A CLOCK COLLECTOR

Hokitika Guardian, 8 September 1924, Page 3

A CLOCK COLLECTOR

SYDNEY, August 2. The. av<“i'age man is satisfied with out* clock in the house, or sit most two. But not so with .Mr Quigg, who. with his wife, lives in a cottage within the old Botany cemetery, in the metropolis of Sydney, lie makes a hohhy ol collecting clocks, whose ceaseless tick, tick, cuckoos and chimes, and rings and rates contrast strangely with the sepulchral and everlasting silence ol the dead who rest all round his cottage. But if their spirits roam round the little cottage at the dead of night they probably pour inaleilivtioiis upon the ceaseless noises and heart-beats of the clocks of Mr Guigg. for lie lias several hundreds of them. To wind them all up occupies live and a half hours of his time every Sunday, lie says. He has more clocks and a greater diversity of them, than ever the average purveyor of clocks dreamed of. He has been collecting them all his life, and his father before him was a collector. There is a great grandfather’s clock POl7 years old; a French grandfather’s clock, claiming the same age; another indicates the phases of the moon; there are clocks shaped like padlocks, cups, see-saws, frying-pans and kewpies ; one quaint clock shows Charlie C’liaplm pouring out a cup of tea for Mary Bickford, while cuckoos dart out to announce the hour; there is a woodtn clock, made in 1010. and like Johnny Walker, still going strong; a calendar dock lias continuously and accurately told the flight of years, and of leap years, months, days, hours, minutes and even seconds, since 1872; there is a German clock, capable of turning of! the gas or electric light at any required time: eleetrie and water clocks and so on. Everywhere in Mr Quigg’s cottage clocks tick and ring hells and blow bugles and wink eves in their faces, and do other extraordinary things. It is a quaint 1i01.1.y that this old gentleman with his equally quaint name indulges in!