The Wateringbury Sundial (1797)

Post date: Nov 20, 2011 3:25:28 PM

The following article is contributed by by John Foad, Registrar of the British Sundial Society (http://www.sundialsoc.org.uk/), thirty years after the Wateringbury Sundial, made by Thomas Crow, was stolen from the churchyard of St. John the Baptist's Church.

The last two decades of the eighteenth century were lively times. It was an age of revolution around the world, but also a time of creativity and invention. Mozart was in full flood in Vienna, and his pupil Beethoven was beginning to make his name; de Rozier and Laurent had sailed over Paris in a hot air balloon; the earliest river steamboats were being built in America. In England George III, still obstinate but not yet in his final madness, had managed to regain the confidence of his people. The younger Pitt was leading the country with confidence and ability, and George was happy to let him do it.

Abroad, the world was in flux. After seven years of inept warfare far off across the Atlantic, Pitt was not unhappy to let the American colonies go their own way.

On the other side of the world, the East India Company had moved beyond mere trade in spices, silks and cotton, and had become heavily involved in the government of the sub-continent, acquiring full political control of the region of Bengal. Pitt removed this power from the East India Company, and commenced the British domination of India that was to last for the next one hundred and fifty years.

Uncomfortably nearer home, the French Revolution was running its bloody course. In 1795, the young Bonaparte came to notice after crushing a Royalist attempt to regain power in Paris. Britain found herself the unaccustomed ally of all the European monarchies, in an attempt to control the conquering zeal of the new leader. Nelson was given a roving commission to harry the French at every opportunity, but it was not until 1798 that he was able to impose on Napoleon his first heavy defeat. Napoleon had sent a large force to the eastern Mediterranean with the intention of landing in Egypt and overthrowing the Turkish Ottoman Empire. Nelson, however, had followed the fleet out, and was able to destroy it totally in the Battle of the Nile, leaving the invading force stranded and forced to abandon its plans.

* * * * *

"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very heaven"

One who grew up in that exciting period was Thomas Crow, born in Wateringbury in 1772. His was an artistic and an inventive family, echoing the times. His elder sister Sarah married the sculptor Joseph Kendrick RA, and their children were both to become members of the Royal Academy in their turn. His younger brother William designed a modified version of the Octant, a navigational instrument which had been invented some hundred years earlier. Little more is known about William, beyond the tantalising fact that he died and was buried in the precincts of the Tower of London.

Thomas farmed locally, and also owned a shop in the village. He lived at Broomscroft, a house in Canon Lane, inherited from his widowed grandmother Sarah. In 1797, at the age of twenty five, he married Mary Hosmer, and the same year came their first child. In those days of family excitement and anticipation, while a new life was growing within his young wife, did he feel the urge to conceive and create an object of lasting beauty by his own unaided efforts? While Sarah was preparing for the birth, and later while she was taken up with the care and nursing of the baby Frances, was Thomas glad to escape to the study and the workshop, and to fashion the sundial that has been so admired? Many hours and days of research must have gone in to its design, and patient days and weeks into its construction. Nothing was hurried, nothing was skimped. The detail was extensive and accurate, the decoration simple but full. The balance between fact and flourish is lightly held and satisfying.

No doubt some of the basic information was readily to hand to an alert and investigative family such as his. The principles of the layout of a horizontal dial were well known, and the accurate Equation of Time, given on his dial to the nearest second, had been published by Flamsteed more than a hundred years earlier. With the coming of accurate chronometers in the previous century, the meridians of most of the major cities of the world would have been readily available.

The idea of showing on his dial the time around the world would appeal in those days of incident and shifting political balance, from ancient China to the fledgling United States. He selected some two dozen places from around the world to add interest to his dial, indicating when it was noon, for example, in Mexico or in Mecca. Most are ports, which would be familiar to everyone in that maritime age. From Acapulco in the West (one of the finest natural anchorages in the world), to Nanking on the Yangtse in the far East, he uses places that would have been talked of, and read in the papers as ports of call. Pico, for example, while not a port in itself, is the highest peak in the Azores, which for two centuries had been a honeypot for English privateers, picking off the Spanish treasure ships returning from the New World. The Azores and the Canaries (Tenerife) were also frequently attended by the Navy, intent on harassing the Spanish at every opportunity. Indeed it was at a battle off St Cruz in the Canaries that Nelson had lost his arm just in July 1797.

We can note how, when he needed a location to represent noon when it is five pm at Greenwich, he ignored the great city of New York, and chose instead Port Royal in the British island of Jamaica. It would have been insensitive perhaps to celebrate the capital of the Union which had so recently fought free from British rule. In a similar vein he ignored Paris, Marseilles, Lyon and Nice, any one of which could have bridged the gap between 11:15 am at Siena and 12:15 pm at Madrid. But who in 1797 would consider allowing France to feature on such a beautiful design? Many questions come to mind from the choice of places shown on the dial. Why indeed did he select Siena? Florence, more widely famed, is at nearly the same hour angle to represent noon at 11:15 am. Or he could have chosen Turin, and shown 11:30 instead.

Some place names puzzle me. Attock, up in what was to become the North West Frontier country, was surely of no concern to England for another hundred years? Lar is a small remote town far from the sea in southern Persia. Why would it be known? Falam (if I have read the name right) is in Myanmar, high up on a small tributary of the Irrawaddy, many days arduous journey from the sea. What made it a name to celebrate?

Do some of the choices perhaps have a personal key? Had Thomas, or one of his family, visited these smaller places; or did they have some special wider significance at that time, now forgotten? As far as I know, the answers to these puzzles died with Thomas in 1821.

However his work, as he must have hoped, lived on, remaining in the churchyard at Wateringbury for nearly two hundred years. But does some collector now, I wonder, feel a stab of guilt when he admires this highly identifiable dial, taken from the pleasure of many for the selfish satisfaction of himself alone? What does he plan to do with it? Will it perhaps find its way anonymously one day into some auctioneer's catalogue? It would be nice to hope so.

Meanwhile at least the original pedestal remains, made and signed by Thomas's brother-in-law Joseph Kendrick, who also sculpted a statue of Sir Charles Style in Wateringbury church. And now, in the first year of the new millennium, a replacement has been made, and graces Kendrick's pillar. It is a simpler dial, but an elegant one, made by Michael Allen, another local man.

Place names and times shown on the Thomas Crow dial

See also Thomas Crow's Sundial at The National Maritime Museum.