1700s: US patriot and his links to Derby

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No. 24, Iron Gate, Derby, was John Whitehurst’s house from 1737-64

Clockmaker John Whitehurst’s house at 27, Queen Street, Derby

2006 marked the 300th anniversary of the birth of that incomparable American patriot, Benjamin Franklin – a statesman with a most potent and interesting link to Derby.

Writing of the house at 24 Iron Gate, Edwin Bradbury says: “The part now occupied by Mr [Richard] Keene belonged to the celebrated John Whitehurst, author and philosopher, who constructed All Saints’ clock in the premises at the rear now used as printing offices....it has been handed down as a matter of fact that the philosophic clockmaker here entertained his friends, Franklin and Darwin.”

I might add that it was on the evidence of this passage, among other, more circumstantial pointers, that Derby Civic Society managed to get this house and its workshop listed two years ago.

The association with Erasmus Darwin and his old friend Benjamin Franklin must certainly have helped.

It was in the summer of 1758 that Franklin, American inventor and pioneer in advancing the study of electricity, visited Birmingham at the invitation of Whitehurst’s friend Matthew Boulton, thanks to a letter of introduction from a mutual friend. Needless to say, Boulton was keen to share their acquaintanceship with his closest friends, namely Whitehurst and Darwin, then a young GP in Boulton’s original home town, Lichfield.

Less than two years before, Franklin had been elected a Fellow of the Royal Society and, during the following 30 years, all his scientific chums joined him in that select coterie.

As it turned out, all three got on like a house on fire and a lengthy and highly fruitful acquaintanceship began that was to last more than 30 years.

A year later, in 1759, en route to Scotland in the August, Franklin stayed with Whitehurst in Derby – at 24 Iron Gate. Another acquaintance of Franklin’s in Derby then lived opposite Whitehurst in Iron Gate, Anthony Tissington, whom Franklin put up for election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in June 1766.

Indeed, Tissington, a geologist, mineral agent and mine owner with supra-national interests in whose enterprises, Whitehurst (among others) had a lucrative 48th share, may have encountered the American before either Boulton or Whitehurst, given that both were older, Tissington having been born a year before Franklin.

It is natural to ask, however, what bound these, at first sight, rather disparate characters together. They were then not all radicals.

Franklin was in Britain as the representative of the state and congress of Pennsylvania and was keen to hammer out an agreement between the Government and their American colonists.

It is only when that seemed impossible, from the passing of the Coercive Acts in 1774, that his political stance became increasingly radical until eventually he became the doyen of the cause of independence.

Whitehurst was for a long time a Tory, but started to change with the American revolution.

All four were fascinated with science. Scientific knowledge was increasing at an ever-quickening pace and Darwin and Whitehurst, in particular, as future members of the Lunar Society, founded in Birmingham with Boulton from 1764, did much to experiment, theorise and add to the store of data, emulated and paralleled by their friends and contemporaries all over Europe. This was the age of The Enlightenment and this unquenchable thirst for science was its fuel.

Another facet behind the closeness of their association was Freemasonry. Here, the main driving force was probably Franklin himself, who had been initiated into the “craft” in 1731, becoming Provincial Grand Master of Pennsylvania three years later.

On coming to Britain in 1757, he joined the London Lodge of Emulation, No 21, into which Whitehurst was later initiated.

Subsequently, almost all the Lunar Society members were Freemasons, as were many of their clients.

Franklin was probably the influence behind all this, however, for his brand of freemasonry soon moved towards the esoteric. This coincided with the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1776, when the American, back across the Atlantic for a year, was obliged to move to Paris, where he became the colonists’ ambassador to the French Court.

Here, in 1779, he became the master of a French Lodge called the “Neuf Soeurs” (Nine Sisters) to which Voltaire, thenceforth a friend, belonged.

In 1782, Franklin took a positive step towards Strict Observance Freemasonry – much more esoteric and mystical – when he joined the Loge Royale des Commandeurs du Temple à l’Ouest de Carcassonne (Royal Lodge of the Western Commanders of the Order of the Temple of Carcassonne).

Exactly what truck Louis XVI might have had with such a lodge, with its Da Vinci Code overtones is hard to say; probably not much, despite the Royal Warrant!

Another acquaintance at this time was James Ferguson, a Scots-born mathematician, astronomer and gifted scientist. He became a peripatetic lecturer on all aspects of science, his lectures becoming the last word in social modishness for the increasingly well-educated provincial middle classes.

It was Ferguson who presented a winter series of 20 lectures in the Shire Hall at Derby in 1762, repeating the experience in 1764 and November-December 1771, each time being booked out, with Whitehurst acting as agent for the tickets.

It was an occasion in the first series that inspired Joseph Wright to paint A Philosopher giving a Lecture upon an Orrery – although the lecturer is not Ferguson, but more probably a relatively young Whitehurst – commissioned by another influential patron of all of them, Washington Shirley, 5th Earl Ferrers, then rebuilding Staunton Harold to his own designs.

Franklin, Ferguson and a Dr William Small were all worried about the lack of raw materials available to the colonists. They were also obsessed with gadgets and competed to invent a clock with the fewest moving parts, meaning, essentially, wheels. While Small claimed to have made a wheel-less clock, the other two invented a three wheel clock.

A superb example in Derby Museum, made by Whitehurst around 1770, is probably the one, surviving correspondence implies, he made for Franklin on one of the latter’s later Derby visits, when he stayed at his friend’s new house, 27 Queen Street.

On August 1, 1771, we find Whitehurst still trying to make clocks for Franklin with James Ferguson-style refinements, for he wrote that day to Franklin: “The other clock you were so kind to order is in hand and will soon be completed. I found it necessary to depart from Mr Ferguson’s plans for the sake of greater simplicity. The moon’s southing and the time of high water, ought to be visible as the time pointed out by the indices. I believe you will agree with me in this alteration. I consulted Mr Ferguson before I alter’d his designs.”

This must refer to a tidal clock developed by Ferguson and Capt Hutchinson of Liverpool in 1764; that Whitehurst felt obliged and was able to simplify this complex timepiece is a tribute to the Derby man’s superior genius!

The design was further refined in 1770 before Whitehurst simplified it and, in due course, two clocks, set to tell the tides in the harbour at Boston, were sent to Franklin, to take home with him when he returned to America.

Sadly, a large quantity of Whitehurst’s letters to Ferguson which materialised with Derby dealer Frank Murray in the 1930s were sold to an American collector, since when they have utterly vanished. Apparently, they were full of beautifully drawn and tinted diagrams of clock movements and other devices; what a loss!

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