Gaunt's Time (2nd Edition)

Setting the scene

In colonial Victoria the second half of the nineteenth century was a time of huge growth and development, underpinned by an influx of people and money as a result of the gold rushes. After initial white settlement in 1835 Melbourne spent 15 years developing from a frontier town into a provincial centre with a white population of 23,000 in 1851; by 1890 it had grown to 490,000 people and was an internationally-recognised city. Confident to the point of brashness, Melbourne was seen as fast and reckless; a metropolis with ornate new multi-storey buildings to rival the old world but without its sophistication.

Success was measured by wealth and successful people liked to display their means prominently, a trend dating from the early gold era when successful miners returned to Melbourne to spend lavishly on clothes, jewellery and entertainment. As the alluvial gold ran out and mining was taken over by companies, the owners and shareholders made their fortunes and spent lavishly on clothes, jewellery, homes and transport. With improvements in technology and manufacturing processes, even the working folk were able to afford personal luxuries that were once restricted to the upper classes. Through the 1870s and into the ‘Marvellous Melbourne’ decade of the 1880s, this display of personal success broadened out into civic rivalry where municipalities and the larger country towns strove to have the best and biggest buildings, often adorned by a public clock as the finishing touch. The rivalry also continued beyond the local scene; success was displayed at inter-colonial and international exhibitions where Victoria vied with the other colonies and foreign countries to prove itself a frontrunner in the fields of scientific and industrial achievement. Connection by telegraph ended the Australian colonies’ isolation from England and Europe and made it possible to keep abreast of, and compete with, international trends and advancements.

If the display of success was one hallmark of the times, opportunism was another. The worldwide wave of scientific enquiry, a stream of new technologies and the need for infrastructure to support Victoria’s huge population growth worked together to provide opportunities for enterprising people and there was a liberal supply of credit from English banks to resource new ventures. Buildings, roads, public transport networks, communications, public and recreational developments — there was work to be done and money to be made all over the colony. The Hobson’s Bay (Port Melbourne) railway line, Melbourne’s first, was opened in 1854 yet by the 1880s Melbourne boasted a large network of train and tram services connecting the new suburbs that had sprung up. Investment, particularly in land, was booming with fortunes built on speculation encouraged by government spending on infrastructure. While prosperous working-class families lived in the newer western suburbs, Collingwood became a slum area with open channels carrying sewerage and industrial waste where those who could not work, particularly women and children, lived in complete poverty with help available only from church-based charities. Yet Collingwood built a grand Town Hall in 1888 with an ornamental clock tower and a clock large enough to be clearly seen from the noisome squalor of the Collingwood Flat.

The era of opportunity reached its peak in the late 1880s, exemplified by a huge increase in property values during 1887. Yet by 1891 the land boom was finished and before the end of that year the Melbourne press was reporting on financial tension and a short-term halt on bank withdrawals. The debt-fuelled boom left many in financial ruin when it ended; banks and other businesses failed, shareholders lost their money and a large part of the workforce was unemployed. Demand for property fell sharply and whole residential estates, built as speculative ventures during the 1880s, became unsaleable. The final blow fell in April 1893 when the withdrawal of overseas finance resulted in the collapse of all but three of the remaining banks in a single month, pushing the colony even deeper into depression. With the crash compounded by the Federation Drought later in the decade, large numbers of people left Victoria and economic growth stalled for some 20 years. No longer arrogant, Melbourne entered the twentieth century with an outlook that was far more sober and cautious.

Gaunt’s time

Figure 1: Thomas Gaunt, date unknown

Born in London on 18 March 1829, Thomas Ambrose Gaunt was the fifth child of Thomas Healey Gaunt and his wife Diana Elizabeth. They went on to have eight children in total and the family lived in a small house in the working-class area of St Botolph Without Bishopsgate, supported by Thomas Healey’s work first as a clock case maker and later as a clockmaker.

In March 1840 Thomas Healey purchased Freedom of the City of London as a clockmaker, a requirement to start his own clockmaking business, but by 1842 he was gone from the family. This left Diana in charge of the household, with five children and teenagers to care for on the limited income of son Myott’s wage as an apprentice clockmaker, daughter Rosetta’s wage as a brush drawer and her own attempts to gain work as a servant. In 1843 when Gaunt was accepted as an apprentice by local clockmaker George Orpwood, Diana was unable to meet the costs of his indenture which were paid by the Pennoyer Charity (a foundation established to provide educational opportunities for poor children). This apparently had a lasting impact on Gaunt, who went on to become a dedicated supporter of a wide range of charities.

Over the next seven years Gaunt completed his apprenticeship living on-site with the Orpwoods. During this time he met younger fellow-apprentice John Trowbridge and so came into contact with John’s older sister Jane. He also met Father Faber, a Roman Catholic priest converted from the clergy of the Church of England who arrived in London in 1849 and took an active role in the spread of recently-legalised Catholicism. As a result of this contact Gaunt became a Roman Catholic.

Gaunt married Jane Mary Trowbridge in June 1853, three years after he qualified as a clockmaker. Their first daughter, Mary Jane, was born in December 1854 and their second, Teresa, in September 1856 so it was a family-based decision that led them to Plymouth in July 1857 where they boarded the Copenhagen to emigrate from England to the new Colony of Victoria. Jane, Mary and Teresa travelled as part of the ship’s complement of 21 passengers, but Gaunt worked his passage as the ship’s carpenter. They arrived in Melbourne on 14 October 1857.

On arrival in Sandridge (Port Melbourne), Gaunt immediately advertised for work as a watchmaker with replies to be directed to him via the Copenhagen. The request was answered by Mr Henry Newman, an established Melbourne watchmaker and jeweller, and Gaunt was employed in Newman’s shop in Elizabeth Street. This allowed him to establish himself and the family in Melbourne while he prepared to venture into business on his own, which he did in 1859 with a small shop at 7 Post Office Place (the section of Little Bourke Street running between Elizabeth and Swanston Streets). The firm of T. Gaunt, or more commonly ‘Gaunt’s’, had entered the Melbourne scene.

The first decade of the business was a time of establishment and rapid growth, with the shop expanding into 5 Post Office Place in 1863 and the installation of telegraphic connection from the mean-time clock at the Melbourne Observatory in 1866. The availability of this authoritative measure of time allowed Gaunt to adjust timepieces with guaranteed accuracy and cemented his reputation for expert repairs, which he advertised as being done under his personal supervision. He also established the spectacle-making arm of the business, which won an Honourable Mention at the 1866 Melbourne Intercolonial Exhibition of Australasia (the first of many Exhibition awards); this may explain why he chose to advertise his spectacles during the Melbourne visit of Prince Alfred in 1867 by decking out the front of the shop with a gaslit design that featured the words ‘a grand’ followed by an enormous pair of spectacles: ‘A grand spectacle.’ The pinnacle of the decade, however, came in 1869 when Gaunt completed the colony’s first locally-made large turret clock and installed it in the Melbourne General Post Office. A surviving photograph, taken in November that year, shows Gaunt and his staff proudly standing outside the Post Office Place shop which boasted a large public clock in a tower above the door.

Figure 2: Post Office Place in November 1869

By this time the Post Office Place site must have been overcrowded, because in December 1869 Gaunt took the huge step of moving the shop to the grand new Royal Arcade. The new premises faced Bourke Street with large plate-glass display windows and included living quarters and workshops above; a telegraphic connection from the Observatory was installed once again to ensure correct time and a large clock was placed in the front window which became a focal point for pedestrians to check their watches on the way past. Gaunt kept the Post Office Place premises to act as workshops until at least 1871 and this obvious expansion could only have enhanced his growing reputation as Melbourne’s leading jeweller, optician and clockmaker.

Figure 3: Royal Arcade

The 1870s opened with a flourish of activity in the clockmaking department; work flowing from a clockmaking contract with the Victorian Government was supplemented by a successful tender for a new turret clock at the Melbourne General Cemetery which was co-designed with the Government Astronomer, Robert Ellery. This design became the basis for other clocks around Melbourne, including one for St Augustine’s church which won a Bronze Medal at the 1870 Metropolitan Intercolonial Exhibition in Sydney. This success was followed by a Gold Medal for excellence in the manufacture of clocks and watches at the 1873 Melbourne Exhibition which qualified him to send exhibits to the London (Crystal Palace) Exhibition later that year; his locally-made marble mantel clock received a commendation from the Victorian commissioner as an example of excellent workmanship. Even so, Gaunt’s offer to the City of Melbourne in 1870 to make a clock in Melbourne for the new Town Hall was received less than enthusiastically and they eventually imported a clock from London in 1874.

During this time there were two notable changes within the business. The first took place in 1872 when Jane’s brother John arrived in Melbourne with his wife and family after working for a respected clockmaking firm in London, and was employed as Gaunt’s foreman; the second was in about 1873 when Gaunt employed Henry Vanheems as Manager. Vanheems, an optometrist, took particular responsibility for the optometry work of the business while also having a more general management role; this freed Gaunt to concentrate more on business development. As a result the mid-1870s produced reports about expansion into extra workshops and implementation of the eight-hour day for all Gaunt’s workers, together with a new advertising line as the only watch manufacturer in the Australian Colonies.

The stage was set for success on a far-reaching scale, and it came in two instalments. In 1875 Gaunt won a Special Silver Medal for his exhibits at the Melbourne International Exhibition, the precursor to America’s first official World’s Fair which took place in Philadelphia in 1876. This allowed Gaunt to showcase his products in a genuinely international exhibition and also gave him the right to use the image of a Philadelphia medal in his advertising, which he did from then on. It was followed by a more personal triumph in November 1876 when he completed a large racing chronograph of his own design, donated it to the Victoria Racing Club (V.R.C.) and installed it at Flemington Racecourse in time for the Melbourne Cup race. It was