‘A quandary’: Palmerston North’s historic public clock is often slow

Palmerston North's public clock is nearly 120 years old. Photo / Palmerston North City Council

When Warren Warbrick notices the clock in Te Marae o Hine is slow he remembers Kerei Te Panau was 102 or 103 when the timepiece was named after him.

The clock is “a little bit slow because [Te Panau’s] got a bit of age on him”.

The clock used to be in the old post office building on the corner of The Square and Main St East in Palmerston North. When it opened in 1906 Ellen Wood, wife of then Palmerston MP William Wood, named the British-built clock and chimes for Rangitāne rangatira Te Panau.

“My dad used to say to me if you are ever looking at the clock then you’ve always got to remember it’s going to be five minutes out either side,” Warbrick said.

Rangitāne view the clock as a symbol of Te Panau, who hoped he would be remembered by it.

“Because there are four faces on the clock tower, we feel that he is still watching over us as a people and a number of us older ones when we hear the chimes going we like to think that he is having his say ... We stop and listen to what he has to say.”

Warbrick, a historian and Māori arts consultant, is sharing his knowledge of the clock to illustrate its cultural and historical significance.

Due to its age, the clock is naturally losing time, posing a quandary, Kathy Dever-Tod said.

“The current clock can’t be relied on to be accurate all the time, it does slowly lose time,” the group manager of parks and logistics at Palmerston North City Council said.

Little bits of metal come off the cogs over time due to wear and tear, resulting in time slippage.

“Our guidance to our community is that the clock tower is a pretty good indication of time, but if you need to be somewhere at a precise time, check your watch or phone too.”

Even when the clock was installed it would have run slow and would have needed to be regularly adjusted, just like people would have done with clocks at home or their timepieces, she said.

“Typically this was thought to be a one to seven-minute variation. These days with digital clocks we have the exact time so that means we know the precise time.”

The former Palmerston North Post Office on the corner of The Square and Main St East. The clock tower was removed after the 1942 Wairarapa earthquakes.

The clock, its mechanism and chimes are considered heritage objects.

There is no way of permanently making it accurate without replacing the mechanism. Dever-Tod likened it to buying a house in the Savage Cres heritage zone and replacing the wooden windows with aluminium ones.

“We do our best and we do adjust it, but every time we adjust it it will always be losing time just because the mechanism is so worn.”

With the rise of digital timepieces and fewer mechanical municipal clocks in New Zealand, horology is a dying profession.

Two people have been trained by a retired Palmerston North watchmaker to correct the time, which is more involved than turning a knob. It is a two-person job they do when they can voluntarily. They consider it looking after one of their ancestors.

“The mechanism is quite delicate,” Dever-Tod said.

“Anybody who goes in there has to go in with absolute care when they are making the adjustments because of the age of it. It’s not like another clock where you just go and say ‘oh, I need to adjust that’ and anybody could do it. That makes it a little bit problematic. You don’t want to be the person who breaks the clock.”

Long-term solutions could be a digital clock at i-Site or at the proposed new bus terminal in The Square.

Palmerston North MP William Wood and his wife Ellen with Rangitāne rangatira Kerei Te Panau and his wife Ereni Te Awe Awe in 1906. Photo / Auckland Libraries Heritage Collections

Te Panau and his wife, Ereni Te Awe Awe, had a strong relationship with the Wood family, Warbrick said.

William was a former mayor of Palmerston.

The honouring of Te Panau was a strong symbol of the relationship between Rangitāne and the borough council.

The Manawatū Standard of November 23, 1906, reported Te Panau as saying he hoped his fellow tribesmen would always look upon the clock as a monument to Rangitāne, and revere it accordingly.

After the 1942 Wairarapa earthquakes, the clock tower was removed from the post office and the clock and chimes were put in storage.

In 1953 Arthur Hopwood, of Arthur Hopwood Hardware, gifted the city £10,000 to build a new tower in The Square, to hold the clock and chimes. It was completed in 1957.

Judith Lacy has been the editor of the Manawatū Guardian since December 2020. She graduated from journalism school in 2001 and this is her second role editing a community paper.