Meet the group of volunteers keeping York's clocks ticking

John Cossins, a volunteer with the York Clock Group, grew up in the shadow of that clock, and now it is down to him to check it keeps proper time.

Residential apartments now fill the tower, but John has access to maintain the clock at the top. We meet outside and he takes me up in the lift, then leaves as he descends to meet the photographer.

While pictures are being taken outside, I am free to explore somewhere that is only open two or three days a year.

It is a huge square space, like a brick vault, and once housed a water tank. There are four windows high in the bare walls, each containing a clock face.

After the factory closed in 2005, the chocolate works fell into disrepair, and the clock mechanism disappeared. When the HBD group acquired the site, it worked with developer the PJ Livesey Group to bring the clock back to life and in the process created a small museum.

The clock faces were restored by Smith of Derby in a project costing more than £60,000. At the centre of the room, now stripped of that water tank, is what’s known as a Waiting Train Clock, made by Gents of Leicester. A similar clock measures time at the Royal Liver Building in Liverpool.

For those of a horological bent, the Terry’s clock is powered by an electrical impulse from a master clock. This looks like a grandfather clock and sits below the replaced mechanism, from which long rods reach out to the four clock faces.

Left alone here, you feel almost as if you’ve been dropped inside a giant clock. As the afternoon light filters through the quartet of dials, the mechanism runs through its rhythmic chore of clicks, whirs and gentle clanks as gears engage and cogs turn.

John returns, has more pictures taken inside the tower, then we are free to talk time. He’s 72, pendulum slim, friendly and busy, a self-declared clock nerd with many clocks at home.

“That goes back a long time,” he says. “It goes back to the 1970s, that. It’s something I’ve always been interested in. Electrical and wind-up, weight clocks.”

Born and bred in York, John used to work in electrics for BT, and in the 1980s helped maintain radio equipment on the tower roof.

“That’s how I knew this place. It was a really good radio site. The police were up here. Council, medical firms and BT. Little brick buildings on the roof.”

John says the Terry’s clock is unusual for the clock group as it doesn’t need winding.

“The only reason the group is involved in this one is because I do the electric stuff and there’s only really me does that.

“We have to keep an eye on it. It looks after itself but the danger with that is that they get neglected and you get faults with them that cause premature wear. Then you end up with a serious fault.”

John checks in about once a month on the 100-year-old clock.

“They’re not perfect clocks but they’re not bad. It’s an electric clock but it’s a pendulum-driven clock. It’s still a traditional pendulum clock, just like a grandfather clock at home.”

This allowed factories to keep all clocks in unison – good for timekeeping, but also for corralling workers.

“All the clocks were controlled by the central master clock. The beauty of that was they all showed the same time. It suited the management because every clock was the same and you can imagine the workers were all tied to time.”

The Terry’s clock was linked to a master clock in the time office by the main gate. For the display in the tower, the master clock has been moved to sit beneath the restored mechanism, which used to be a floor lower before the water tank was removed.

The York Clock Group attends to clocks around the city, having picked up the task from Geoffrey Newey, whose family had been making clocks in York for years.

After Geoffrey died in 2015, aged 87, there was no one else to do the job, and the group began to wind the clocks he used to wind. “He was well known in the city,” adds John. “He was a real character. He used to buzz around on a Honda moped. He did it for a pittance, to be honest.”

John joined the group five years ago. The clocks they maintain include the one that hangs over Coney Street from St Martin, alongside others at Tower House in Fulford Road, the newly restored De-Grey House, the Castle Museum, the Spurriergate Centre and Heslington Hall.

“We also wind some domestic clocks at Mount School and Middlethorpe Hall hotel, because Geoffrey Newey used to do that,” says John.

Of all the clocks, the one at St Martin’s is the trickiest. The church was extensively rebuilt after bombing during the Baedeker Raids of 1942, and the clock there now dates to the 1960s, and was restored again in 2012.

The difficulty lies in what is known as the leading off work, a general term for the rods and so on that connect the dial to the timekeeping mechanism. The St Martin’s clock is a long way from its mechanism.

“There’s a lot of friction in that drive,” says John. “You have to make sure it’s free of anything. Because of all that friction and all that metal, you need heavier weights driving the clock, so they’re pretty big weights on that one. They have to be wound.

“You turn the handle a hundred odd times before it’s wound. And you don’t just do it on the clockwise, you do it on the strike side that strikes the hour.”

The mechanical poetry of this task was lost to someone on Tripadvisor: “It’s a big clock outside an old church. You can see it way before you get to it. There were several homeless people sleeping under. It was okay.”

Hurrying on, John points out that clocks are prone to mechanical afflictions, so winding every week is a chance to check. This happens on a Tuesday. “We have five active members,” he says. “We’re all in our seventies and it will peter out. But we’ve just recruited a really nice couple.”

The group always looks out for a stalled clock. “It’s part of the tourism of the city and it’s a shame to see them stopped,” adds John.

A few years ago, he restored the clock in George Hudson Street, on the old Co-op building, and has been working on the clock in Coney Street where TK Maxx used to be. He has the parts in his workshop, repaired and ready to go back into what is now a branch of Hard Rock Cafe.

With that the story ends. Reading this should have taken about four minutes of your time.

Anyone who is interested in joining the York Clock Group should email [email protected]