You can't escape entropy. It is the immutability of existence. That's why you can't unbreak an egg or reverse ageing. "Things fall apart," quothed one Billy Butler Yeats, "the centre cannot hold". Tru dat.
But the end can be delayed. With enough money, one can retard the entropic process. Take our heritage sites, we wanna preserve these artefacts as a tangible connection to our past. It's a way for fostering a sense of identity and continuity; to remember what we have and why we need to keep having them.
The Victoria Clock Tower stands as one of these structures worth safeguarding. Together with the Victoria Theatre and Victoria Concert Hall, the performing arts centre is an officially gazetted National Monument.
Standing at 54m and topped by a copper cupola, the Victoria Clock Tower has kept (mostly) steady time for Singaporeans since 1 February 1907, when the Duchess of Connaught set it in motion. The Clock Tower was hella useful back when the Singapore River was a bustling port; when the clock sounds, it alerted the coolies and traders to when it was time to break for lunch or to knock off from work.
English clockmaker Gillett & Johnston of Croydon were behind the clock's innerworkings; those mechanism was, at the time, the chef's kiss of early 20th-century horological engineering. Four of its opal clock faces stare out in four directions and each of them measure four metres in diameter. The tower's five bells sound the Westminster Chimes, a part of the tune plays every 15 minutes and the full sequence on each hour.
As mentioned before, you can't outrun entropy. Thus, in June 2010, Victoria Theatre and Concert Hall was closed for major renovations. In 2014, the landmark would open again. Extensive work was done to the Victoria Clock Tower with the original mechanism returned to Gillett & Johnston's successor company in Surrey for refurbishment. Back then, PK Chan or Uncle Chan as he's affectionately known, would trudge up all 176 steps of the clock tower twice a week to manually wind the clock (which would take up to an hour), now an automatic winding system is installed and Uncle Chan now only has to check-in twice a month now.
(At the point of writing, Uncle Chan's contract is up this year. It is not known whether, Uncle Chan would continue with overseeing the clock tower but, for now, he has his brother who might take over the clock tower duties so, we'll see.)
The Hour Glass is now the Principal Patron of Arts House Group. Not only do they provide funding for the clock tower upkeep, they furnish philanthropic support for Arts House Group’s programmes as well. It's a meaningful coming-together of the Hour Glass and the Arts House Group, two institutions that are committed to preserving heritage for the next generation.
If you're interested, you can partake in the Clock Tower Climb organised by Arts House Group. This is an exclusive one-hour tour that allows you to explore the building’s history, architecture, and new installations. You'll get to scrutinise the clock mechanism up close and learn more about its fascinating history and role in Singapore... and if all goes according to scheduled, you get to witness the ringing of the bells.
