BRASS TIMEKEEPER FULL
BRASS TIMEKEEPER PLUS

However, through Jefferys and Graham, Kendall had connections with John Harrison, the great pioneer and inventor of the marine timekeeper and precision watch.

He appears though to have remained something of a loner in the trade he was not a member of the Clockmakers' Company and doesn't seem to have been part of the group of talented London (ex-City) watchmakers who met at the Devil Tavern during the last quarter of the 18th century. He was highly respected as a craftsman too working under Graham and with his contemporary Thomas Mudge, he was part of the finest watch making team of the day. He was brought up a Quaker, but once his own master he no longer stayed as one of their brethren though, according to his obituary he ‘never quitted that simplicity of manners for which that sect is so generally admired and a man more inflexibly upright, either in person, word or deed, perhaps scarcely ever lived’. In 1742, immediately after his apprenticeship had ended, he set up on his own, working almost exclusively for the great watch and clockmaker George Graham (1685-1751), as an escapement maker specialising in the horizontal (cylinder) escapement. In 1736 his maternal grandfather (Nicholas Larcum, a salesman of Chipping Wycombe) left property in trust for him, through his mother, and he inherited a reasonable private income (in his will he left 3% annuities on a capital of £1,200, to his brother Moses and thence to Moses's children). On 7 April 1735 Larcum was apprenticed to the watch, clock and repeating-motion maker John Jefferys for seven years, at which time he was living with his parents in St Clement Danes in Westminster, London.

His parents were both Quakers and he had one brother, Moses. Kendall, Larcum (1719-90) was born on 21 September 1719 at Charlbury in Oxfordshire, the elder of two children of Moses Kendall, Mercer and Linen Draper, and Anne Larcum (originally of Chipping Wiccombe, Bucks) who married on 18 June 1718. It was then passed to Vice Admiral Sir John Jervis in HMS ‘Victory’, and returned to the Board in 1802. It was issued to Captain James Cook on his second and third great voyages of discovery to the South Seas, after which it went with Captain Arthur Phillip and the ‘First Fleet’ to found the first colony in Australia. The timekeeper was commissioned by the Board of Longitude as a copy of H4 in 1766 and was completed in 1769. The dial enamel is perfect and the movement is in excellent clean, working condition. The case has a few slight scratches to the finish, and was rhodium plated in the 1940s. The chronometer is in fine, original condition. Both inner and outer cases are hallmarked for London, 1769-70 and with the case-maker’s mark ‘P.M’. The timekeeper is held in a large, silver pair case with stirrup bow, 165mms high, 124mms wide and 28mms deep. The jewelling extends to the balance (diamond upper endstone in a polished steel setting), escape wheel, contrate wheel and third wheel, all with endstones, and the pallets as mentioned. The hardened steel balance has a three turn blued steel spiral balance spring, of tapered form, with a long, somewhat straighter tail, acting against a bimetallic compensation curb, and a secondary ‘isochronal curb pin. The timekeeper contains Harrison’s adapted verge escapement with diamond pallets, acting with the hardened steel escape wheel (correctly called the ‘balance wheel’). The third wheel, with internally cut teeth, runs within the potence plate and meshes with a fourth (remontoir) wheel, leading to a fifth and fly, with the remontoir spring driving a fourth (contrate) wheel, which drives the steel escape wheel.

BRASS TIMEKEEPER PLUS

The timekeeper has a nominal four-wheel train plus a great wheel with a remontoir interposed at the fourth wheel. The fusee, which has Harrison’s maintaining power, has a brass pipe around the winding square. The general level of finish of the brass-work is very high with all brass movement parts highly polished. The plate is engraved ‘Larcum Kendall LONDON 1769’.

BRASS TIMEKEEPER FULL

The timekeeper has a brass, one-day full plate fusee movement with four turned pillars, with a highly engraved slide plate, balance bridge and third wheel bridge. It has polished and blued steel beetle and poker hands with a fine polished steel pointer seconds hand with a counter poised tail. A one day marine timekeeper with a 102mm diameter white enamel dial, in imitation of that of H4, with scrolling decoration at the quarters and roman hour numerals and Arabic ten-minute figures.

Brass timekeeper