Foreign News: The Big Clock

For 17 years Thomas Manners, 52, helped to record the inexorable passage of time in London’s sprawling la^ courts. As a clock mechanic in the Ministry of Works, it was his duty to wind, inspect and keep on time the 800 clocks scattered throughout the great building. One day last week. Manners climbed the stone stairs of the tall main tower to tend the intricate mechanism of gears, chains and weights in the great central clock that juts out from the law courts at Temple Bar, above London’s busy Strand.

Manners’ twice-weekly chore with the big clock was a simple matter of starting the motor that winds its huge weights into place. As he worked away inside the tower, hurrying Londoners in the crowded Strand below glanced up as usual for a reassuring look at the great white dial that guided their daily scurrying. Auto horns blared their impatience at a moment’s delay, exhaust pipes splattered with selfimportance, old friends called out greetings, and tardy law clerks beat sharp tattoos on the pavements with hurrying heels. In the cacophony that makes a great city, no one-would hear a cry for help coming from behind the clock face in the tower 100 ft. above their heads. On and around the clock’s great hands moved, slow and inexorable, with never a slip.

Two hours later, the clock was still running, still keeping perfect time, but something was wrong. Two other clock mechanics went up the tower to see why the great clock was no longer striking the hours. There, his long brown work smock caught in the relentless turning gears of the clock’s winding mechanism, they found Thomas Manners, strangled to death by the clock he had tended so long and faithfully.