The Last of the Watchmakers

In the days before watch batteries, every town needed large numbers of watchmakers to make and repair mechanical clocks of all kinds. The same people were usually skilled in making and repairing jewellery as they had the techniques and equipment that allowed them to work in miniature. However, some towns had more of a reputation for clock and watchmakers than others – and Bury St. Edmunds was one of the very best of the provincial clock and watch-making centres. In fact, there was once a museum dedicated entirely to Bury’s watchmaking tradition, the Clock Museum, located in a handsome red-brick house at the northeast corner of Angel Hill. I remember visiting it and seeing row upon row of beautiful bulbous gold pocket watches of the eighteenth century, inlaid with enamel and intricate inscriptions both inside and out. This was the splendid Gershom-Parkington collection, and many of these watches were made in Bury. When the Council bought the Herveys’ old townhouse on Honey Hill in 1993 and turned it into the Manor House Museum, the Clock Museum was closed and the collection moved there. Since the Manor House closed a few of the clocks are on display at Moyse’s Hall Museum but the majority of them must be in storage.

Bury was particularly famous for lantern clocks, which became common in the seventeenth century. One of the finest makers of lantern clocks in the town was William Hawkins (fl. 1740) who had a shop on the corner of Abbeygate Street (then the Cook Row) and Whiting Street. Hawkins’s wife Elizabeth was a Catholic and appears in the lists of those who refused to swear the Oath of Allegiance to George II in 1745. The Cook Row became the most popular location for clockmakers’ shops in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The large clock jutting into the street above the jewellers Thurlow Champness is a reminder of this history. Originally the clock was not there to tell the time but to inform passing customers of the nature of the trade carried on within. The company that is now Thurlow Champness has changed hands many times and become a commercial jewellers, although clocks and watches are still sold there.

In the 1820s the Pace family established a watchmaking business in Abbeygate Street, first at number 19, and lived above the shop in a rather handsome regency style apartment that stretched across numbers 19 and 20. In the ‘History, Gazeteer and Directory of Suffolk’ of 1855 William Last was recorded as living at number 19, but by 1869 the shop had moved next door to number 20 and was run by William Humphrey Collis, Last’s nephew. The shopfront of W. H. Collis and Son, dating from around 1900, must be the oldest on Abbeygate Street and probably the oldest remaining in the town. With the exception of Thurlow Champness and Barwell’s it is one of the few shops in the street that remain from when I first remember it. Many of the old family-owned shops have gone, such as the confusingly named and almost adjacent Ridleys the greengrocers and Ridleys the gentlemen’s outfitters, Leeson Son & Burdon the Chemists and a dozen others that I and probably virtually everyone else has forgotten but were once indispensable for everyday life. However, W. H. Collis has a uniquely antiquated appearance. Not only is the shopfront old, but it is also impenetrable, filled with shelves of much-faded velvet that was once perhaps royal blue but is now a shade of pale turquoise, sparsely populated with articles of secondhand silver and without any gap to show the passer-by that a shop lies within. A blind was permanently pulled down over the glass door, and next to it at the top of a couple of steps is the dark, solid and forbidding door of number 19, the front door to the apartment above.

Over the years Bury’s oldest family-run businesses have steadily fallen prey to the declining youth of their owners, the reluctance of their heirs to continue the business and the pressures of the market. Bury’s the bakers in Churchgate Street used to bake their bread in an oven from the reign of George III and gave away stake cakes to the homeless; Booty’s on the Northgate Street roundabout was cut off by changes to the road layout in the 1970s but somehow survived until about four years ago, with government notices from the Second World War still displayed in the windows. Each time I returned to Bury the facade of W. H. Collis was a reassuring reminder to me that some of the old ways did not change. It was a marvel to me that the shop managed to survive at all.

I have been inside the shop on only a couple of occasions. I have no recollection of why I first went inside – presumably I was looking for something made of silver, probably a replacement for some piece of cutlery that had accidentally got swept into the rubbish. The shop’s proprietor, Peter Avis, was very willing to talk about the history of the firm, and he was very proud indeed that he had inherited the shop from the Paces and Collises. Avis wore a saffron-yellow waistcoat and, with his aquiline profile and a few whisps of grey hair on either side of an otherwise bald head, he looked, spoke and acted like a character from ‘Pickwick Papers’. He assured me gravely that in the long apartment upstairs there was regency furniture and ornaments untouched since the shop was first established. Avis was unusual – eccentric, even – in choosing to live above his shop. Indeed, he was probably the last proprietor in Abbeygate Street to do so. His family had run the shop for so long that he probably owned it outright and was nobody’s tenant – indeed, his ancestors re-fronted the building and they may have built it from the foundations, although there was presumably something standing there before and, like most buildings in central Bury, there was probably a mediaeval frame beneath the bricks. Over the years, as clock and watchmaking declined in importance, Collises had developed another aspect of the business – the sale and repair of silver – yet Peter Avis was, in a sense, the last of the original tribe of watchmakers who made their home in the Cook Row in the eighteenth century. He was certainly the last to live there.

On the night of 12/13th January 2012, thieves broke into the apartment above W. H. Collis and murdered Peter Avis. He was a vulnerable target for crime, and few seem to have had much that was substantial to say about him after his death, except that he was a reclusive eccentric with no known family. However, Peter Avis was not just an old man killed above his shop in a robbery gone wrong; he was the last of the watchmakers of Bury St. Edmunds, and with his brutal and unnecessary death part of the history of the town has been lost – not through a gradual decline like the other family-run shops, but in a manner that insults and demeans a long and proud history. Peter Avis deserves to be remembered.

Advertisement