The death of Stroud’s racist clock

It’s a late January morning when I find the artist Dan Guthrie under the information boards at Paddington Station. He’s hard to miss. His hair is dyed bright red and he’s carrying a large suitcase with a purple Telfar bag which he refers to as “my entire studio”. He is immediately funny, warm and razor smart. Today we’re catching the 10:32 to Cheltenham Spa, calling at Dan’s hometown of Stroud, Gloucestershire.

Stroud is an eccentric town, brimming with creativity and contradiction. I grew up in a village 20 minutes away and did my Art Foundation at Stroud College. It’s a course a lot of us did when we weren’t sure what to do.

There are those who’ve lived in Stroud for generations, and others lured to its giddying beauty from elsewhere. There are the second-homers and a motley crew of celebrity residents like Jamie Dornan, Sade, Keith Allen and most recently, Liam Gallagher. It’s also home to Damien Hirst’s studio, and as we take our seats on the train, Dan reminds me that the late Gordon Burn once interviewed Damien on this exact train journey in March 2000.

The landscape surrounding Stroud is a fantasy of rural Englishness, soundtracked by Vaughan Williams and Britten. It’s what gave Laurie Lee his material for Cider with Rosie, and got Jilly Cooper’s juices flowing liberally enough for Riders. It’s home to a tight-knit community and a large population of artists and musicians, as well as some (perhaps unfair, sometimes justified) stereotypes that usually resemble a bare-footed, crystal-bearing, Stone-Henge-praising, loose-knit-textile-clad hippy. Stroud’s population is also 98% white, as per the 2021 census.

Dan moved to Stroud when he was three and grew up in an area called The Heavens, a bucolic paradise of waterfalls and meadows overlooking the Five Valleys. His maternal grandparents migrated to the town from Jamaica in 1950 during the Windrush years. “You come to this landscape, and the best representation you’ve got is a racist clock. That’s not going to make you feel good”. Dan is referring to The Blackboy Clock, the Stroud-based subject of his new exhibition in Bristol, and the reason for today’s anti-pilgrimage.

As the train rolls through Stroud’s surrounding valleys, the hills curl up like creases in green velvet, studded with gilded Cotswold stone. I ask Dan whether he ever felt different growing up here. “When you’re at primary school, you’re just being a kid, jumping through,” he says. “But looking back at school photos, I’m sticking out quite a bit.” His senior school, a local boy’s grammar, was more diverse, but not by much. “When I started, I was asked to be in some photos for the prospectus and it was a proper like, ‘Where’s Wally’ moment where you try to spot me on every page to be like ‘the representation’. I’m playing cricket, doing chemistry, then in the computer lab – I was interdisciplinary from a young age,” he laughs. “That’s when it all really started to sink in. There were uncomfortable moments.”

Dan’s bio says he’s interested in the “representation and misrepresentation of Black Britishness”. “It’s kind of artspeak because if you think about it, that’s everything,” he laughs. “Representations of blackness in the media haven’t always shown a rural experience. A lot of the stories have focused on metropolitan areas. What I’m interested in is when something doesn’t represent you, and how you can connect to that.”

We walk up the steep hill from Stroud Station, past some empty retail units, the usual vape and betting shops and Stroud’s quintessential craft and vintage outfits stocking crystals, witch spells, dream catchers and incense. We reach what feels like the summit, and there, next to Dan’s old primary school, perched high on a residential building in a small alcove is The Blackboy Clock (horological term jacquemart, or a Jack Clock). It’s a mechanised wooden figure of a Black child wearing a leaf skirt, holding a club with which it once struck a bell on the hour. It’s small and silent, but its presence is deafening. How the clock has survived for 240 years is astonishing, particularly during the last five given the sudden realisation that publicly displaying offensive cultural tropes might not be great.

Despite walking past the clock daily as a child, it was only when Dan moved home during the 2020 lockdown that he spotted it. “There was virtually nothing online, just a few random mentions.” Five years of research and miles down the rabbit hole later, the clock has become, for better, worse and lots in between, inextricably linked with Dan’s own story.

Around the same time Dan discovered the clock, the Black Lives Matter movement began gaining international attention following the murder of George Floyd; across the UK, monuments deemed to celebrate slavery and racism were defaced, destroyed or toppled, including the Edward Colston statue in nearby Bristol, where Guthrie’s new commission is on view. “When the protests started, I was like, it’s time to try and do something about this”, he recalls. “But at the same time, everyone that you go to secondary school with suddenly posts a black square on Instagram. I was feeling so burnt out by it. I couldn’t go wading into the internet chaos of 2020 without actually knowing what I’m talking about.”

Instead, he spent the next six months quietly writing to local councillors and trying to find out as much as possible about the clock. He trawled local history books, online articles, newspaper archives and film reels accessed via his then-job at Stroud Library. Gradually, he gathered a piecemeal history. It was assembled by Stroud watchmaker John Miles in 1774 (the height of the Transatlantic Slave Trade), and displayed on his shopfront on Kendrick Street. The origin of the wooden figure itself is unknown. “It’s not a person. It’s a blackamoor trope, the stuff you might see holding up lamps,” says Dan. In 1844, it relocated to a specially-constructed niche on the front of a former schoolhouse, since converted into flats. It was carefully restored in 1977 and 2004.

In 2021, Dan got involved in a council-run survey to find out how the Stroud community felt about the clock, and what they thought should happen to it. “Whilst most local council consultations get like 17 responses for potholes, this got over 1,600 responses”. 77% wanted it taken down, including Stroud District Council. Within that, 59% percent said that it should be relocated to a museum, the rest wanted it destroyed.

Just 22% thought it should stay up. One of them was then Tory MP for Stroud, Siobhan Baillie, who, at the time, said that she “opposes removal of history and statues” and “to do so serves no purpose other than to allow some people to decide or be selective with history or decide what is most comfortable and cause no offence“. She also added, “…I am also concerned that a certain minority of people with loud voices have an unquenchable desire to be constantly finding things to be outraged at.” Dan objected to Siobhan’s “divisive” language, and things spiralled after a Guardian article featuring Dan as one face of the campaign was picked up and “twisted” by right-leaning outlets. He found himself at the receiving end of a volcanic barrage of hate. “I got everything from ‘snowflake’ to ‘I’ll break your legs’”, he recalls. “One email was sent ‘from the 98%’ as in, the majority white population [of Stroud]. That took quite a toll on me. Who signs up to be a part of that?” At one point, Dan even got a call from an anti-extremism advocacy group warning him about a “50% chance that members of [far-right party] Britain First are going to show up and door step you about this.”

Despite the division, the general consensus was that the clock should be rehoused in the local museum. But there are complications. Blackboy House is privately owned, as is the trust that maintains the clock. The building is listed, so planning permission would be required to remove it. Plus, the Tory government’s controversial ‘Retain and Explain’ guidance from 2023 advises that assets of what they deem “contested heritage” should be kept in place, instead accompanied by an explanation of their historical context.

There’s also the question of whether Stroud Museum – which tells the history of the district’s woollen mills, textile factories and breweries (and a room dedicated to one of Stroud’s proudest exports, the lawnmower) – is best equipped to handle such an object. “It’s a local history museum. It hasn’t changed since I was a kid,” says Dan. “Is spending 30 grand to move a racist object into a museum – treating it for woodworm, putting it in a special case so it doesn’t get destroyed – the best use of money?”

That’s where ‘Empty Alcove / Rotting Figure’ comes in, Guthrie’s new work, commissioned and produced by Spike Island, Bristol and Chisenhale Gallery, London. Two videos – shown concurrently – imagine a “radical un-conservation” of the Black Boy Clock via two scenarios: the clock’s removal from the alcove, and its destruction.

Empty Alcove is a five minute continuous shot of the niche with the clock removed, created using the clone stamp tool on Photoshop. Rotting Figure is a CG rendering of the object, wrapped in a black tarp, bound with red tape and set within a black abyss. The clock itself crumbles over the course of five minutes. “We see a silhouette of it, rather than the visually offensive imagery,” explains Dan. Visitors will find the films in a booth of black, painted wood, echoing the material of the clock. Remember when I said being in front of the clock felt silent but deafening? Dan’s films capture that sensation precisely: hope, laced with eeriness.

An integral part of both films is the captioning and audio descriptions; Dan has included ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’ versions of each. For example, in Empty Alcove, the objective captioning might read ‘[schoolyard ambience, light hubbub of traffic], while the subjective captioning says ‘[street feels welcoming, mundanity blossoms]’. Dan has also created a website, earf.info, an evolving online resource with a timeline of relevant events surrounding the clock. It’s a jarring read. In the same year that Stroud’s Anti-Slavery Arch is restored, the Blackboy clock is also suggested for restoration by a horologist. It tells a story of contradictions, of protests and gestures, promises unfulfilled, and sensational reporting designed to bate rage. One of the key parts of this story, and Dan’s artwork, is the media’s reporting of the clock. Journalists have often asked to photograph him next to it for their stories, as though he were a local enraged by a neglected pothole. He refused every time.

I leave Dan to enjoy his weekend of R&R before the big show opening and amble back to the high street for a coffee and a few moments of decompression. I have an hour before my train, and I should probably try and seek out a local view or two. I start with the market. Initially, people seem eager to talk. Until I mentioned the clock. I get passed around market stalls with variations of “I don’t think I can say much about it, but I know who you should talk to…” from veg to cheese, to more cheese to small potted plants and craft beer. No one seems to have lived here longer than a year. There’s one name that keeps coming up: Ron, who I find manning a secondhand book stall in Stroud’s indoor market. He’s lived in the town all his life and knows a lot about the clock. He thought it was sad that people took so much offence, adding that the clock was a rare piece and “a huge part of our history.” He also told me that the bell stopped ringing because the residents didn’t like all the noise.

After a few more failed attempts to harvest opinions, I find Richard waving free newspapers at passersby on the high street. He’s standing by a stall decked with a hotchpotch of placards and flyers condemning 5G, the BBC, a cashless society, vaccines, corruption, surveillance, digital currencies – you name it, they’re anti it. Fair enough, free speech etc., but the message is so muddled I feel a migraine coming on.

Something tells me Richard will have a take on the clock. “I’m very anti-wokeism, and the woke crowd,” he says, standing next to a banner that reads “join the global awakening”. I use every facial muscle to stop the corners of my mouth from curling up. “There was a big thing about it, I read all the letters from everyone in the local paper.” I ask whether he can see how the clock could be offensive. “Part of our history is dark,” he says, stabilising himself on a bollard because he feels weak on the “fifth day of his fast”. “Just because people are offended doesn’t mean it should be taken down. As soon as you go down the path to censor these things, it’s a dangerous slippery slope towards totalitarianism.” Richard spots my camera and volunteers himself as subject, holding up a laminated anti-BBC flyer and positioning himself next to an ‘anti-tyranny’ placard – “this is perfect”, he says. I resist the urge to mention the Transatlantic Slave Trade – perhaps the epitome of a tyrannical regime – of which The Blackboy Clock remains a potent symbol.

Richard hands me his “truthpaper” for my journey home, which I accept out of politeness. It’s called The Light and seems to be a compilation of conspiracy theories masquerading as news. The front-page headline reads ‘Slave New World’ and is followed by a series of paranoid, spoof-like ramblings and something on the ‘imposition of the LGBT agenda’. I Google Richard’s name to find a 2019 news article in which he is pictured after chaining himself to Jeremy Corbyn’s house to campaign against ecoside. I don’t feel I’ve achieved a fair cross-section of opinions from Stroud residents, but I’m late for my train. I pace down the high street until I’m safely out of Richard and the tin-hat brigade’s sight (lest they chase me down with glue), then bin the paper at the first opportunity.

The questions were asked. The people spoke. The officials replied. The publicity and opinions raged. A consensus was reached. But the clock is stuck, and even Stroud officials have little power in the matter. For Dan, there’s been some progress. Where there was once no context, there is now a plaque installed opposite the clock offering a brief history and the debates surrounding the 2021 consultation. “It’s the best we’re going to get for now, unless the owners decide to remove it and take on the system,” he says. “It’s something. It’s not an answer.”

Dan hopes the show will offer renewed interest. I ask if, given what he’s been through, he’s concerned about further attention, but he seems calm. “What I’ve learned is you can never really prepare. Every time I spoke about it, things got slightly more batshit. I’m as prepared as I can be.” After all the division, narrative twisting and online hate, it’s finally time for Dan’s telling of the story, on his terms. I board my train back to London with his words ringing: “If you’re gonna make work about a controversial object, people are gonna pick a fight. So why not destroy it? Why not go all the way? It’s gonna become a headline, so why not lean into the sensationalism?”