for the purpose of informing the public at all times what is Greenwich time.” All corporation clocks were to be set by this clock. Peter Clare was commissioned to provide it. At that time, the Town hall was in King Street. After Clare’s death, the council spent £120 on astronomical equipment; a transit telescope, sidereal clock, and chronometer for astronomical timekeeping to keep it accurate. This was later superseded in 1852 by an hourly telegram from the Royal Greenwich Observatory as Greenwich Meantime became the national standard in 1880.
The Old Manchester Town Hall, King Street. T. Allen, Lancashire Illustrated
The clock was unusual, in that it had three faces.
“It shews the hour minute and second of time at three circles having different centres on a Face fifteen inches diameter - the circles with the divisions on them are engraved in a clear bold style on a strong brass face which is silvered and varnished–the hours are shewn by a finger or index placed on a steel arbour and moving around a circle between the centre and bottom of the face and moves round a large circle near the edge of it; whilst the seconds are pointed out by an index placed on a steel arbour and moving round a circle above the centre of the face.”
- Some Account of the New Time Keeper or Regulator in the Town Hall, Manchester, 7th of the 9th month, 1849 – Peter Clare
Peter Clare’s Town Hall Clock (l) a detail of the clock faces (r ) the clock’s mahogany case © Museum of Science and Industry
Peter Clare goes on to say, “The instrument is placed in a recess in the wall exactly opposite the principal entrance to the Town Hall and on the first landing of the Great Staircase and is easily accessible to the public.”
“The Clock Case is made of mahogany and constructed to fill the whole of the recess, which formerly had the appearance of a door but is now designed to have an agreeable effect and to harmonize with the architecture of the staircase.”
Peter Clare’s Town Hall Clock, in place on the grand staircase of the old Town Hall King Street, 1900. ©Manchester Libraries
The regulator stayed at the old town hall until its demolition in 1912. Then, the clock was moved to Manchester Art Gallery, where it continued to keep time. In keeping with Clare’s original intentions, the Gallery displayed it in a recess with the appearance of a door.
The Town Hall Clock in Manchester Art Gallery’s entrance hall circa 1970s ©Manchester Art Gallery
In the Gallery archives, there is a newspaper clipping from the Manchester Evening News dated 22nd November 1932. “Above the clock is an instrument called a galvanometer. And every morning at ten o’clock, a Post Office telegraph wire transmits to the needle the exact time at Greenwich. And after 83 years of wear, the timepiece very seldom shows a variation of more than four-tenths of a second.”
Although the reporter said that “Peter Clare […] lived in a leisured age when accuracy was more important than speed,” and that the three separate dial for hours, minutes and seconds made it difficult to read, admitting that “it took me almost two minutes to read the exact time.”
Manchester Evening News, 22nd November 1932
The clock remained at the art gallery until 1998, when the gallery was closed to build the extension and glass atrium. It was then moved to the Museum of Science and Industry, where it has remained ever since.
When the Town Hall reopens after its refurbishment, it is hoped to display Peter Clare’s Town Hall Clock there, in pride of place.
Peter Clare died in 1851, aged seventy-one. His obituary in the Manchester Guardian 26th November 1851 says, “Last year, an attack of paralysis deprived him permanently of the power of articulation, but the immediate cause of decease was ossification of the heart.”
His portrait by Joseph Allen is currently on display in gallery 5.
With thanks to Meg McHugh for her help in researching this post.