Rock Around The Clock! A History of New Plymouth's Clock Tower - Part One

The People’s Want For A Clock

Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated across New Zealand and around the British Empire on Tuesday the 22^nd of June 1897. When preparations for Her Majesty’s “record reign” festivities began in New Plymouth, the construction of a town clock seemed like the perfect form of commemoration – it would be practical, lend the town an air of dignity and instil a sense of civic pride.

The suggestion was first made at a public meeting held on the 28^th of May 1897. Other ideas included an esplanade, an agricultural hall or a museum but at a second meeting on the 11^th of June the town clock – described as an “urgent necessity” in the Taranaki Herald – won the vote by a large majority.

A committee was immediately formed to collect donations for the clock. The membership list was a who’s who of Taranaki personalities including brewing magnate James Paul, timber merchant Alexander Shuttleworth, politician Henry Okey, hotelkeeper Audus Raynes and surveyor Thomas Kingswell Skinner.

In January 1899 the fundraising committee formally presented “the people’s want for a clock” to the Borough Council. But, as so often happens, after an initial burst of enthusiasm, time dragged on. It wasn’t until October 1905 that a town clock deputation met with Postmaster General Sir Joseph Ward in the carriage of a train at New Plymouth Railway Station. The man who went on to become prime minister the following year agreed to put the £300 they had raised into the colonial treasury, to be matched pound for pound by the government. New Plymouth’s clock tower was finally about to become a reality.

The Public Works Office designed a grand new brick post office and clock tower for New Plymouth, in the English Renaissance style. Located at the intersection of Devon and Queen streets, the tower stood an impressive 35 metres high and was designed to project over the footpath so that, as the Taranaki Herald described it, “a view of the dial could be obtained from all quarters”. It was the first tower in New Zealand to straddle a street and cost £6990 to construct, using bricks from Joll & Black’s brickworks in Ōnaero.

Little Ben

The foundation stone of the new post office was laid by Sir Joseph Ward on the 28^th of November 1905 in front of a crowd of a thousand people. Post office officials began moving into their new home in 1907 but it wasn’t officially opened until the 27^th of May 1908, again by Sir Joseph, this time in his role as Premier. Described as “one of the best postal and telegraphic buildings outside the four centres”, it housed New Plymouth’s chief postmaster, letter delivery facilities, a telegram office with desks for writing, a telephone exchange and operating room, a money order office and savings bank, the customs office, the Lands and Survey department, pneumatic tubes for communicating around the building as well as lunch and cloak rooms for staff.

The tower’s turret clock was made in Shropshire by English clockmakers J.B. Joyce & Co., a firm established in 1690 which had made clocks for public buildings everywhere from Cape Town to Shanghai. The clock struck the hours and what are known as the Westminster chimes – a melody used to mark each quarter-hour that continues to ring out today. The time was displayed on four opal dials 198cm in diameter, illuminated at night by eight electric lights behind the faces.

The wardrobe-sized mechanism of the clock was based on the principle designed for Big Ben in London, prompting some to nickname it New Plymouth’s Little Ben. There were three weights, one each for the chimes, the tick and the strike, and these had to be wound by hand up to the clock room at the top of the tower once a week. Two dials on the main mechanism, one for the minutes and one for the seconds, worked with a series of gears to turn the iron rods that moved the hands on all four faces of the clock. Little Ben kept surprisingly accurate time, but did have a tendency to gain a few seconds every week and occasionally had to be stopped briefly to make up the difference.

The five bronze bells were made by John Taylor & Co. of Leicestershire, established in 1839 and still the world’s largest working bell foundry. New Plymouth’s bells weigh a total of two and a half tonnes, with the largest being 81cm high and 90cm in diameter.

New Plymouth’s clock was shipped to New Zealand from London on a ship called the Corinthic and arrived in New Plymouth by train from Wellington on the 30^th of April 1907. Finally, at 4pm on Saturday the 6^th of July 1907 the clock’s bells rang out their first notes, with the electric lights behind the faces lit at the same time.

Town Time

The new clock tower looked magnificent but complaints from the public began almost immediately. While the bells could often be heard as far away as Ōmata, some residents had trouble hearing them in town itself, with the sound of the sea being blamed. Residents also bemoaned the fact that the hands were hard to see. Most seriously, it was reported that the clock often ran as much as five minutes slower than the one at the railway station, causing people to miss their trains. It turned out the station clock was wrong, although even after that was fixed discrepancies between it and “town time” continued to cause missed trains.

But the bells were rehung, the striking power of the hammers increased and New Plymouth’s clock tower, with its brown and cream striped brickwork, became part of the town’s landscape, dominating the skyline for more than sixty years.

The chimes of the clock were used to signal the beginning of events, like euchre tournaments, dances and Carnival Queen elections. When the Prince of Wales was proclaimed King George V on the 10^th of May 1910, the Mayor of New Plymouth read the official proclamation to a crowd of 1500 people in front of the clock tower. It was a meeting point for passengers catching the daily horse coach to Opunake and when New Plymouth became the smallest municipality in the world to run overhead electric trams in 1916, they trundled by the clock.

To celebrate Armistice Day in 1918, a flag was raised up the tower just after 9am and the bells joyfully rung. The clock’s chimes timed perfectly with nearby church bells and factory whistles at midday every day, prompting a judge to pause a witness giving evidence during a court trial in 1921, saying “a perfect jazz band goes on here at twelve o’clock”.

When New Plymouth attained city status on the 27^th of January 1949, its population having reached 20,000, singers, musicians and a line of fire engines assembled in front of the clock tower before parading along Devon Street. Crowds would gather under the clock on New Year’s Eve to dance and sing Auld Lang Syne.

Gone Jazz

The hands of time didn’t always run smooth, of course. A petition from 60 people was presented to the Borough Council in 1915 asking that the chimes of the clock be stopped between 11pm and 6am. The idea was met with a counter petition from subscribers who had paid for the clock demanding the chimes be kept going all night. A council vote to stop the chimes passed, oddly, 11 to 6. That didn’t stop decades of complaints from visitors to the town about the clock’s hourly strike which carried on through the night, disturbing guests at the White Hart Hotel and other nearby establishments.

At 11pm on the 10^th of February 1925 the electric lights in the post office suddenly went out, throwing the tower into darkness and requiring telegraph operators inside to work by candlelight. An earthquake at 1pm on the 16^th of October 1927 stopped the clock just as it was chiming. Fires occasionally broke out in the tower, with smoke gathering in the top chamber as if in a chimney. In August 1934 the Otago Daily Times reported that New Plymouth’s clock had temporarily “gone jazz”, mysteriously missing a note at the end of each quarter chime that created “an effect of syncopation”. During the Second World War the clock’s attendant had to do the necessary winding at night while a nationwide coastal blackout was in force, with only a covered torch to light his way.

The approaching visit of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip in January 1954 prompted anxious residents to point out that there hadn’t been a flag flying from the tower’s eight-metre kauri flagpole for years due to a broken halyard. In November 1953 the Ministry of Works was reported as saying, somewhat defensively, that it had “not been able to find anyone game enough to climb the pole”. Challenge accepted – the very next morning a Taranaki Alpine Club pennant was seen fluttering from atop the dome. Club Captain Tom Herbert, with accomplices Barrie Hartby and Vic Rhodes, had gained admittance to the building at 8.30pm then strode casually through the motor registration office into the tower and up through a trapdoor onto the dome. The trio then climbed the pole with their bare feet to run a wire through the pulley and hoist their pennant. Chief Postmaster James Sissons was not amused, and the pennant was quickly pulled down, but the broken halyard was fixed in time for the royal tour.

If It Is Dangerous It Must Come Down

Concerns about the safety of the tower’s unreinforced brick walls were first raised in 1929, when an earthquake destroyed Westport’s post office and tower. Then the 1931 Napier earthquake caused several towers in Hawke’s Bay to collapse, and fears grew. A series of powerful earthquakes rocked the Wairarapa in 1942, toppling some 10,000 brick chimneys and seriously damaging clock towers around the lower North Island.  In response, the government authorised the partial demolition of New Plymouth’s clock tower to roof level. Protests halted that proposal after somebody worked out the odds of an earthquake wrecking the tower were more than 2000 to one.

This didn’t stop the post office and its tower being officially declared a hazard by the Public Works Department. In 1945 the Minister of Works, Robert Semple stated simply that “If it is dangerous it must come down”. In 1946 tenders were actually called for the demolition of the top half of the tower, along with the curved pediments – affectionately known as the trimmings – on either wing of the front facade. But public opposition to the very idea of demolition, in particular from tram drivers, who pointed out that they used the clock as the standard time by which to start their runs – as well as an estimated price tag of £4000 to bring it down – meant the clock tower got a reprieve and remained the landmark it had always been.  It even outlived the trams, whose service ended in 1954.

On the 14^th of May 1959 a new chief post office was opened on the corner of Gill and Currie Streets, more centrally located and less congested. It was the beginning of the end.

Progress

In the early 1960s proposals for a new “Government Block” were released, to be constructed in the area bounded by Devon, Silver, Powderham and Robe Streets. Robe Street was to be widened, Silver Street would be built over to make way for a public park, a new police station would be built on the south side of Powderham Street, a modern courthouse would replace the ornate wooden one built in 1895, and a six-storey building, named for Taranaki politician Sir Harry Atkinson, would be constructed next to the post office to house various government departments. With oil and gas revenue beginning to flow, this was progress.

In January 1964 the government announced that 16 towers were to be removed from post offices around the country, including New Plymouth and Stratford. The mayor of Stratford said his town would fight “tooth and nail” to save their clock tower, built in 1924 as a war memorial, but down it came.

The clock’s custodian, watchmaker James Sharpe, reported that New Plymouth’s clock was still in fine condition but Mayor Alfred Honnor said he personally wanted to see the tower gone. By 1967, New Plymouth had a new police station and courthouse and the Atkinson Building was underway. Votes to demolish the tower continued to be taken, then reversed, and decisions deferred.

A firm of Wellington engineering consultants put forward a scheme to reinforce the tower with an internal steel frame, designed to provide the full seismic load required by the current building code, at an estimated cost of $6000. Consultant engineer Alexander Brodie claimed any earthquake risk was negligible, and that the tower could last for 600 years as a free-standing structure. Structural engineer Frederick Thomson, employed by the council, submitted an official report stating that the work required to make the tower safe would cost more like $36,000.

With this eye-watering sum in mind, on the 7^th of August 1968 the council voted to have the tower demolished and the clock and its bells put into storage. The vote was evenly split until Mayor Honnor used his casting vote to authorise demolition. He cited public safety, the fact that retaining the tower would be too costly and how incongruous it would look next to the modern surrounding buildings.

Residents were as divided as the council. Letters to the editor became increasingly heated, with some urging God’s mercy on the “unaesthetic souls” who would tear down the tower, and others describing it as a tiger-striped monstrosity.

Save the Clock Tower

Public efforts to save the clock tower from demolition had been initiated by Colin Allen, chief surveyor of the Lands and Survey Department in New Plymouth. When the Ministry of Works released its plans for the Atkinson Building in 1966, Allen wrote to the council pointing out how few historical buildings there were left worth preserving in the city and that the clock tower had a character and individuality which had become part of the atmosphere. “Like old trees, old buildings once destroyed can never be replaced” he wrote.

The New Plymouth Clock and Tower Trust Committee was formed to raise money to save the clock tower and sent out circulars seeking donations. Members included the artist Michael Smither and director of the art gallery John Maynard. One resident alone, businessman Russell Matthews, donated $1000 to the fund. But others couldn’t care less, with some suggesting the clock be scrapped and sold for parts.

The popular Taranaki Photo News favoured demolition in the name of modernisation, urging New Plymouth to “get modern in our city!” The old tower looked “a bit silly” beside the snazzy new Atkinson building and courthouse and “if we had our way it would have been down by now, stripes and all!” The vitriol didn’t stop there: “The thing looks hideous, and if this is what people call beautiful and historic, then why build any new buildings at all?” The New Plymouth Chamber of Commerce was also of the opinion that the tower should be torn down and of course the Ministry of Works and the Postmaster General in Wellington strongly recommended that the tower be demolished for safety, along with the rest of the post office.

A petition to “Save the Clock Tower” was presented to council with over 1100 names on 31 pages. The New Plymouth Historical Society also wrote in favour of its retention. Dozens of other letter writers described the tower as an old friend, warning that “once gone, it will be gone forever” and that an entirely modern city would appear soulless, lacking in “historic patina”. But it was all to no avail. The Ministry of Works called for tenders to knock down both the old post office and the clock tower, all 24,000 square feet of them.  

With the final ruling made and the end nigh, the clock’s mechanism was carefully removed and stored by the council’s works department, with instructions that it be serviced regularly in case it was ever needed in some new structure.  The faces of the clock and its bells were taken down on the 1^st of February 1969. New Plymouth’s once stately clock tower had fallen silent, but the worst was yet to come.

Demolition Day

The battle to bring the 62-year-old tower down began at 6.30am on Thursday the 10^th of April 1969. It took seven long hours. An initial blast of gelignite did nothing. The demolition crew regrouped. At 9.35am, watched by hundreds of onlookers, they tried hooking wire ropes onto a bulldozer to pull the balcony columns down. The wires snapped and the Taranaki Herald reported that “a ragged, ironic cheer came from the spectators”.  More office workers from the surrounding buildings came out to enjoy the show. Buses of school children arrived. Further attempts were made to topple the highest section of the tower at 9.58am, 11.14am, 11.36am and 12.20pm when the wires broke again. At that point the crew broke for lunch. Finally, at 1.40pm the columns crumbled, the dome split apart and the 22-tonne top section of the tower fell, collapsing into a pile of rubble.

As the Taranaki Herald’s editorial that evening pointed out “The very stubbornness with which the tower resisted efforts to pull it down eloquently refutes the catch cry that it was a major earthquake hazard”.

The entire post office building was gone by the end of the month. The day after the tower came down the letters to the editor started up again. The Taranaki Herald published missives from people deploring its loss and branding the demolition “legal vandalism”, even “an execution”. Clearly, Little Ben would be much missed. But what, if anything, could replace it?

This story was originally published in New Zealand Memories magazine #162 (June/July 2023).

Sources

Taranaki Daily News and Taranaki Herald newspaper articles (collection of Puke Ariki, New Plymouth).

Papers Past website, National Library of New Zealand: paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers.

New Plymouth Photo News 6 August 1966, 20 April 1968, 10 August 1968.

Puke Ariki and New Plymouth District Council archives.