On the line – September 2008

Natasha: Hello, I’m Natasha Waterson and once again I’m joined by David Rooney, our curator of time-keeping.

David: Hello

Natasha: David, you’ve been telling us over the last couple of months about some of the characters involved in selling Greenwich time a hundred years ago. This month I understand you’ve got some stories about a Greenwich Time Lady.

David: Yes, last time we heard all about the gloriously named St John Wynne, the Edwardian electric time merchant who tried to put Ruth Belville out of business. St John Wynne and Ruth Belville sold people Greenwich Mean Time. Now Wynne used an electrical cable network and really sophisticated self-correcting clocks, but Ruth did it in a rather unusual way - she took a good quality pocket watch that she called Arnold, after its maker, to the Royal Observatory every week, got it corrected, and then carried it around London all day selling her subscribers a weekly look at the watch.

Natasha: It sounds a weird way to send the time. Was she really that much competition to Mr Wynne?

David: Well it sounds weird, but actually her service was better than Wynne’s system, for some customers at least. The Belville method went back to the 1830s when Ruth’s father John started sending the pocket watch Arnold down to his customers in London. John actually worked at the Royal Observatory, and this was a way he could stop the London watchmakers knocking at his door every day asking to have a look at his big clock, because back then there was no other way to get Greenwich Mean Time, except from the Observatory’s big time ball, which still works today by the way. But it was only any good if you could actually see the time ball. And the watchmakers in London couldn’t see it, so it was a fat lot of good to them.

So, John Belville sent Arnold into town every week, and when John died twenty years later, his widow Maria Belville started carrying the watch around their hundred or so customers. She did it until she was in her eighties, and she was nearly blind, so come 1892, she thought it might be a good idea to let their daughter Ruth take over the business.

Natasha: What was London like in those days for women walking alone?

David: It was pretty ghastly actually, especially the streets Maria and Ruth used to have to walk along. We know they had customers in the London Docks, which used to be in Shadwell next to Whitechapel, and in fact I’ve worked out that the women’s walking route took them right next to streets where Jack the Ripper killed several of his victims in the late 1880s. One of these women, Catherine Eddowes, was found in a little courtyard just off a main street that Maria had to walk along every week, which quite frankly must have terrified her.

What made it all the more horrific for the Belville women was that one of their relatives, a guy called Lewes Sayer, actually worked for the City of London Corporation and he went to view Catherine Eddowes’s  body in the City Mortuary nearby, and he later described that evening as ‘a nightmare experience which I should not care to repeat. The terrible mutilation which had taken place indicated clearly that the work was that of a madman.’ You can imagine that conversations between Lewes and Maria that week must have been awful.

Natasha: It certainly sounds like it was a good time for Maria to retire. What about competition for her services by then? Had the electrical time services started?

David: Yes, they had. The Observatory started sending out time electrically on wires in the 1850s, and from the 1870s the Post Office made it available to ordinary folk. And the Standard Time Company, that’s the firm that St John Wynne was later to run, started selling the time to Londoners from about the 1880s. So you might think that Ruth Belville’s seemingly quaint service by then would have been outdated - but you’d be wrong. She lost a few customers over the years but a hard core of them, about 50, stuck to her right up until 1940, when she finally retired, herself in her eighties.

Natasha: 1940. That’s an incredible length of service.

David: Yes, the Belvilles carried Arnold about town of over a century between them, and every week their customers would get Greenwich time to a tenth of a second - that’s a factor of ten better than the electric wires would give the time out. But by the 1920s and 1930s, times were changing for Greenwich time. In 1924 the BBC started broadcasting what we now know as the pips, taking the time directly from the Royal Observatory, and in 1936, anyone with a telephone could dial TIM and listen to the brand new speaking clock - and I’ve got more to tell you on that story another time.

Now by 1940 Ruth had had enough, but she didn’t have anyone to pass the business on to. She got herself a pension from the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers in the City of London and she was so grateful to them that she left her pocket watch Arnold to the company, and you can still see in the fantastic Clockmaker’s Museum in the Guildhall. And I should just point out that if you’re planning to visit the Observatory here at Greenwich, it’s really easy to get to the Guildhall as well, and you won’t be disappointed.

But after Ruth had retired she didn’t have long to enjoy the meagre fruits of her lifetime of labour. Britain was in the middle of the horrendous Second World War and Ruth lived very close to Croydon Airport at that time, which was a real target for bombing. In the end though it wasn’t the bombs that killed her, but it was a silent killer - carbon monoxide poisoning. She’d turned down her bedside gas lamp too low, it started kicking out fumes and she died in her sleep. It was 1943, and when Ruth died the Belville time service died with her. It’s an extraordinary story.

Natasha: It certainly is, and you’ve recently published that story haven’t you?

David: I have. My new book, Ruth Belville - the Greenwich Time Lady, has just been published by the National Maritime Museum, and if you’re at all interested in time, or London or how to make a living in a hostile world, you might like to get hold of a copy. You can find out what really happened to Ruth back in 1908 when St John Wynne tried to put her out of business.

Natasha: David, thank you very much.