I have decided to place this topic in the Watch Discussion section of the Forum before transferring it to my topics column, the main reason being the importance to the story of one particular chronometer pocket watch, but also because I feel the topic may hold an interest for a more general watch orientated readership; I trust that readers will understand this decision as they read the topic. The watch concerned is illustrated here below, and I leave these pictures without a caption since relevant details of the watch appear in the text of my topic:
![]()
![]()
(Above pics from Rooney (October 2015) and, bottom, Rooney (November 2015) - see Sources at the end of the topic)
Before examining the "selling of the time" business operated by the Belville family, a few notes need to be said about the standardisation of time between different geographical locations in the country, which did not really exist as such in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with the setting of the time being largely a local affair. At the beginning of the standardisation process, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich played an important role in setting and keeping the accurate time, and in 1833 the Observatory introduced a new service whereby time signals were sent using a large ball on the roof of the building. Every day, the ball was raised to the top of a mast a few minutes before it was lowered at exactly 1 pm. This service was used mainly by sailors to synchronise their marine chronometers. In 1852, a large clock was installed on the gate of the Royal Observatory, displaying the current time to the general public, and this clock, as well as the time ball, were both operated via pulses from the master clock. Over the years, these pulses were also being transmitted by cable to London Bridge, and from there the time was distributed to other clocks around the country. The coming of the electrical telegraph, which began to take off in the mid-19th century, eventually provided accurate time to anyone with the right equipment.
John Henry Belville was probably born on 25 July 1795 and baptized on 16 August that year at the church of St Pancras in London. He was the son of John and Jane Belville although the place of his birth is not known for sure; it may have been Bath in Somerset or somewhere in revolutionary France, from which country his mother had recently fled. Whatever the case, Belville and his mother settled in Somerset, England, where they met the astronomer John Pond, who had established an observatory at Westbury. Pond took an interest in the boy's education, and when he was appointed as the new Astronomer Royal at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in April 1811, he took the young Belville with him in his capacity as the boy's guardian. Interestingly, for some years on the careers advice of John Pond, Belville dropped the use of his surname and was known as Mr Henry - a move designed to avoid his name being connected with the horrors of the French Revolution and subsequent wars in France.
On 22 June 1819 at St Paul's, Deptford, John Henry Belville married Sarah Dixon (1798/99-1826) and the couple had three sons and two daughters. Sarah died in December 1826, and on 22 July of the following year Belville married Apollonia Slaney at St Alphage's, Greenwich, with whom he had a daughter, Cecilia. Cecilia became a notable botanical photographer and married the astronomer James Glaisher; their eldest son was the mathematician James Whitbread Lee Glaisher.
In 1835 Pond retired as astronomer royal and was replaced by the strict disciplinarian George Biddell Airy, and it is interesting to recall that in a note written for Airy by Pond in that year, John Belville was described as being "steady tho' not clever" and as "a good computer; but when much exertion is required he requires exciting". At this time, accurate portable timekeepers used on board ships for navigation known as chronometers were in widespread use, and an industry for their manufacturing and setting had grown up in London. Makers and users of these instruments required regular time-checks against Greenwich time, for which they made frequent visits to the observatory. When Airy lost patience with these interruptions he asked Belville, who had become a senior astronomer at the Royal Observatory, to inaugurate a service whereby a specially corrected pocket chronometer would be carried every week from the observatory to London subscribers to the service. This service, which utilized a pocket chronometer made by celebrated watchmaker John Arnold in 1794, was an immediate success, and Belville went on to operate it for twenty years - supplying some 200 London clock and instrument makers with the correct time. This network of subscribers across London paid an annual fee for a weekly visit from the watch - a fine but modest looking pocket watch in a plain silver case.
Following the death of his second wife, Belville married again on 22 December 1851 at St Andrew's, Holborn, his third wife being Maria Elizabeth Last, the daughter of Bartholomew Barcham Last, a Lowestoft merchant. She was then living on Cross Street, Hatton Garden, London, and may have met John Belville during his visits to customers. Maria and John had a daughter in 1854, named Elizabeth Ruth Naomi but known as Ruth, and two years after her birth John Belville died at home in Greenwich on 13 July 1856, following a long illness. He was buried on 18 July in St Margaret's churchyard, Lee, Kent, near the tomb of his former guardian, John Pond. For those who wish to dig deeper into the biography of John Henry Belville, further information is contained in a Royal Observatory Greenwich article (see Sources for this topic below).
Maria Belville at the premises of one of her customers in about 1890 (pic from Wikipedia - upload.wikimedia.org):
![]()
On the death of John Belville, it seemed likely that the business of selling the time by means of a hand-carried chronometer would come to an end since Airey had by then instituted an automated time-distribution service which used electric clocks to send time pulses by telegraph wires to railway stations and post offices. However, some of Belville's subscribers appreciated the personal touch and about 100 of them requested that Maria continue her husband's weekly visits. Maria obtained permission to carry on this business from Airy, and she started as a purveyor of the time herself, along with her other work as a school teacher.
As a child, John and Maria Belville's daughter Ruth may have been educated at home in her mother's boarding school - 23 Crooms Hill, Greenwich - where she later worked as a governess. From an early age, Ruth also accompanied her mother on the weekly time visits across London. In about 1890, the women gave up this school and moved to nearby 29 Elliscombe Road, where Ruth took up teaching in earnest, being described in the 1891 census as a "professor of French and Music". In 1891/92, now partially blind, Maria retired from selling the time, at which point Ruth requested, and was granted, permission to check the Arnold chronometer weekly at the observatory. Maria Belville was to die at the family home on 29 December 1899 and she was buried on 3 January 1900 in Charlton cemetery. Ruth Belville continued in the time selling footsteps of John and Maria Belville from 1892, and her customers would appear to have included a wider variety than just clock/watch and instrument makers.
Ruth Belville outside the gates of the Royal Observatory; picture first published in the Daily Express on 10 March 1908, and reprinted in the February 1920 edition of Popular Science Monthly (pic from the Royal Observatory Greenwich):
![]()
By the close of the 19th century, Ruth Belville was facing competition for her service, not just from the Observatory but also from the Standard Time Company, a commercial enterprise which provided hourly time pulses to automatically corrected clocks for about half the price of Belville's weekly visits. Nevertheless, although many customers switched to the new service, about sixty stayed loyal to Ruth Belville. Ruth herself remained in Charlton until 1907, her last address there being 25 Wellington Road, before moving to 43 St Luke's Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire. By the time of Maria Belville's retirement and death, telegraph time had become an established technology, with the Post Office in competition with commercial firms such as Standard Time However, the new telegraph services were not trouble free - in either accuracy and reliability, with many written complaints about the Post Office service in particular. Ruth Belville was therefore able to retain her niche business, offering a personal weekly time service.
In 1908, Ruth Belville found herself at the centre of much local press attention in the Maidenhead Local Advertiser, following a lecture given by the new chairman of the Standard Time Company, St Andrew St John Winne, as a means to drum up more customers for his new business. In his lecture, Winne (sometimes spelt "Wynne") damned the work of the Belvilles by faint praise, suggesting that "no mere man" could have obtained the two Belville women's weekly access to the observatory. In the event, the lecture backfired and Winne's attempt to undermine Belville's reputation actually led to Ruth gaining more customers. In an interview from 1908, she described a routine that involved checking her chronometer at Greenwich every Monday and visiting, at least once every two weeks, forty customers located between the Docklands and Mayfair.
Ruth Belville and her dog, from the 18 March 1908 edition of The Tatler. Ruth's dog was put down after Ruth lost her case in 1914 against the charge of "keeping a dangerous dog not under proper control" after the dog apparently attacked another dog and its owner (pic from the Royal Observatory Greenwich):
![]()
In the final decades of her life, Ruth Belville faced greater challenges to her time business. In July 1916 British Summer Time was inaugurated, bringing more attention to the standardised setting of clocks and watches, while from February 1924, the BBC broadcast the "Greenwich time signal" of six pips to mark the hour. Later, by the mid-1930s, telephones were in widespread use and in July 1936, the General Post Office (GPO) introduced the "speaking clock", known as TIM after the dialling code used to access the service and utilising the recorded voice of Croydon telephonist Ethel Jane Cain. Nonetheless, Ruth Belville continued her personal time distribution service in spite of all this competition.
At the outbreak of World War Two, Ruth was living in a cottage near Croydon Airport, a target for enemy bombing. In 1940, an explosion at the Royal Observatory prompted the relocation of the time department to a safehouse in Surrey, and meanwhile, working life for Ruth Belville , involving her walking the streets in her eighties, became impossibly dangerous. She therefore finally retired, aged 86, in that year, and lived on a pension provided by the Worshipful Company of Watchmakers. She died on 7 December 1943 from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty gas lamp at her home, 57 Plough Lane, Beddington, Surrey, and was cremated on 15 December at the South London Crematorium in Streatham. On 12 December 1943, the News of the World reported her death with an article headed "Human 'T.I.M.' Found Dead", while the next day, The Times noted how for "half a century" she had "taken the correct Greenwich time to business houses in London on a watch 100 years old". Unmarried, Ruth left no heirs and with her death the unusual Belville family business came to an end.
Ruth Belville supervising the setting of an office clock; photoraph published in the October 1929 edition of Popular Science Monthly (pic from Royal Observatory Greenwich):
![]()
Before concluding this topic, you might be wondering what happened to the Belville's chronometer pocket watch that had been an integral part of the family time selling business for over a century. In fact, "Arnold", as the watch was fondly named by Ruth Belville, after the maker John Arnold, still survives. "Arnold" was a John Arnold pocket chronometer No.485/786, originally made for the Duke of Sussex. It originally had a gold case but, worried that it might be stolen for the precious metal content, John Belville replaced the case with one of silver after he was given the watch. While Arnold was in Ruth Belville's possession, she wanted the watch to have a good home on its retirement from her time distribution service, and she proposed, when writing to the Evening News in 1908, that it should be in the British Museum. However, in 1921, she changed her mind, hoping that the Royal Observatory would buy the watch. In fact, neither institution received Arnold on her retirement. In 1941, the Clockmakers' Company granted a pension to Ruth Belville, giving her financial security, and in 1943 as a show of gratitude, Ruth donated the chronometer to the museum of the Clockmakers' Company, which put it on display in the Guildhall. Today, the watch now resides in a case at the Science Museum as part of the new Clockmakers' Museum.
The Clockmakers' Museum (Gallery) at the Science Museum in London (pic from Rooney (November 2015 - see Sources at the end of the topic):
![]()
The "time-keeper" of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, in 1929, checking the time against "Arnold" which is held by Ruth in her right hand. This picture appeared in a number of American newspapers in 1929 (pic from Royal Observatory Greenwich):
![]()
Sources used for the text of this topic
Alchetron, "Ruth Belville"; Alchetron, updated 23 June 2018. Online at alchetron.com/Ruth-Belville
Buijsrogge, Bert, "Watchmaking History: the business woman who sold the time"; Chrono 24 Magazine, 26 June 2018. Online at https://chrono24.com/magazine/watchmaking-history-the-business-woman-who-sold-the-time-p_30370/
Rooney, David, "Belville, (Elizabeth) Ruth Naomi (1854-1943)"; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 24 May 2012, and this version 1 September 2017. Online at https://www.oxforddnd.com/view/10.1093/ref
dnb/9780198614128-e-96694
Rooney, David, "How did Arnold get to the Clockmakers' Museum"; AHS: The Story of Time, 23 November 2015. Online at ahsoc.org/blog/how-did-arnold-get-to-the-clockmakers-museum
Rooney, David, "Keeper David Rooney shares the story of Ruth Belville, the 'Greenwich Time Lady'"; Science Museum Blog, 23 October 2015. Online at https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ruth-belville-the-greenwich-time-lady
The Royal Observatory Greenwich ...where east meets west, "Distribution of time by the Belvilles". Online at royalobservatorygreenwich.org/articles.php?article=1245
The Royal Observatory Greenwich ...where east meets west, "People: John Henry Belville (aka John Henry)". Online at royalobservatorygreenwich.org/articles.php?article=1124
(Above pics from Rooney (October 2015) and, bottom, Rooney (November 2015) - see Sources at the end of the topic)
Before examining the "selling of the time" business operated by the Belville family, a few notes need to be said about the standardisation of time between different geographical locations in the country, which did not really exist as such in the 18th and early 19th centuries, with the setting of the time being largely a local affair. At the beginning of the standardisation process, the Royal Observatory at Greenwich played an important role in setting and keeping the accurate time, and in 1833 the Observatory introduced a new service whereby time signals were sent using a large ball on the roof of the building. Every day, the ball was raised to the top of a mast a few minutes before it was lowered at exactly 1 pm. This service was used mainly by sailors to synchronise their marine chronometers. In 1852, a large clock was installed on the gate of the Royal Observatory, displaying the current time to the general public, and this clock, as well as the time ball, were both operated via pulses from the master clock. Over the years, these pulses were also being transmitted by cable to London Bridge, and from there the time was distributed to other clocks around the country. The coming of the electrical telegraph, which began to take off in the mid-19th century, eventually provided accurate time to anyone with the right equipment.
John Henry Belville was probably born on 25 July 1795 and baptized on 16 August that year at the church of St Pancras in London. He was the son of John and Jane Belville although the place of his birth is not known for sure; it may have been Bath in Somerset or somewhere in revolutionary France, from which country his mother had recently fled. Whatever the case, Belville and his mother settled in Somerset, England, where they met the astronomer John Pond, who had established an observatory at Westbury. Pond took an interest in the boy's education, and when he was appointed as the new Astronomer Royal at the Royal Observatory, Greenwich, in April 1811, he took the young Belville with him in his capacity as the boy's guardian. Interestingly, for some years on the careers advice of John Pond, Belville dropped the use of his surname and was known as Mr Henry - a move designed to avoid his name being connected with the horrors of the French Revolution and subsequent wars in France.
On 22 June 1819 at St Paul's, Deptford, John Henry Belville married Sarah Dixon (1798/99-1826) and the couple had three sons and two daughters. Sarah died in December 1826, and on 22 July of the following year Belville married Apollonia Slaney at St Alphage's, Greenwich, with whom he had a daughter, Cecilia. Cecilia became a notable botanical photographer and married the astronomer James Glaisher; their eldest son was the mathematician James Whitbread Lee Glaisher.
In 1835 Pond retired as astronomer royal and was replaced by the strict disciplinarian George Biddell Airy, and it is interesting to recall that in a note written for Airy by Pond in that year, John Belville was described as being "steady tho' not clever" and as "a good computer; but when much exertion is required he requires exciting". At this time, accurate portable timekeepers used on board ships for navigation known as chronometers were in widespread use, and an industry for their manufacturing and setting had grown up in London. Makers and users of these instruments required regular time-checks against Greenwich time, for which they made frequent visits to the observatory. When Airy lost patience with these interruptions he asked Belville, who had become a senior astronomer at the Royal Observatory, to inaugurate a service whereby a specially corrected pocket chronometer would be carried every week from the observatory to London subscribers to the service. This service, which utilized a pocket chronometer made by celebrated watchmaker John Arnold in 1794, was an immediate success, and Belville went on to operate it for twenty years - supplying some 200 London clock and instrument makers with the correct time. This network of subscribers across London paid an annual fee for a weekly visit from the watch - a fine but modest looking pocket watch in a plain silver case.
Following the death of his second wife, Belville married again on 22 December 1851 at St Andrew's, Holborn, his third wife being Maria Elizabeth Last, the daughter of Bartholomew Barcham Last, a Lowestoft merchant. She was then living on Cross Street, Hatton Garden, London, and may have met John Belville during his visits to customers. Maria and John had a daughter in 1854, named Elizabeth Ruth Naomi but known as Ruth, and two years after her birth John Belville died at home in Greenwich on 13 July 1856, following a long illness. He was buried on 18 July in St Margaret's churchyard, Lee, Kent, near the tomb of his former guardian, John Pond. For those who wish to dig deeper into the biography of John Henry Belville, further information is contained in a Royal Observatory Greenwich article (see Sources for this topic below).
Maria Belville at the premises of one of her customers in about 1890 (pic from Wikipedia - upload.wikimedia.org):
On the death of John Belville, it seemed likely that the business of selling the time by means of a hand-carried chronometer would come to an end since Airey had by then instituted an automated time-distribution service which used electric clocks to send time pulses by telegraph wires to railway stations and post offices. However, some of Belville's subscribers appreciated the personal touch and about 100 of them requested that Maria continue her husband's weekly visits. Maria obtained permission to carry on this business from Airy, and she started as a purveyor of the time herself, along with her other work as a school teacher.
As a child, John and Maria Belville's daughter Ruth may have been educated at home in her mother's boarding school - 23 Crooms Hill, Greenwich - where she later worked as a governess. From an early age, Ruth also accompanied her mother on the weekly time visits across London. In about 1890, the women gave up this school and moved to nearby 29 Elliscombe Road, where Ruth took up teaching in earnest, being described in the 1891 census as a "professor of French and Music". In 1891/92, now partially blind, Maria retired from selling the time, at which point Ruth requested, and was granted, permission to check the Arnold chronometer weekly at the observatory. Maria Belville was to die at the family home on 29 December 1899 and she was buried on 3 January 1900 in Charlton cemetery. Ruth Belville continued in the time selling footsteps of John and Maria Belville from 1892, and her customers would appear to have included a wider variety than just clock/watch and instrument makers.
Ruth Belville outside the gates of the Royal Observatory; picture first published in the Daily Express on 10 March 1908, and reprinted in the February 1920 edition of Popular Science Monthly (pic from the Royal Observatory Greenwich):
By the close of the 19th century, Ruth Belville was facing competition for her service, not just from the Observatory but also from the Standard Time Company, a commercial enterprise which provided hourly time pulses to automatically corrected clocks for about half the price of Belville's weekly visits. Nevertheless, although many customers switched to the new service, about sixty stayed loyal to Ruth Belville. Ruth herself remained in Charlton until 1907, her last address there being 25 Wellington Road, before moving to 43 St Luke's Road, Maidenhead, Berkshire. By the time of Maria Belville's retirement and death, telegraph time had become an established technology, with the Post Office in competition with commercial firms such as Standard Time However, the new telegraph services were not trouble free - in either accuracy and reliability, with many written complaints about the Post Office service in particular. Ruth Belville was therefore able to retain her niche business, offering a personal weekly time service.
In 1908, Ruth Belville found herself at the centre of much local press attention in the Maidenhead Local Advertiser, following a lecture given by the new chairman of the Standard Time Company, St Andrew St John Winne, as a means to drum up more customers for his new business. In his lecture, Winne (sometimes spelt "Wynne") damned the work of the Belvilles by faint praise, suggesting that "no mere man" could have obtained the two Belville women's weekly access to the observatory. In the event, the lecture backfired and Winne's attempt to undermine Belville's reputation actually led to Ruth gaining more customers. In an interview from 1908, she described a routine that involved checking her chronometer at Greenwich every Monday and visiting, at least once every two weeks, forty customers located between the Docklands and Mayfair.
Ruth Belville and her dog, from the 18 March 1908 edition of The Tatler. Ruth's dog was put down after Ruth lost her case in 1914 against the charge of "keeping a dangerous dog not under proper control" after the dog apparently attacked another dog and its owner (pic from the Royal Observatory Greenwich):
In the final decades of her life, Ruth Belville faced greater challenges to her time business. In July 1916 British Summer Time was inaugurated, bringing more attention to the standardised setting of clocks and watches, while from February 1924, the BBC broadcast the "Greenwich time signal" of six pips to mark the hour. Later, by the mid-1930s, telephones were in widespread use and in July 1936, the General Post Office (GPO) introduced the "speaking clock", known as TIM after the dialling code used to access the service and utilising the recorded voice of Croydon telephonist Ethel Jane Cain. Nonetheless, Ruth Belville continued her personal time distribution service in spite of all this competition.
At the outbreak of World War Two, Ruth was living in a cottage near Croydon Airport, a target for enemy bombing. In 1940, an explosion at the Royal Observatory prompted the relocation of the time department to a safehouse in Surrey, and meanwhile, working life for Ruth Belville , involving her walking the streets in her eighties, became impossibly dangerous. She therefore finally retired, aged 86, in that year, and lived on a pension provided by the Worshipful Company of Watchmakers. She died on 7 December 1943 from carbon monoxide poisoning caused by a faulty gas lamp at her home, 57 Plough Lane, Beddington, Surrey, and was cremated on 15 December at the South London Crematorium in Streatham. On 12 December 1943, the News of the World reported her death with an article headed "Human 'T.I.M.' Found Dead", while the next day, The Times noted how for "half a century" she had "taken the correct Greenwich time to business houses in London on a watch 100 years old". Unmarried, Ruth left no heirs and with her death the unusual Belville family business came to an end.
Ruth Belville supervising the setting of an office clock; photoraph published in the October 1929 edition of Popular Science Monthly (pic from Royal Observatory Greenwich):
Before concluding this topic, you might be wondering what happened to the Belville's chronometer pocket watch that had been an integral part of the family time selling business for over a century. In fact, "Arnold", as the watch was fondly named by Ruth Belville, after the maker John Arnold, still survives. "Arnold" was a John Arnold pocket chronometer No.485/786, originally made for the Duke of Sussex. It originally had a gold case but, worried that it might be stolen for the precious metal content, John Belville replaced the case with one of silver after he was given the watch. While Arnold was in Ruth Belville's possession, she wanted the watch to have a good home on its retirement from her time distribution service, and she proposed, when writing to the Evening News in 1908, that it should be in the British Museum. However, in 1921, she changed her mind, hoping that the Royal Observatory would buy the watch. In fact, neither institution received Arnold on her retirement. In 1941, the Clockmakers' Company granted a pension to Ruth Belville, giving her financial security, and in 1943 as a show of gratitude, Ruth donated the chronometer to the museum of the Clockmakers' Company, which put it on display in the Guildhall. Today, the watch now resides in a case at the Science Museum as part of the new Clockmakers' Museum.
The Clockmakers' Museum (Gallery) at the Science Museum in London (pic from Rooney (November 2015 - see Sources at the end of the topic):
The "time-keeper" of the South Metropolitan Gas Company, in 1929, checking the time against "Arnold" which is held by Ruth in her right hand. This picture appeared in a number of American newspapers in 1929 (pic from Royal Observatory Greenwich):
Sources used for the text of this topic
Alchetron, "Ruth Belville"; Alchetron, updated 23 June 2018. Online at alchetron.com/Ruth-Belville
Buijsrogge, Bert, "Watchmaking History: the business woman who sold the time"; Chrono 24 Magazine, 26 June 2018. Online at https://chrono24.com/magazine/watchmaking-history-the-business-woman-who-sold-the-time-p_30370/
Rooney, David, "Belville, (Elizabeth) Ruth Naomi (1854-1943)"; Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published online 24 May 2012, and this version 1 September 2017. Online at https://www.oxforddnd.com/view/10.1093/ref
dnb/9780198614128-e-96694Rooney, David, "How did Arnold get to the Clockmakers' Museum"; AHS: The Story of Time, 23 November 2015. Online at ahsoc.org/blog/how-did-arnold-get-to-the-clockmakers-museum
Rooney, David, "Keeper David Rooney shares the story of Ruth Belville, the 'Greenwich Time Lady'"; Science Museum Blog, 23 October 2015. Online at https://blog.sciencemuseum.org.uk/ruth-belville-the-greenwich-time-lady
The Royal Observatory Greenwich ...where east meets west, "Distribution of time by the Belvilles". Online at royalobservatorygreenwich.org/articles.php?article=1245
The Royal Observatory Greenwich ...where east meets west, "People: John Henry Belville (aka John Henry)". Online at royalobservatorygreenwich.org/articles.php?article=1124
