Lucky find
Coincidences being what they are, perhaps I should not be surprised when, a few weeks after I completed my restoration of the ‘Sam. Hill’ longcase movement, I was at a local antiques fair when I spotted a small enamelled tin on a dealer’s table. What caught my eye really was the clock face that was on one side of it. I picked up the tin and almost couldn’t believe it when the dial turned out to be a copy of a ‘Sam. Hill’ of Sheffield dial. The quartz movement was mounted inside the tin.
Before starting this project I had never seen nor heard of Samuel Hill’s clocks and there, before my eyes, was another ‘Sam. Hill’ dial, albeit a quartz-driven copy on an enamelled tin, marketed by a modern English company as a souvenir of some kind. I not only bought the tin but, on leaving the fair, I went straight to the newsagents’s and bought a ticket in the next lottery!
Brian Barkworth, Australia
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