ENGLISH GUIDED TOUR. Welcome in the clock-making museum of Saint Nicolas d Aliermont. I m Claire and I will be your guide for this visit.

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1 ENGLISH GUIDED TOUR HALL Hello Welcome in the clock-making museum of Saint Nicolas d Aliermont. I m Claire and I will be your guide for this visit. To understand why there is this museum in this town, you need some information. First of all, where are we? On the Aliermont plateau which is 15 kms long and 4 kms wide. At the beginning, instead of the town was the forest, the forest of Arques. On the 12 th century the archbishops of Rouen settled down here and built the first houses along the main street of SNA. (see the map) SNA owns one of the longer street in France, around 7 kms long. It s along this main route that the clock-maker s worshops appeared at the beginning of the 18 th century. In fact, it s Charles Antoine CROUTTE, a son of a clock maker in Dieppe who settled down here for the first time. Precisely in Follow me to admire the clocks whose the creator he is. Please have a seat, we stay there for a few minutes. MAIN ROOM These clocks are called Saint Nicolas clocks but also demoiselle or élegante : Why? Because they are tall and thin, very thin. This kind of clock ranges from 1,80 meter to 2,40 meters (inches?) high. Why are the SN clocks so special? First element : their mechanism. In which material are they made of? Here is a clue : it s copper plus zinc : it s brass. Brass is very useful because it s stainless. The whole mechanism is made of brass, even the wheels, the pinions, the pendulum, everything. And what do you notice if you have a look to its size? It s very short. Indeed, the Saint Nicolas pendulum is short to be integrated in the clock s head. The rule of thumb is to divide a clock in 3 parts : - The head - The body - The base What do we have in the head? We have the dial. Please, compare these two clocks and their dials. What is the difference? - One is complete - The other is composed of 13 pieces

2 The second one is the oldest because at the beginning it was impossible to enamel a complete dial. So, they had to enamel piece by piece and stick them together. Once they improved their technic, they managed to enamel the whole dial at once. Now, have a look at the hands, which patterns can you recognize? - Lili s flower - Sun - The third one is Breguet hands, it s the name of a famous clock maker. Saint Nicolas clocks were also called clocks with bloom headed because you always have flowers, plants around the dial. By example, here you can see 2 ears of corn, there you can see a basket with many flowers. An important decoration is here : what can we see? - Birds, two birds : it s doves. It s a symbol. When you have this decoration, it means a wedding s present. The legend tells us : in Normandy when a girl was born in a family, an oak was planted ad when she get married, a clock is made with the wood of this oak. Usually Saint Nicolas clocks are made of oak (as the others furnitures in Normandy) but sometimes also of deal or of pearwood. Then, in Saint Nicolas head you have : - Dial - Hands - Decoration - Pendulum And what can we find in the body? The energy! What is it? - Weights, cast iron weights but why do we have 2 weights there? One is for the striking mechanism, the second one is for the hands mechanism. The rule is : - On the right the striking mechanism - On the left the hands mechanism This rule is the rule, almost always This clock is an adaptation of a franc-comtois movement to a Saint Nicolas body. What is the main difference? The pendulum! Big and long. So the franc-comtois pendulum beats every second whereas the Saint Nicolas pendulum beats every half a second. A Saint Nicolas is faster than a franccomtois clock. Besides you can see 3 different mechanisms : - The first one is a skeletoned movement from a franc-comtoise clock. It s very useful to see what happens inside because in a Saint Nicolas it s impossible : there are two plates which hide the

3 wheels, pinions, everything. Let s go! (mise en movement de la sonnerie, puis de l alarme). You even have an alarm-clock on it! So, during the 18th century Saint Nicolas produced clocks for the living-room : a long case clock. At the end of the century, the production decreased and Paris sent a Parisian clock-maker Honoré Pons to revive the clock making production. Honoré Pons with Matthieu CROUTTE (do you remember this name? He s a descendant of Ch. A. CROUTTE) created mechanisms for clocks that you put usually above the fire place. You can see his signature on the movement : a stamp. You can observe there s no more weights, so what energy is used by these clocks? - A spring : it is inside the barrel. I need keys to wind up the springs. So, you can see two openings on the dial : why? One for the hands mechanism, the other for the striking mechanism. Who is able to tell me which one is on the right and which one is on the left? HALL So, these clocks as the other ones are dedicated to rich and powerful people. After the production of this kind of clocks, Saint Nicolas became a specialist for carriage clocks. Indeed, it s the beginning of travels : Dieppe is the first sea resort in France. The Couaillet factory produced carriage clocks for women and men. The essential element in these clocks is the balance spring : it s the pendulum s miniaturization. It s very useful for the clock s mobility. Indeed, this element makes the carriage clock stable. You ll find again this balance pendulum in the alarm-clocks. Let s continue the visit but before discovering the 20 th century production in SNA we have to go back in time to understand how appeared the first tools to control the time. The first creation was the gnomon before the sundial. Then, you will have water clocks (clepsydra), then the first clocks in belfries and church towers. We are in the 13 th century. Here, you can see 3 church tower mechanisms. We re observing the first one. To understand how it works we have to look for the energy : which one? - A weight, cast iron weight Now, it s necessary to wind up the weight but nothing happens. Why? Because we need to put on the pendulum. Like this. Now, it works! You can see the lever escapement linked to the wheel escapement which is linked to the hours wheel, the minutes wheel and the seconds wheel. Now, we are going to cross the Time Gallery, you will see a sun dial, a sandglass and I ll wait for you in the 20 th century room dedicated to the two most important factories in SNA : Couaillet and Bayard. BAYARD ROOM On this wall, you ll have documents about Couaillet factory. It was across the street from the 19 th century when the museum was still a farm. It burnt 3 times and closed. This factory is very interesting because we can understand the relationships between the boss and his workers. As you can see here, all the employees were invited to celebrate the

4 wedding of the Couaillet daughter. It s impossible to imagine this nowadays, isn t it? These both factories are the representation of paternalism in Saint Nicolas. Indeed, they improved their living condition : they built houses close to the factory, one of them built a theater for the town to bring some entertainment to the workers of the town. They needed it because during the winter they worked 10 hours a day and in summer 12 hours a day. Women and children were paid for each piece, contrary to men who were paid for each hour. A child could start to work at 8. The other big factory was Bayard. But before being named Bayard, its name was Villon because of this man who is the creator of this brand. When it was Villon, the production was ornamental clocks. When its successors Duverdrey and Bloquel lead the factory, they decided to dedicate their production to the alarm-clocks. Alarm-clock is an American invention, created around the 20ies. Duv and Bloq decided to produce alarm-clocks intensively and used the American method : to work on an assembly line. You can see here a worker s table. Each woman had to put one piece in the alarm-clock. You have the foreman (in white) who checked the work. Each woman has 2 tools : a chronometer and a revolving light. The first is to check the time to put the piece on and when the second one comes on, the woman has to take the next piece. Now, you must know a few numbers : - Around alarm-clocks went out of this factory everyday - An alarm-clock was complete after 7 minutes - Around people worked there One of the improvement in Bayard clocks was the possibility for the customers to see the time in the darkness. Indeed, radium was put on the hands of each alarm-clock to make it phosphorescent during the night. What is incredible is the fact that some women told us they used to put radium under their nails to shine at the ball! After all the explanations about Bayard, we are going through the Bayard Gallery to see all kinds of alarm clocks, clocks BAYARD GALLERY The famous alarm clocks are - Sonnfort - Tapageur : it means which makes much noise! And some people told us that it was not noisy enough so they put it in a plate full of coins!!! - A jewel clock, very small, more for women than for men who prefer the traditional alarm-clock - Kitchen clock, to have the clock in the same style than the furnitures! Bayard alarm-clocks and clocks were famous everywhere, in France but also abroad : in Spain, in Canada, In United States, in Birmania and even in North of Africa. Everywhere. CHIMES GALLERY Here, you can see a small cabinet display with the main competitors of Bayard at this time : Badulf, Jaz (Japy) and Seiko which still produced alarm-clocks and clocks. CLOCK MAKER S WORKSHOP The museum is very recent. It opened in Before all the collection used to be in an old castle but there was too many items to display. So the mayor decided to build a museum which would be dedicated to the clock-making history. They decided to reuse an old farm, from the 18 th century, and to add modern rooms. In this museum it was

5 really necessary to have a workshop to repair our clocks and then, two times a week, visitors can see former workers working on clocks. It s on Wednesday and Thursday morning. CHRONOMETERS ROOM In the 19th century different kinds of clocks were made : besides domestic clocks we had scientific clocks with regulators and chronometers for the navy. We have also time clocks for the factories and clocks for train stations. We have a clock system named mother- daughter : it means one big clock which gives the real time and daughter clocks which are fed by this clock to have the same time everywhere in the station. The clock-making would be nothing without the workers, that s why the last room in the museum is dedicated to them. It s in the farm s heart, the room with the big fire place, here you can see a beautiful ceiling with much wood, and very low that s why it s so dark. Here, It s time to talk about the learning, the way the employees worked : see the picture which shows us the inside of the Couaillet factory : everybody worked, children, men, women, old people : everybody. And as if it was not sufficient to be together 6 days a week, after work the workers gathered to play music together and they created the Saint Nicolas brass band. Today the municipal harmony orchestra is the descendant of this brass band. We can t talk about the workers without talking about the wars, the both wars : the first and the second world war. During this period Saint Nicolas was used to make weapons for the army, especially rockets. Because in clock-making factories we used the same tools than to make weapons. Last information about Saint Nicolas, it s about the landscape of the town. Indeed, according to the different installations of clock making industries shaped the town. One example : Vaucanson factory. There was nothing there. The factory arrived, dug this route, at the end of the street : the factory and on both sides houses for the workers : their size was different if the employee was the director, a foreman or a simple worker. A great name in architecture worked for Duverdey and Bloquel in Saint Nicolas, it s Le Corbusier. He built two houses, just two because it was 1917 and Le Corbusier wanted to use concrete it s too expensive for Duverdrey who decides to stop the project of 40 houses. Nevertheless we have two houses built by Le Corbusier Nowadays, we make visits outside to discover this heritage if you re interested in it, maybe for a next visit in Saint Nicolas d Aliermont. Version du 14/02/2012