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From 1924 it was regularly broadcast by the BBC at home, and after the Empire Service (later the World Service) was begun in 1932, the chimes became a favourite with overseas listeners, projecting nostalgia to those far from home, and an idea of Britain as a source of order, authority, and time even to some who had never been there. In the interwar years the sound of Big Ben would become familiar across Britain in a more mundane manner. The clock was becoming associated with moments of reflection, remembrance and solemnity. When, after the war, an annual ceremony was instituted at the Cenotaph in remembrance of the war dead, the chime of Big Ben at 11 was the symbol for a two minute silence to begin. Lord Harcourt, who was in 1914 colonial secretary, remembered in a speech after the First World War hearing from Downing Street the chilling sound of the bell tolling 11 o’clock and marking the expiry of the ultimatum to Germany and the beginning of hostilities. Its authoritative and dominant sound was echoed by a 68-gun salute in Hyde Park, one for every year of the king’s age.
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It was first used to toll at the obsequies of a monarch in 1910: both at the procession to take Edward VII’s body to lie in state at Westminster Hall, when it was rung every 15 seconds, and again for the funeral itself, when it was rung every minute. It was possibly that ‘sepulchral’ sound – more than the clock’s accuracy or ubiquity – that was the reason why the bell seeped so deeply into the British mindset. In 1859 one medical practitioner in Southwark complained to the Medical Times of the depressing effects produced on his patients by the ‘morbific influence’ of the ‘sepulchral tones’ of the big bell. ‘She came to my room just as Big Ben was striking 8’, said a witness of the victim in a sad murder and suicide case in 1919 in Lambeth reported in The Times. Clarissa Dalloway in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel laid her green dress on her bed just as Big Ben struck twelve, ‘whose stroke was wafted over the northern part of London, blent with that of other clocks, mixed in a thin ethereal way with the clouds and wisps of smoke and died up there among the seagulls’. The mantelpiece clock for the ruling elite – it could and can be seen right down Whitehall – people around Westminster and even over the river measured out their lives by it. Its reliability, carefully adjusted with pennies, was almost proverbial. The largest bell ever cast in Britain, and perhaps beyond it, the tallest four-faced clock tower ever built, the most accurate clock, the whole construction was vauntingly ambitious, a masterpiece of engineering – at least once the initial problems were overcome and the clock was got to work properly. Initially, the clock must have seemed indicative of British power, confidence and technological knowhow. The reasons for its status are obvious enough but it is perhaps worth reflecting on what sort of nation the clock and the tower came to symbolise and just how it came to do so. The overused word ‘iconic’ seems for once appropriate in the case of something that has appeared on countless photographs, souvenirs and bottles of brown sauce, and whose sound has been heard just about every day from London to Lahore and beyond. The reaction in some quarters to the news that Big Ben will cease to strike from noon on Monday 21 August until 2021 (the Daily Telegraph says there is a ‘backlash’ the Mail says it’s a ‘death knell for common sense’) is an index to the peculiar place of the bell, its clock and its tower in British national consciousness. With Big Ben – possibly – due to fall silent next week, our Director, Dr Paul Seaward, discusses the history of the famous bell…