With so many new faces coming to settle in Kibworth each month, you might be forgiven for saying 'which new face?' And why was this one featured on a Radio Leicester broadcast at 7.30am on 27 October and on the BBC TV News for the East Midlands on the morning of Tuesday 28.
The face in question is the new clock face on the tower of St. Wilfrid's Church, Kibworth, which was unveiled during the last week of October and is so visible from Church Road, whichever way you are travelling.
Although St. Wilfrid's Church is a 14th century building, the tower was built in the 1830s. You possibly know the story that St. Wilfrid's had a tall spire up to the morning of 23 July 1825. On that morning the steeple fell down and records of meetings held at the time state that the enormous cost of replacing the spire meant that a tower would have to replace the steeple. The tower you see today was completed in 1836 and includes the clock made by John Hanbury of West Haddon in 1836. Although the three faces of smooth grey slate were set into the circular stone lips on the North, South and West faces, only the North and South faces were connected to the clock.
Why wasn't the West face completed? This was the task that Richard White set himself. Obviously, a straight axle geared to each hand would connect the North and South faces, but to gear each hand at a right angle to the other faces was an engineering problem that had fascinated Richard for some time. For many years he has climbed each week to the floor where the mechanism is housed to wind up the clock. Gradually the plans gave way to scale drawings and eventually to turned parts.
Although the Friends of St. Wilfrid's happily agreed to underwrite the costs involved, practically the whole project has been financed by Richard and his friends - such is their enthusiasm to have the clock face working 161 years after the clock was first installed.
Richard White lives in Smeeton Westerby and has an engineering business in Fleckney and it was from that base that all the gears, axles, flanges and couplings were made, making use of modern materials that would stand up to the elements and years of hard work. He asked David Illson from Gumley to photograph the hands of the existing faces in order to determine their scale and shape.
David has subsequently made a photographic record of the whole process. Alf Herbert, the masonry contractor from Market Harborough, was able to prepare the slate face and gild the numerals. John Burbridge has boxed in all the working parts in the tower and Colin Kilbourn, a roofing contractor from Lubenham, loaned and erected the scaffolding. All this work was freely given.
The result is what you see from Church Road - a unique third clock face completing work started 161 years ago. It is nice to think that Richard White's initiative will live on in years to come.
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© Kibworth & District Chronicle 1998