Cinderford High Street clock, and old DF Mercury newspapers. (General)

by Jefff , West London, Middlesex, Wednesday, December 26, 2018, 20:28 (2165 days ago) @ Jefff

Further to my earlier post I'm pleased to say I've today chatted with Cinderford Town Councillor Mark Turner who spoke about the clock in the Forest Review newspaper pages posted earlier in this thread. He explained that he started chasing the story of the "lost clock" back in mid 2015. During his searches he went through the records of the Town Council, and has copies of minutes of meetings from 1974 when the Town Hall was demolished. These minutes showed that even then the Council were keen for the clock to be saved and kept on public display, and were writing to various parties to this effect. The minutes referred to it as the "Co-op clock", as they owned the town hall building which they were redeveloping at that time, just as they had owned it since they installed the clock in 1899.
Mr Turner followed many other lines of enquiry, and after drawing several blanks including the Dean Heritage Museum storage units and the Co-op's own historians, the clock face and mechanism was eventually found safe in private hands. Apparently when the clock was removed from the Town Hall it was taken-in by Cinderford St John's Cricket Club with a view to erecting it on their pavilion, but this never happened.
A recent picture of the face is here
http://www.theforestreview.co.uk/article.cfm?id=712&headline=Time%20machine%20for%2...

I'm very pleased to report that the clock is now owned by Cinderford Town Council. The face is on display in the reception of the old Council Offices building at St Annals House, Cinderford. The whole mechanism is considered by experts to be in fantastic condition and shouldn't be too difficult to get running again.

The Town Council have also recently acquired the old HSBC (ex Midland) Bank building in the town centre, lock stock and vaulted barrel. It's Mr Turner's desire that after restoration the clock will be erected there, which seems an excellent idea. The building also holds the large set of bound volumes of original copies of the Dean Forest Mercury newspapers acquired when their Cinderford office was closed a few months ago, it is intended that these will eventually be made available to the public and of course historians and FH researchers, until then they are safely locked in the bank's massive vault !
See
http://www.theforester.co.uk/article.cfm?id=105060&headline=Cinderford+council+bid+...

I will now make enquiries about those who erected the old town hall building and it's clock such as mason Richard Sier.