Nowadays, Big Ben is a worldwide tourist attraction and a fixture of the London skyline. What you might not know, however, is that the impressive clock tower on the shores of the River Thames is believed to have had an older brother. Before Big Ben, there was Great Tom.
We have to go right back to the 13th and 14th centuries to trace the hazy origins of Westminster’s original clock tower and original great bell. Long before the modern Palace of Westminster was built, there are records of a stone clock tower constructed to the north of the main entrance as early as the 1290s, and concrete evidence of its presence from the 1360s onwards.
The mystery begins with an inscription on the original 14th-century bell, known as Great Tom. If it was correctly transcribed from an earlier bell, it reads: Tercius aptavit me rex Edwardque vocavit, Sancti decore Edwardi signantur ut horae. From Latin, this translates as: King Edward III made and named me, So that by the grace of St Edward the hours may be marked. King Edward III ruled England for 50 years, from 1327 until his death in 1377.
It is possible that an even earlier bell, dating back to Edward the Confessor in the 11th century, is actually referenced instead. This would mean that Great Tom was himself a later edition.
Anyhow, as ordinary clocks became commonplace in wider society, large clock bells striking on the hour became less important. In time, even the great bell tower at Westminster fell into disrepair. By 1698, then king William III decided to gift the clocktower to the parish of St Margaret’s Westminster. Great Tom was sold to nearby St Paul’s Cathedral a year later, and the tower itself was pulled down in 1707.
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The bell cost a pretty penny. While £385.17s.6d (or £385.88) sounds like a reasonable price these days, according to the Bank of England that is the equivalent of approximately £65,500 ($82,722) today. The cost was calculated per pound, and Great Tom weighed well in excess of 9,000 lbs.
But the transition to St Paul’s, on New Year’s Day, 1699, did not go smoothly. Great Tom fell off its carriage and cracked. Interestingly, this incident is said to have given London’s Bell Yard its. The damage was not terminal, however, and in 1708 Great Tom was used as the hour bell for the clock in the south-west tower of St Paul’s.
After ambitious plans for the new Houses of Parliament in the mid-1800s, a new clock tower was completed on the site where Big Ben stands today. But the first bell for the new tower also cracked. It meant a new bell to be cast by the Whitechapel Bell Foundry. Only this bell was broken as well. People did not discover the crack after it had been hoisted into place. Finally, in 1863, the third Big Ben was in position to strike its famous E flat.
