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17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The DIFINITIVE biography of Rupert Gould, March 2, 2007
This review is from: Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (Hardcover)
BOOKREVIEW
Time Restored: The Harrison timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the man who knew (almost) everything.
By Jonathan Betts; published 2006 by Oxford University Press, Oxford UK & New York, NY and the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich UK; Hardcover (dust jacket), 464 pages; 62 black and white illustrations in the text, 16 color plates; extensive bibliography, glossary, index; ISBN 0-19-856802 9; available to NAWCC members at the National Watch and Clock Library in Columbia PA.
Most serious students of horology will be familiar with the name of Rupert T. Gould (Lieut. Commander, RN, retired) primarily as the author of "The Marine Chronometer, its history and development", originally published in 1923 (and reprinted repeatedly up to 1989, now out of print, but amazon is now taking preorders for a new reprint). That book remains -in the opinion of this reviewer- 80 years after it was written still the best text on the history and technology of the marine chronometer. The general public in the USA is more likely to have come across Gould in Dava Sobel's bestseller "Longitude" as the amateur clock restorer who rescued the early longitude clocks by John Harrison from obscurity and decay. These clocks - now commonly referred to as H1 to H3- together with H4 and H5 are clearly among the most significant horological artifacts in existence and form the core of the timekeeping exhibit at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich (UK), the one world heritage site that every horologist should visit.
Jonathan Betts, the Senior Specialist, Horology, at the Royal Observatory, National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, is one of the most respected horological scholars, lecturers and writers alive. As the current custodian of these Harrison clocks he has long felt a deep and personal affinity to the person who -against all odds- brought these horological marvels back to life in the second quarter of the 20th century. For decades, Betts has painstakingly collected and studied material for a comprehensive biography of Gould. He was fortunate to not only have access to Gould's extensive notebooks (held at the NMM) describing the restoration work in painstaking detail, but also to be personally very familiar with these timepieces. Furthermore, Betts had won the trust of Gould's heirs and thus access to private diaries, photo albums and other family papers.
The task of writing a Gould biography must at times have appeared overwhelming to Betts, because Gould was a very complex and extremely multifaceted person. The temptation to write "only" a "horological biography" about his hero must have been tempting to Betts, and such a book on its own would have presented a welcome addition to the horological literature. Such a book would have been easier to read for the many Harrison afficionados and horologists who longed for it. But Betts chose the harder route: He chose to write a Gould biography that would do justice to Gould the person rather than just to Gould the horologist. This reviewer feels that this ambitious task has been accomplished in a balanced and sensitive manner.
R.T. Gould was a brilliant individual, with many heartfelt interests, who made major contributions in many of the tasks he undertook: He was a polymath and scholar of many diverse subjects. He excelled in horology and as a radio presenter; he studied and wrote on the history of the typewriter; he was a brilliant conversationalist and talented artist; he was an expert on sea monsters (including the Loch Ness monster) and systematically collected and documented curious and unexplained facts; and early in his life he had a promising naval career. But for much of his life he also sporadically suffered from severe mental illness which caused chaos in his marital life and his career.
This reviewer believes that it is impossible to fully comprehend the horological achievements of Gould, to truly understand his obsession with the Harrison sea clocks, without wading through the other more troubled chapters of his life, and without discovering the other subjects that were dear to him.
The author faced the challenge of writing a biography of a genius, who led a chaotic personal and professional life, whose many accomplishments fell into widely diverging disciplines and areas, whose horological endeavors were spaced out over decades. There seems to be no easy way to tell the complete story of such a complex person; both a strictly chronological structure or strictly thematic chapters would be somewhat difficult for the reader to follow. Betts chose a hybrid approach between a rigid timeline and a thematic organization of the material, and in addition wisely chose to move several of the ancillary subjects to appendices and 412 footnotes (which account for over 100 pages of the book).
In the book as published 8 (out of 22) chapters (and 3 out of 6 appendices) deal primarily with Gould the horologist. I suppose a reader with a horological focus could possibly read only those parts and learn quite a bit about Gould the horologist. This reviewer is glad to have had all parts of the book available, because Gould -and all his achievements, horological and otherwise- can only be fully appreciated in the larger context of his life and his time.
From a horological perspective, the meat of the book is in the chapters describing Gould's restoration work on the big Harrison sea clocks, H, H2 and H3, in the 1920s and 1930s. Gould took on this task as a volunteer and amateur horologist. If he had not "rediscovered" those magnificent machines in a state of complete neglect, they would probably no longer exist, let alone run today. Gould kept extremely detailed, richly illustrated notebooks documenting his efforts, which form the basis for much of this book's narrative in the horological chapters. Any horologist with a deeper interest in John Harrison's work must read "Time Restored", because it contains so much additional information on these machines and their history. Anyone who has struggled to .bring a long neglected, complex mechanical movement back to life will be fascinated -and will fee empathy with Gould- reading these chapters. Most readers will also be surprised at the utter lack of standards that existed just 70 years ago regarding the restoration and conservation of objects, which today are considered artifacts of global historic significance.
One of the side effects of reading "Time restored" for this reader was to whet his appetite for future horological publications not yet published, such as a) a scholarly re-edition of Gould's' "Marine Chronometer" with the countless revisions and additions suggested by Gould himself over the decades, and b) a facsimile edition of Gould's notebooks detailing his work on the Harrison pieces. Now that the Gould biography is published, Betts would be the ideal person to get these priceless horological treasures into print.
In summary: "Time restored" can be enjoyed as a well crafted description of the horological contributions of an important persona of his time, but for the reader so inclined, it is much more, it is a sensitive portrait of a troubled, but brilliant human being, who pursued his horological and scholarly goals against the odds imposed by society and his era.
Fortunat Mueller-Maerki, Sussex, NJ
December 29, 2006
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rupert Gould: the Fortean perspective, March 5, 2010
This review is from: Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (Hardcover)
Has there ever been a man so gifted, yet so burdened, as Rupert Gould? Britain's answer to Charles Fort (the two men were contemporaries; Fort's dates were 1874-32, Gould's 1890-1948) will be known to those interested in Forteana as the author of The Case for the Sea Serpent, The Loch Ness Monster and Others and two incomparable collections of essays, Oddities and Enigmas. Yet 'scientific mysteries' (the phrase is Jonathan Betts's) were merely one of Gould's areas of expertise. He was, inter alia, a naval officer, distinguished hydrographer, authority on Arctic and Antarctic exploration, master horologist and `name' broadcaster -- not to mention a talented artist in the style of Aubrey Beardsley, a leading expert on the history of the typewriter, and an umpire at Wimbledon.
Such achievements would be remarkable enough in a man who had devoted a long life entirely to his interests. Yet Gould died aged only 58, worked for years in a relatively humdrum office job, and was prone throughout adulthood to mental illness. As Betts notes in this exceptionally well-researched and sympathetic biography, he was confined, speechless, to bed for the best part of a year by his first breakdown, suffered three further severe outbreaks of depression thereafter, and could be prostrated by any one of several irrational fears, including those of being struck by lightning and getting caught up in a revolution. These frailties undoubtedly restricted his output, and so did a dubious talent for taking on far too many commitments. Among numerous projects begun but never finished were books titled Nine Days' Wonders and Mares' Nests -- works fit to rank with Fort's X and Y in the damned library of lost literature - and a proposed study of bisexuality, The Third Sex, which would certainly have seemed pretty radical had it been published, as planned, in 1947.
The upshot of all this was that Rupert Gould never quite achieved the fame, nor received the credit, that his admirers have long felt was due to him. Much of his life was spent in genteel poverty (he was forever selling valuable items from his various collections to raise a few pounds), and according to his waspish son Cecil -- one of Betts's chief sources, a very different character who by his own admission never much liked his father -- his life was `as he himself realised, a sad waste of great and varied talents.' Betts is kinder, observing simply that Gould's parents' choice of a naval career for their son was a mistake, and that Rupert would have made an exceptional academic or barrister.
As it was, however, the nervous breakdown Gould suffered on the outbreak of the First World War led to a `soft' posting to the hydrographer's office at the Admiralty, where he studied the history of navigation and had sufficient leisure time to read widely -- everything but literature, Cecil recalled, though in fact there were other lacunae in even his father's fund of knowledge, notably in the field of zoology. And what went into Gould's head stayed there: the secret of his success as a fount of wisdom (drafted onto the renowned Brains Trust panel, he was the only member never to be hauled up by a listener for making a mistake) was a photographic memory. `I can visualise the actual page of a book where I read the information,' he once explained, and no reader who has made his delighted way through the footnotes of a Gould book,
where information drawn from Wild Sports of the World rubs shoulders with the Transactions of the Anglesey Antiquarian Society, is likely to doubt it.
Given Jonathan Betts's own interests (he is Senior Specialist in Horology at the National Maritime Museum), it's no surprise that the bulk of Time Restored is given over to Gould's work in a field few Forteans will know much about: horology, specifically the study of the marine chronometer. It was Gould's signal achievement to restore to a going condition all four of the timekeepers invented in the eighteenth century by John Harrison, the subject of Dava Sobel's best-selling Longitude. He was self-taught, both as a mechanic and an horologist, and Betts gives an account -- well-balanced as one of Harrison's machines -- of his subject's achievements, praising his imaginative and systematic efforts (the restorations took well over a decade all told) while condemning some of the actual workmanship as unforgivably botched and hardly in tune with the modern museum curator's preference for conservation over restoration.
There is much, even here, of interest to Forteans, though, for the years of working on the 'Harrisons' display Gould's character in the round. He possessed, the reader learns, an stubborn stamina, fragility and a spectacular facility for procrastination, an odd mix that eventually cost him his marriage and -- thanks to the scandal attendant on the divorce -- his job, his home, his children and his best friend.
Disaster on such a scale would have been sufficient to destroy men far more robust than Gould, and perhaps the most extraordinary achievement of his far from ordinary life was to meet these devastating blows with a determination that saw him crank out most of his best-known works in an astonishingly short time. (Oddities, a book of 75,000 words complete with 27 original drawings, was written in less than a month.) This at least left time for other obsessions, including -- as Betts recounts without sensationalism -- a lifelong interest in bondage and, apparently, ritualised group sex activities involving London prostitutes. One wonders whether the current generation of Forteans will make such compelling subjects for future biographers.
Betts, by his own admission, knows little of Forteana, and if the book has one failing it is that its (finely detailed) account of Gould's contributions to our field cannot match that of his achievements in horology. There's nothing, for example, to equal Ronald Binns's revealing analysis, in The Loch Ness Mystery Solved, of Gould's influential excursion to Loch Ness. Betts has also been poorly served by his proof-reader; the text is littered with typos. But these are small gripes. Even the most dedicated Fortean will learn something new from this book. At this price, unfortunately, Time Restored seems destined to reach only a limited audience, and one can only hope that a paperback edition will follow in due course.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Everyman, January 4, 2011
This review is from: Time Restored: The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything (Hardcover)
The subtitle "The Harrison Timekeepers and R.T. Gould, the Man Who Knew (Almost) Everything" would be more accurate if reversed. After reading a library copy of Gould's book "The Marine Chronometer", I picked this up to learn more about the Harrison chronometers. I found myself captivated by the actual subject of Betts' book, which is Gould himself.
In his 1928 book "Oddities" Gould wrote about "an eccentric seventeenth century inventor Orffyreus" (Betts' phrase), saying "He passes from our sight... an exasperating and yet pathetic figure-morose, self-centred, childishly passionate, vacillating and yet tenacious, his own worst enemy, forgetting the duties of ordinary human intercourse in his passion for mechanism and wrecking his life as a result." Annotating his own copy of "Oddities" in 1940, Gould acknowledged that this description applied just as well to himself.
After finishing Betts' book, Gould's self-judgment seems overly harsh. There is a great deal to admire about the man, and unique as he was, more than a hint of Everyman appears in his character.
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