Historian Arthur Nicholls reveals the history of Kendal’s time guns

I READ Mervyn Bowley’s piece about the Kendal Time Gun, which appeared on the Nostalgia page on May 9.

From the beginning the Time Gun was sounded every weekday, not just Saturdays, but in its latter years there were changes in the frequency – it was not fired every day.

Men worked a six-day week then and, without watches to tell the time, the gun sounded at dinner-time.

It was first paid for by public subscription and later became the responsibility of the town council.

When first set up, the gun was fired directly from Greenwich Observatory through a mechanical contrivance attached to it, but this was inconvenient to the Observatory and too expensive for the town.

T. & E. Rhodes was a natural choice for operating the gun through an electrical switch at its shop in Highgate, as the firm was responsible for ensuring that the Town Hall clock showed the correct time by obtaining Greenwich Mean time from the General Post Office.

In 1936, when Rhodes gave up the business, the firing of the gun was contracted to Johnson & Court, whose shop was at the corner of Finkle Street.

The insulators from which the telegraph line ran to the gun could still be seen on the wall until redecorations a year or so ago.

Certainly, it was the caretaker of the Serpentine Woods who charged the gun, with two and a half pounds of gunpowder (in cartridge form) and a fuse each time.

It is not generally known that there were actually four time guns, one after another as they needed replacement.

The first gun arrived in Kendal in May, 1873, its site at Serpentine Walks being given by the Kendal Fell Trustees. It lasted until 1882 when it was replaced by the second gun. This wore out in 1908 when it was found unsafe and was replaced.

It was put in Abbot Hall Park where boys played on it. There was nothing romantic about it. It had come from an ancient frigate, ‘HMS Warspite’ and the War Office was glad to get rid of it.

A new gun was sought in 1913 and the War Office offered a 40-pounder which would have blown out windows left, right and centre, so the third gun was smaller and soldiered on through the First World War until 1930 – with firing reduced to Wednesdays and Saturdays (market days). There is no record of its firing being stopped during the war but it is likely that it continued– its sound being a reminder of the conflict.

The fourth and last gun was a small affair, weighing only about a hundredweight. It was fired especially in 1936 to mark a moment of silence in tribute to the late King George V.

The sounding of the time gun ceased at the outbreak of the Second World War. The gun which had been in Abbot Hall Park was sold for scrap in 1940, but the last time gun remained in position.

It was still there on the night of Thursday, Septem-ber 7, 1950 but in the morning it had gone. Wheel marks indicated it had been carried away in a trolley. It was never found but had probably been sold to a scrap merchant - recycled!

The full story of Kendal’s time guns is told in a monograph published by the Kendal Civic Society.