My Training at West Dean College

MOSTYN GALE - Many of you know that I spent the last year in England at West Dean College taking clock courses.  I thought you might be interested to learn a bit more detail, so this article will answer the burning questions:  What is West Dean College?  Why did you go there?  What did you actually do all day?

West Dean College is a small, private college near the south coast of England, about 100 miles southwest of London.  The College was opened in 1971 and is funded by the Edward James Foundation which was established by Edward James in 1964.  Edward (1907-1984), was the heir to his family’s fortunes and a life-long patron of the arts.  He is best known for his patronage of Surrealist artists Dalí, Magritte, Tchelitchew, Fini and Carrington.  He built reputedly the finest private collection of Surrealist art in the world.  He set the course for the college to be a place that champions creativity and teaches traditional arts and crafts practices.  Today it enjoys a reputation as the premier institution for conservation of heritage crafts and objects.  Many of its graduates have gone on to work at some of the most prestigious organizations worldwide.  The College has a formal relationship with the University of Sussex, wherein the University academically validates and awards the college’s Masters degrees.  The College also offers Diploma programs which are less academic and focus on the hands-on aspects of heritage crafts.

The typically 60 full-time students each year are enrolled in Masters Degree Programs in Conservation Studies and Collections Care as well as Diploma Programmes in conservation of books and library materials, ceramics, clocks, furniture, metalwork, musical instruments, and historic buildings.  I was enrolled in the Postgraduate Programme for Conservation of Clocks and in the Master of Arts program for Conservation Studies.  At the Chapter meeting in April, I will be presenting a program entitled, “Clock Conservation for Dummies”.  Hopefully you will find it interesting and instructive.

The Clock Programmes

The clock I worked on was made about 1725
by James Snelling.

In all, there were seven students in the various clock programmes while I was there but the workshop can handle up to nine.  Normally the programmes have a two year duration, but because of my training at Chapter 190, I was able to jump in half way and complete the course in just one year.  To my knowledge there are no other schools in the world like this for clocks.  In addition to learning restoration and repair skills, learning about conservation and how best to preserve history was very important to me.  Additionally, this school has great connections to institutions such as Greenwich and the British Museum as well as a host of other highly regarded institutions and collectors throughout the UK.  These connections provide opportunities for learning, for work on historic objects and exposure to some of the most highly regarded conservation professionals that regularly lecture at the college.  For example, David Thompson, the recently retired curator of horology at the British Museum gave us four lectures on the history of horology whilst I was there.  In short, I went there because it’s the best school in the world for clocks.

The inside of the movement showing
the anchor escapement wheels
that need to be replaced.

What did I do each day?  Every day was like a dream to me and hard work was part of it.  We were required to be in the workshop by nine o’clock (I was usually there about 8:30) and we were there until at least 5:30 or 6:00 at night.  We had tea breaks in the morning and afternoon and a very nice lunch provided at the school.  I began the course work by learning some basic hand skills; primarily filing steel and brass, but also cutting, heat treating, grinding, piercing, and finishing.  We learned these by making some basic tools such as a file cleaner, a scribe, a punch, a screwdriver.  That basic work took up about six weeks.  Interspersed with time in the workshop we had classes on topics such as science for conservation and academic writing.  Typically, sometime during the week, in the workshop we would also have a session on how to assess the condition of a clock or write a Condition Report or a hands-on skill such as riveting.  We were also taught to photograph our work and keep daybook records of what we were doing.  About once a month we had a special topic involving a  2-day class, usually held in another workshop in the college.  Topics for these included blacksmithing, sand casting, gilding, lacquering, copper and its alloys, turret clocks, wood identification, engraving, finishing and mathematics for horology.  After learning some basic skills, we turned our attention to designing and building clocks.  Essentially, the normal two year Postgraduate programme spends the first year building a basic clock and the second year restoring several different kinds of clocks.  Since I was trying to do everything in a year, I began the designing and building process but did not finish it.  With some guidelines given as to the overall objectives, the design/build process began with understanding gear ratios, laying out the wheel placement, and building an anchor escapement model to learn the escapement principles as well as some basic skills like making fly cutters and cutting teeth on wheels.  We then moved on to gear and pinion cutting, hard and soft soldering, crossing out and colleting wheels, depthing, bushing, cutting pillars and staking them to plates, and more.

While I practiced most of these tasks, I did not use them in making a clock because I was on a one-year timeline.  Instead I began work on a major restoration project that was to take me through the duration of the year.  My project was to convert the going (time) train of a 300 year old bracket clock back to the verge and crown escapement that it started life with.  Sometime in the mid-18th century, it became the proper thing to do to upgrade your clock from a verge and crown wheel to an anchor escapement.  Many clocks were converted.  Over the last decade or so, it has become a popular (some think it was the right) thing to do to convert them back.  Regardless of the rationale, it served a very useful project for me to learn some fundamental restoration skills as well as learn a bit about a different escapement type.  This task involved making everything needed from raw materials, mostly steel rod/plate and cast brass – here’s a partial list of over 50 parts that I had to make: center wheel, contrate wheel and pinion, crown wheel and pinion, verge, mounting potences, back cock, rise and fall levers, hands for the dial, crutch, pendulum, false pendulum, holdfast, and screws.  Lots of fun!  The photos do a better job than a description – take a look.

The pivot fell right out of the center arbor when I took the clock apart – a good chance to practice repivoting.

The finished pivot

What I have described thus far was all work that went toward a Postgraduate Diploma in restoration of clocks.  As I mentioned, I also received a Master of Arts degree in Conservation Studies.  This work started in the second half of my year and continued through the summer months.  The main goal here was to do some research and write a 10,000 word thesis.  There were weekly classes designed to both help us along with our research and writing but also to learn about conservation.  The classes were taught by highly respected people in their areas from institutions such as the University College London, the British Museum, and the University of Amsterdam to name just a few.

The components of the contrate wheel

The assembled contrate wheel

To help us in our research and writing we also had regular assignments to turn in; three oral presentations, two written essays, and 4000 and 8000 word thesis drafts.  One of the essay topics was “Identify and explore the intangible and ethical aspects of conservation related to your research question (2000-2500 words).” Aren’t you glad you didn’t have to write that one?  We also met with the tutors on a regular basis to discuss the scope and progress of our research, beginning with trying to define exactly what it was that we were going to do.  The thesis could not be just research, being a practical school with a conservation focus, we had to do something practical that had to do with conservation.  It took a good six months to nail down what I was going to write on and what the practical aspects were going to be.  In the end my thesis title was, “Exploring Methods for Determining the Age of Mainsprings.”  I will write about this in another (shorter) newsletter article.  I am sure you don’t want to read the whole thesis.  My research involved visual characterization, microscopic analysis, and use of an x-ray florescence analyzer on a collection of 20 mainsprings.  Of course there was a lot of reading on the history of steelmaking to begin to understand the process for making mainsprings.  I also performed a survey of horologists regarding the replacement of mainsprings – that will also have to be the topic of another article – some of you participated in that.

Potences (the mounting pieces for the crown wheel) were
cut and filed from pieces of solid cast brass

Writing and rewriting, formatting, editing, and re-editing - somehow it all got done in time.  I do appreciate the learning but it was not a piece of cake.  After all the work, it seemed that I would not get any useful results until I did more structured analysis of the data – then things began to make sense.  I was able to confirm the approximate manufacturing date of mainsprings for two different clocks at the college and confirm them to be, to the best of our knowledge, original to the clock.  

My work was completed on the 18th of September and we returned home on the 1st of October.  We plan to return to West Dean this coming July for my formal graduation.  This was a great adventure – I think you can tell that I learned many things while I was there – of course, you don’t have to go to West Dean to learn about clocks – we have many good courses, workshops, and educational lectures right here at our Chapter.  There is something for everyone, an enormous amount of work to be done and fun to be had!  It is especially important to have fun!

If you want to read more about our trip to England and West Dean College see my blog at www.saving-time.org.

This photo shows the center wheel, the contrate wheel, and the crown wheel arbor in place with top and bottom potences for testing the depthing.

The verge was cut from a piece of 3 mm steel gauge plate.  I marked it blue so that I could see scratched cutting lines

The pallets are cut in half lengthwise, to get their faces in line with the arbor center, and then twisted to get the right offset angle.

The finished verge. 

The verge and crown wheel being tested in position. Note that none of the parts are finished at this point.

The pendulum crutch was cut from a piece of steel gauge plate then filed, formed and heat treated.

The finished pendulum crutch

The pendulum was cut from pieces of cast brass.

The bob was made in two halves and soldered together.

The pendulum rod took a lot of careful filing.

The finished pendulum.  The bottom part of the rod was left long until rating was completed.

Two new hands were cut from gauge plate and finished to better match the period style.

The new hands are in the center and far right subsidiary dials.

The pendulum was suspended on a long spring and the rate controlled by rise and fall levers.  You can see one of the levers riding on a snail on the back of the dial.  As the snail is rotated (manually from the front) the pendulum is raised or lowered to adjust the rate.