The Name on the Clock Tower: Solving the Riddle of Edith Hartley

If you have ever waited for the 22 outside the Town Hall in the rain, you have looked up at it. Pale stone, four faces, a bit of a lean on the north side that nobody official will admit to. And under the dial, a small bronze plaque with a name on it that most of us walk past a hundred times a year without reading.

Edith Hartley. 1826 to 1889. That is roughly where the certainties end and the stories begin.

What the plaque actually says

The inscription is short: 'This clock was given to the town by Edith Hartley, 1889.' Below it, in a different typeface and clearly added later, a line reads: 'Who gave the town its time.' That second line is the source of most of the confusion. It sounds like a memorial, and it is often described as one, but the wording is odd for a Victorian dedication and there is no record of who paid for it. The Town Hall's own 1970s guidebook calls her 'a local benefactor' and leaves it there, which is exactly the sort of sentence that starts a mystery.

Down to the record office

The paper trail begins in the basement of the library on Copper Street, where Fordbridge Record Office keeps the corporation's minute books. Reference FB/TC/4/11 covers 1888 and 1889, and the entry for 14 March 1889 is the money shot: a single paragraph accepting 'the offer of Miss E. Hartley to provide a clock and bells for the municipal buildings, at her own charge, in memory of her brother.'

Her brother. Not her.

That one line complicates the popular version of the story, in which Edith is a wealthy eccentric who wanted the town to know what time it was. The clock was, at least on paper, a memorial to a sibling — a brother whose name appears nowhere on the building.

The shop on Copper Street

The census returns, held on microfilm at the same office, put Edith Hartley in Fordbridge from the 1850s onwards, living above a drapers' shop on Copper Street with two nieces and, for a while, a lodger described as a 'clock jobber'. The 1881 return gives her occupation as 'draper and milliner', which sits awkwardly with the local belief — repeated to me twice in one afternoon — that she was a clockmaker's daughter.

'People like the clockmaker version because it's tidy,' says Marion Tull of the Fordbridge Historical Society, who has spent a decade on the town's Victorian trades. 'But the trade directories are quite clear. Her father was in corn. The clock connection seems to come from that lodger, and from the fact that she paid for the thing, and somewhere along the way the three facts got welded together.'

What the records do show is money. Her will, a copy of which survives in the archive, leaves £420 towards the clock and bells — a serious sum for a shopkeeper — with the residue going to her nieces and a small legacy to the Sunday school at St Cuthbert's. She died in the spring of 1889, months before the clock was set running.

What the family said

Descendants of one of the nieces still live on the Ashcroft Road side of town, and their version has always been slightly different again: that the clock was meant to be a joint memorial and that Edith's name only went on the plaque because the brother had died unmarried and childless, and 'the town wanted somebody to thank'.

That is family memory, not documentation, and it should be treated as such. But it does explain the plaque's strange phrasing better than anything in the minute books.

The gap in the story

Here is what we can say with confidence. Edith Hartley ran a drapers on Copper Street for more than thirty years. She paid for the Town Hall clock and bells. She asked for it to commemorate her brother. She died before it was finished, and the town put her name on it rather than his.

Here is what remains open. Which brother, and why he mattered enough to hang a clock on. Why there is no portrait of her anywhere in the building. And why the photograph in the Civic Hall corridor, captioned 'Edith Hartley, benefactor', is dated 1901 — twelve years after her death — and shows a woman considerably younger than sixty-three. The archivist's note in pencil beside it reads, cautiously, 'possibly a niece?'

As for the mechanism itself, the original was hand-wound by a succession of town keepers until it was electrified in 1974. Albert Nunn, the last of them, was interviewed by the local paper in 1998 and remembered climbing the tower twice a week in all weathers, and being told off for letting the chimes run four minutes fast so he could get home for his tea. That detail, at least, has the ring of truth.

Your memories wanted

So the mystery isn't solved, exactly. It's been narrowed. The woman on the plaque was real, she was a shopkeeper rather than an engineer's daughter, and she very probably never saw the clock she paid for ticking.

If anyone has photographs of the Town Hall clock from before the 1974 electrification, or a memory of the chimes being wound by hand, we would genuinely like to see them. Drop them into the library on a Thursday, when the record office is open from 10am to 4pm, or send them in and we'll pass them on to Marion and the historical society. Somewhere in a box in an attic in Fordbridge there may be a picture of Edith Hartley with her own face on it — and if there is, the town would quite like to meet her properly.