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A Merry Christmas and a Happy New Millennium to all our customers and to all
who visit our website. The new year resolution of our webmaster is to see that this page
gets updated a lot more frequently in 2000 than we managed in 1999.
MASHAM AND THE MILLENIUMThe ring of ten bells installed at the start of the year, with new fittings and framework, by Whitechapel at Masham in North Yorkshire (home of the famous Theakston's brewery), comprises five new bells and five old ones. The older bells, the five largest of the ring, were all cast James Harrison of Barton-on-Humber in 1766. James was the younger brother of John Harrison, who is renowned worldwide as the man who finally solved the problem of how to accurately measure longitude. This he achieved by producing a clock of hitherto unheard of accuracy capable of maintaining time over a large range of temperatures and humidities and regardless of the motion of a ship.This accomplishment won him a government prize of £20,000 (equivalent to about £6,000,000 in today's money), though it took the personal intervention of George III to secure this money for him. The full story of Harrison's struggle can be read in the best-selling book, LONGITUDE by Dava Sobel. Interestingly, Thomas North F.S.A., in his book THE CHURCH BELLS OF THE COUNTY AND CITY OF LINCOLN, PUBLISHED IN 1882, questions the sole involvement of John and states: "The instrument was, after several trials and improvements, completed, as is generally supposed, by John Harrison the elder brother, but the popular impression in their own neighbourhood was that James was the greater genius of the two, and that from his conception the time-keeper was modelled and completed, but that being the more careless and easy of the two in disposition and habits, he allowed his brother to take the instument up to London, where, as was anticipated by their neighbours, he introduced it as his sole invention, and obtained the full credit for it himself." The church clock at Masham is also by Harrison and therefore, to maintain the Harrison tradition, Whitechapel have cast the new bells from specially made moulding gauges designed to match exactly the Harrison scale and profile. Can there be a more appropriate bell restoration project for the millenium than one which breathes new life into bells and a clock made by the family that, with the fifth Astronomer Royal Nevil Meskelyne, resolved the problem of longitude and placed the prime meridian through Greenwich?
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