Every object you see when you walk around a National Trust house has a story to tell.
We’ve asked our curators to pick just a handful of their favourite objects on display in our historic houses.
They’ve garnered a suitably eclectic selection, from an Academy Award to a dress embroidered with over 1,000 iridescent Indian jewel beetle wings.
Timeless classic
‘The Harrison longcase clock keeps perfect time’ says Gareth Williams, House & Collections Manager at Nostell Priory in West Yorkshire, which is hardly surprising given the name of its maker, John Harrison.
© National Trust / Robert Thrift
The clock stands in the Billiard Room. Made in 1717, its mechanism is almost entirely of wood: the movement, frame and wheels are of oak, the pendulum is of mahogany, and the spindles and pinions are of boxwood.
The extraordinary story of John Harrison is one of history’s gripping yarns. It’s a tale of struggle, perseverance and the prodigious talent of a bluff underdog who had little standing but a brilliant mind.
The series of maritime clocks Harrison built during the 1700s now rank among the world's most famous (remember it was a ‘long-lost Harrison watch’ which finally gave Del and Rodney their fortune in ‘Only Fools and Horses’?). But fame and just reward didn’t come easy for this carpenter’s son from Lincolnshire – he had to scrap tooth and nail every step of the way.
Harrison’s father worked as a carpenter on the Nostell estate. Born in Yorkshire, but brought up in the remote Lincolnshire village of Barrow, he followed in his father’s footsteps as a craftsman.
When news reached Barrow of a great £20,000 prize, offered by the Government for the man who could find a way of accurately measuring longitude at sea, Harrison picked up the gauntlet. From 1730, he spent seven years building his first sea clock, which would later become known simply as ‘H1’.
Clocks H2 to H4 followed. With H4, the bulkiness of the first groundbreaking clocks was replaced by an oversized pocket watch, which was shown to the judging Board of Longitude in 1760. Harrison’s own son, William, had trialled it on a voyage to Jamaica in 1761, the watch losing of just 5.1 seconds along the way.
However, the Board, whose own acolytes were busy trying to solve the problem, decided that ‘…the experiments already made of the watch have not been sufficient to determine the longitude at sea’. They confiscated H4 and withheld the prize.
Undeterred, Harrison set about making his masterpiece: H5. He enlisted the help of the King, George III, who declared ‘By God Harrison, I'll see you righted!’
In 1773, after 43 years of devoted work, he finally received his prize. As if aware for the neatness of time, he died on the same day he was born three years later, aged 83.
Why choose it? 'It has an unassuming immediate appearance, yet it's a remarkable object with huge historical significance and made by someone who had an intimate link with Nostell itself' says Gareth.
|
