![]() ![]() The latter comprise a hundred separate daybooks and ledgers relating to the business established by an engraver, Ralph Beilby, and Thomas Bewick, a former apprentice, in 1777. But perhaps the most interesting section is that from the Beilby and Bewick Account Books. There are also descriptions and illustrations of the kind, range and usage of horological tools. In the north-east, as elsewhere, clockmaking was often a family business, and one chapter contains extra information, with genealogical tables, about the two dozen or so of the region’s pre-eminent clockmaking families. From diverse sources scattered information has been collected that throws light on the practices of both rural and town makers thus we learn, for example, something about the ease and cost of entry into clockmaking, wages, merchants’ guilds, work-rules of apprentices, and also the activities of the area’s great horological pioneers such as Abraham Fromanteel and Deodatus Threlkeld. Bates shows changing styles of local makers and explains how these can, of course, be used to help date their work. The main body of the text, in the first part of the book, comprises chapters giving background information on local clock and watchmakers. To have all this valuable information in one convenient source makes the volume an important addition to any serious horological library. The entries are arranged alphabetically, and there is also a very useful sub-index of makers arranged by towns. Each entry carries a code that permits a researcher to trace the reference back to its source, which might be one or more of an impressively wide range of local newspapers, directories, reference books, and parish records. ![]() The entries vary in length from a line or so to a paragraph or two ( the most important makers, naturally, are also dealt with extensively in the text). This is a Directory of more than 1500 clockmakers, watchmakers, and goldsmiths ( the latter, of course, involved in the repair and retailing of timepieces) who worked in the two north-easternmost counties of England from the late sixteenth until the late nineteenth centuries. The core of the book lies in its second part. The author is to be doubly congratulated, once for the energy and expertise that went into the research, and again for the enterprise which launched its result it is the first book to be issued by his own firm, Pendulum Publications, a welcome addition to companies specialising in horological works. Nevertheless it fulfils admirably its main objective, for it is the MOST COMPREHENSIVE COLLECTION OF INFORMATION ON ITS SUBJECT MATTER. Bates’ volume as he admits in his preface, cannot pretend to be the very last word, as new information constantly comes to light. Until now historians, dealers, and collectors, of clocks and watches emanating from Northumberland and Durham have had to rely for their reference on either the general works of Baillie and Britten or on Leo Reid’s “North Country Clockmakers”, a compilation published more than half a century ago. The present volume forms a valuable addition to this literature. One of the distinctive features of horological publications over the last decade or so has been the emergence of a country-by-country coverage of clockmaking in Great Britain. “Clockmaker’s of Northumberland and Durham.” ISBN-0-950. BOOK REVIEW IN "ANTIQUARIAN HOROLOGY" FOR SEPTEMBER 1982
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