Ruth Belville: The Greenwich Time Lady - Hardcover

Rooney, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0948065974 ISBN 13: 9780948065972

Publisher: Natl Maritime Museum, 2008

Synopsis

In a world that witnessed the emergence of automatic timeballs, telegraph time signals, the speaking clock, and the BBC’s six pips,” one family provided the hours and minutes to paying customers across London for more than 100 years using a pocketwatch named Arnold.” It was with Ruth Belville the last of the timesellers, who retired in her 80s in 1939 that this remarkable episode in the history of timekeeping and London life was brought to a close. Seeking to show that the Belvilles operated a service that was to many customers better than the official electric time signals from Greenwich, this chronicle turns the story of the Greenwich Time Service on its head, revealing for the first time the strengths of Ruth Belville and her family. In this fascinating true account, commercial propaganda, dirty tricks, and failing technologies come together in a story of the Greenwich Time Lady and her surefire will to succeed in Edwardian London.

About this title

About the Author:

David Rooney is a historian of technology and a curator of timekeeping at the Royal Observatory.

Review:

"This is an engrossing and eccentric slice of London history . . . it's constantly surprising, crisply written, beautifully detailed."  —Jonathan Meades, British writer and broadcaster

"Rooney tells a story that Dickens would have loved, lively with the oddity of human characters making a living from time, laced with arcane lore of London and loaded with the history of the Royal Observatory and GMT."  —The Times

"Like a telescope from the Observatory, [the book's] focus is fine but its range is wide. Rooney has a gift for making difficult concepts easily graspable, and a riveting way of setting scenes, describing characters and relating anecdotes."  —Telegraph

"At a terse 192 pages, [this book] carries no dead weight. . . . Yet Rooney's prose is not skimpy or spare; rather, it breathes life into the characters and events that form this unusual story."  —popmatters.com

About this edition

• Publisher: Natl Maritime Museum
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0948065974
• ISBN 13: 9780948065972
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 192