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| The offending item... |
Sometimes, rabbit holes lead to nowhere.
The major appeal of the BBC’s “Antiques Roadshow”, for me, has been the level of detail provided by its experts about the featured items, both about their origin and place in history. Their monetary valuation is inconsequential – if the sentimental value is higher, it’s just a number.
But one item left me perplexed. In an episode recorded at Belfast’s Botanic Gardens, first broadcast in May 2025, expert Adam Schoon shows three brass items to host Fiona Bruce, inviting her and the gathered crowd to guess their use. The largest item is a clock dial, with one large hand, but instead of a standard twelve-hour face, this dial counts to sixteen. The engraved “P” on the face links to an either/or guess: was this dial used to record the number of partridges dispatched by a shooting party? Or is it an early 19th century dial used to display the departure time of a stagecoach to prospective passengers? Why a 16-hour dial? Schoon said, “it didn’t go all night”, so therefore must only show the hours at which that specific stagecoach would leave.
That was all the information given, apart from confirming it was a stagecoach departure clock - apparently partridges could be killed in higher numbers. The clock dial is intricately engraved with a pattern between the dials, but they do not show increments of an hour – you can only indicate the “top” of each hour, from 1 to 16.
But this just refused to make sense to me. Another brass item shown in this guessing game was an Elizabethan (16thcentury) laundry tally, used to count various items in and out of the laundry process, but this is also done using ten dials that count to 12, like a regular clock. Remember that counting to twelve was more prevalent until decimalisation in the UK – twelve pennies make a shilling, twelve ounces in one troy pound, twelve inches make one foot. Until the advent of computing, I can’t think of a previous need for a hexadecimal counting system, at least in my part of the world.
Describing the time using a twenty-hour hour clock, from 00:00 to 23:59, also only gained more widespread use in the 20th century, even if clocks with 24-hour faces had existed for centuries before. Could it be that, wherever this clock came from, the only possible departure times were between 01:00 and 16:00? Without being told where it was displayed, I can never know.
Searching any of this information online proved to be a dead end. Searching “16-hour stagecoach clock” only confirmed that the Royal Mail stagecoach from Bristol to London eventually reduced its time to just sixteen hours before steam trains took over from then, accelerating the journey time even further. “Stagecoach clocks” only reveal pictures of similar brass clocks that show standard twelve-hour faces, or ornamental clocks being drawn by ornamental horses, while “carriage clock” creates a minefield: am I looking for a departure display clock, or a hand-held watch that is buffered by metal or wood to prevent its mechanism from being knocked during transit in a stagecoach, or did I want one of those little ornamental carriage clocks that your grandmother had on her mantlepiece?
Even worse as a search term is “stagecoach”: since the deregulation and privatisation of bus services in the UK in the 1980s, the Stagecoach Group has become one of the largest bus operators, and any search for information about stagecoaches from any period in history, or even the 1939 western film “Stagecoach”, will have to try to exclude services that are available right now.
What I am left with here is either a mystery, or nothing at all. It may be just a quirk that this clock face, made to display very particular times in a very particular location, made its way onto television, and left me feeling a little too intrigued... So the coach wouldn’t depart after 4pm, but it could leave at 1am...?
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