Gents of Leicester Double-Sided Station Clock | 1940s Bakelite Slave Clock, Never Opened, Factory Seals Intact
Gents of Leicester Double-Sided Station Clock | 1940s Bakelite Slave Clock, Never Opened, Factory Seals Intact
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An extraordinary 1940s Gents of Leicester double-sided station clock, Bakelite-housed and running on both of its original slave clock movements. The original factory seals over the movement bolts are still completely intact, this clock has never been opened since the day it left the factory.
At a glance
| Manufacturer | Gents of Leicester, England |
| Type | Double-sided Bakelite station / slave clock |
| Produced | Circa 1940s |
| Movement | Two original slave clock movements, one per side, factory seals on the movement bolts still intact and unopened |
| Power | Pulse generator built into the plug, plug in and the original movements run again |
| Sound | Authentic mechanical "clunk" every 30 seconds |
| Glass | Original glass covers |
| Mount | Includes chain, ready to hang directly |
| Diameter | 30.5 cm (12.0") |
| Depth | 13.5 cm (5.3") |
| Availability | One of one, once sold this exact piece will not return |
| Import duty | Payable by the buyer in their own country |
The story
Gents of Leicester was founded in 1872 by John Thomas Gent, later registered as Gent & Co, and grew into one of Britain's most respected names in electrical timekeeping. In 1903, the company introduced its Pul-syn-etic system, a master clock and slave clock network that let a single accurate timepiece drive dozens or hundreds of others across a building or site, all showing the exact same time from one central source. It was a solution built for exactly the kind of places where precise, uniform timekeeping mattered most: railway stations, factories, post offices, and schools across Britain, and beyond, adopted Gents installations by the thousand. The company's best-known surviving clock still hangs in London's Waterloo Station, a fitting monument to a firm architects routinely specified for its reliability and foolproof installation.
Slave clocks like this one carried no timekeeping mechanism of their own. Instead, each held Gents' own "S" Type movement, sealed inside a Bakelite housing, which advanced the hands by a single, mechanical step every time it received a pulse from the master clock elsewhere in the building, producing the unmistakable "clunk" that still defines these clocks today. Double-sided versions, like this one, let a single fixture display the correct time to platforms, corridors, or waiting rooms on both sides at once, a common sight at stations across the country.
What makes this particular clock genuinely remarkable is what hasn't happened to it. The original factory seals over the movement bolts on both sides are still completely intact, meaning this clock has never once been opened in the roughly eighty years since it left the factory floor. We have left that history untouched. Rather than servicing or resetting the internal movement, we paired the clock with a pulse generator built directly into the plug, so the original 1940s movements themselves are what drive the hands today, exactly as they were built to, just as they did the very first day they were installed.
The clock comes complete with its original glass covers and a chain, ready to hang directly. Two faces, two untouched original mechanisms, and nearly a century of history still doing precisely what it was engineered to do.
Suited to collectors of horological and railway history, interior designers looking for a genuinely rare, unrestored statement piece, and anyone who wants a working piece of British engineering history with a story that very few surviving examples can still tell.