Parish Clock - St Mary’s church and a brief history of standardised time 

You may be aware that the clock on the tower is having the internal movements overhauled and restored. Although it is working well the view obtained from experienced clock repairers was that it is best to overhaul it now rather than leave it any longer. This means the clock will be out of action from early February until it is re-installed, hopefully by the end of April (if not sooner). Readers may recall a previous article explaining that when the clock was installed (by Pollards of Crediton) in 1810 very few had any timepieces in those days so like many parish/town clocks our clock would have served to indicate the time to those living in the vicinity.

The UK was among the first countries to establish a standardised time or Railway time as it became known. Before this, towns and cities set their own time depending on where they were and this could vary by tens or twenties of minutes. The key goals behind introducing railway time were to overcome the confusion caused by having non-uniform local times in each town and station stop along the expanding railway network and to reduce the incidence of accidents and near misses, which were becoming more frequent as the number of train journeys increased. Great Western was the first to apply this in England in November 1840, the first recorded occasion when different local times were synchronised and a single standard time applied. Railway time was progressively taken up by all railway companies in Great Britain over the following two to three years. The schedules by which trains were organised and the time station clocks displayed were brought in line with the local time for London or “London Time”, the time set at Greenwich by the Royal Observatory which was already widely known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT). 

The railway companies sometimes faced concerted resistance from local people who refused to adjust their public clocks to bring them into line with London Time. As a consequence, two different times would be displayed in the town and in use, with the station clocks and the times published in train timetables differing by several minutes from that on other clocks. Despite this early reluctance, railway time rapidly became adopted as the default time across the whole of Great Britain, although it took until 1880 for the government to legislate on the establishment of a single Standard Time and a single time zone for the country.