Michael Mosbacher

Will Stroud’s ‘racist’ blackboy clock fall?

The blackboy clock

Britain’s statue wars are rumbling on. Stroud District Council wants to take down an historic Jacquemart or jack – a mechanised figure which strikes the time with a hammer on a bell – clock located on Castle Street in the centre of the Gloucestershire town. Whilst jack clocks are fairly common in France and Germany, there are only 20 in the UK, most showing knights or similar striking the bell. Stroud’s jack, however, is a thick-lipped black boy in a leaf skirt and hence offends today’s mores.

In the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and Bristol’s Edward Colston statue being toppled by a mob and thrown into the harbour, Stroud District Council – run by a coalition of 15 Labour, 13 Green and three Liberal Democrats councillors – decided that action needed to be taken. So in time honoured tradition, the Council set up a review panel.

The panel – chaired by a Labour councillor and including various community representatives and a self identifying ‘radical’ historian – has now recommended that the clock and statue be removed at a cost of £33,500 to local taxpayers and be placed in a museum. The Council will be making their decision on Thursday and it appears that it will endorse these conclusions as they are backed by the ruling coalition. Thankfully, whether they will be implementable is another matter.

The 1774 clock is not a great work of art, but rather an expression of vernacular craftsmanship. It is the creation of John Miles, an obscure eighteenth century Stroud clockmaker whose work is not prominent in our museums and rarely comes up for auction; in 2008 one of his mechanisms for a grandfather clock sold at Christies for £1,000. Nevertheless, it is deeply rooted in Stroud – indeed it is much more specific to its locality than many more accomplished works of public art – and has been a local landmark for nearly 250 years.

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