A highly respected clock, watch and chronometer maker, James Brock oversaw the construction of the Great Clock for the Palace of Westminster in the workshop of E.J.Dent. In March 1859, after testing and refining the clock (Big Ben to the uninitiated!) was finally installed in the world-famous clock tower. 

 

Work began on the clock in 1852  after an 8-year dispute with the Royal Clockmaker Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy (1780-1854) who lost the contract, largely because he refused to submit plans and estimates for the contract until 2 years after it was put out to tender by the Government of the day.

 

The clock’s mechanism was designed by Edward Beckett Denison (later to become Lord Grimthorpe) to specifications laid down by the Astronomer Royal George Biddulph Airy (1801-1892) and it was the foreman of Dent’s Workshop, Brock, who oversaw the prestigious scheme. Brock later left Dent’s employment and setting up business on his own account in George Street, Portman Square, it was here that he was commissioned by B.A. Willcox to build the clock for Christ’s Hospital. Brock was held in great esteem by Dent, and therefore allowed to produce clocks under his own name while employed by Dent’s, for whom he seems to have made the majority of their regulators, including for E J Dent’s successors after he had left their direct employ. As their outworker, his serial numbers therefore fell within Dent’s own series, and can be dated by reference to the records of Dent’s production.

 

Brock died in 1893 at the age of 67. Writing in the Horologist Magazine Lord Grimthorpe said of him: “I am sorry to say – James Brock is dead. He was an excellent and charming man who built a sufficient factory in a stable-yard in that region where we made the Westminster clock and sundry other large ones.”

 

One other ‘large’ clock of Brock’s is on permanent display at the British Museum.