Martin Burgess

His exact contemporaries at Farfield included Robert Aagaard, later a furniture maker and conservator who founded the youth movement Cathedral Camps.

In any case, the roads were blocked... One day the School was called out to dig out a farm, or was it a small village?

"[4] After a first career as a restorer of Egyptian antiquities, Burgess turned to horology and clock-making and specialised in building innovative and gigantic clocks, often with a variety of unusual escapements.

His magnificent Second Sculptural Clock, made in 1965, is now owned by the American graphic artist Donald Saff.

The clock (which appeared on the cover of the Horological Journal for August 2001) has a massive compound pendulum which beats at 2.5 seconds and an escape wheel which turns in five minutes.

Its principal feature is a duralumin wheel of 10 feet (3 metres) in diameter, which rotates once in 24 hours, showing world time.

The clock uses a gravity escapement similar to that employed by Frank Hope-Jones, providing an impulse each minute to an 80 kg pendulum.

On the hour, bronze balls are taken by the lion and travel down a track to a set of scales (a symbol of Barclay's Bank) and on into the castle.

[10] Finally, in a 100-day test between 6 January and 16 April 2015, it lost 5/8 of a second to claim the title of the most accurate mechanical clock with a pendulum swinging in free air.

It focuses on the building of one of his gigantic clocks, an open mechanism eighteen feet high, driven by weights and weighing some 350 kilograms, or 760 pounds avoirdupois.