The Girl Who Fixed the Clock

The clock on the market hall stopped at eleven minutes past four on a Tuesday in October 1998 and has said eleven minutes past four ever since.

The positions

The Restorers hold that the clock should be repaired. This is the majority view and has been since about 2001 and has never once translated into anybody repairing the clock.

The Preservationists hold that the clock has now been stopped for longer than most residents have been alive, that it is on the tea towels, and that repairing it would be an act of vandalism. This faction is small and consists mainly of one man called Lionel who is extremely effective.

The Realists point out that the estimate obtained in 2011 was for eleven thousand pounds and that the town council's discretionary budget is four thousand.

The estimate

The 2011 estimate is the single most important document in this dispute and almost nobody has read it.

It is four pages. It says that the movement is a Smith of Derby flatbed of about 1904, that it is in good condition, that the fault is not in the movement at all but in the drive to the north face, and that the sum of eleven thousand pounds covers full restoration including the dial, the hands, the gilding, and a maintenance contract.

Under a heading marked Minimum intervention, on page three, it says that the immediate fault could be rectified for approximately four hundred pounds.

Nobody has ever quoted page three at a public meeting. Everyone quotes eleven thousand.

Nadia

Nadia Farr is sixteen and does not care about any of this.

She got into clocks through a broken carriage clock at her grandmother's and then through a forum and then through a man in Leek who repairs longcase movements and who let her sit in his workshop on Saturdays for two years because she asked properly and did not talk.

She read the 2011 estimate in March because it is on the council website, in a PDF, at the bottom of a page about heritage assets.

She read page three.

What she did

She wrote to the town clerk asking for access to the clock room.

The town clerk replied that access was restricted for insurance reasons.

She wrote back asking who held the insurance, which was a better question than a sixteen-year-old was expected to ask, and got a name, and wrote to them, and established that there was no restriction of the kind described and never had been.

She sent that reply to the town clerk.

The town clerk, who had been in post four months and had inherited the clock along with everything else, invited her to a meeting.

The meeting

Nadia brought: the 2011 estimate with page three highlighted; a photograph of the north face taken with a long lens from the car park; two pages of her own notes; and her grandmother, who said nothing for the entire meeting and whose presence was, everyone agreed afterwards, decisive.

The clerk said the council could not authorise an unqualified minor to work on a listed structure.

Nadia said she was not proposing to work on it. She was proposing to look at it, in the presence of an adult, and produce a report.

The clerk asked what the report would say.

Nadia said she had no idea, which the clerk said afterwards was the moment she decided to allow it.

What she found

She was in the clock room for four hours with the man from Leek, who drove down for nothing and who has never once been mentioned in any of the subsequent coverage because he asked not to be.

The 2011 estimate was correct about everything.

The drive to the north face is a bevel gear and a short shaft, and the shaft has a broken pin, and the pin is a standard size, and the reason the clock has not run since 1998 is a component that costs less than four pounds.

The four hundred in the estimate is almost entirely labour and access equipment.

What she did next

This is the part everyone gets wrong when they tell it.

She did not fix it.

She wrote the report — nine pages, with photographs, which is on the council website now — and she recommended the full eleven thousand pound restoration, and she recommended explicitly against the four hundred pound fix.

Her reasoning, on page seven, is that the movement is intact and original and that a minimum intervention would start the clock without addressing the wear in the drive train, and that the clock would run for perhaps three years and stop again, and that the town would then have spent four hundred pounds to lose the argument permanently, because a clock that has been fixed once and stopped again does not get fixed a second time.

Where it is now

The council has committed four thousand. There is a fundraising campaign at six thousand one hundred. Lionel has, remarkably, donated.

The clock still says eleven minutes past four.

Nadia is doing A-levels and has been offered an apprenticeship in Derby that she has not accepted yet because she is thinking about university.

She has been in the clock room three more times.

She has not touched the pin. She has, she told the man from Leek, thought about it every single time, and the reason she has not is that she wrote nine pages arguing that it would be the wrong thing to do, and she meant them, and it turns out that is harder than it sounds when you are standing next to it with a screwdriver in your bag.