Perth Voice Interactive

THERE was never any chance of Paul Ennis being late for the Perth Citizen of the Year awards.

For six decades he maintained the historic Perth Town Hall clock, making sure the antiquated series of levers, springs and weights were in perfect harmony to tell the correct time.

His long service and diligence was recognised when he recently received the Senior Citizen of the Year award from Perth council.

Ennis, 71, said it was a particularly proud moment as his 92-year-old father, who he cares for, got to see him receive the gong.

The Ennis family looked after the Perth Town Hall clock for more than 100 years and Paul was the last in the family line to service it.

As a young boy Ennis would accompany his dad when he was working on the clock, before taking on maintenance duties when he was a teenager in the late 1960s. The family were all skilled watchmakers and back in the day made chronometers for ships, clocks for the department of civil aviation, and looked after most of the big clocks in the state.

“We did the clock at York Town Hall, the Albany Town Hall and just about everywhere else you can think of,” Ennis told the Voice.

“Back then clocks were controlling all sorts of things including the chronometers on ships which were used for navigation, so they were engineered to the highest standard and had to be spot on.”

The Perth Town Hall clock was built by London clockmakers Thwaites and Reed and the three bells also came from London. 

When fixing the clock, Ennis tried to keep as many of the original parts as possible.

He was amazed by their durability, including a giant suspension spring which had been in-use for more than 50 years. “With these old clocks, none of the parts are standard, even the threads on the bolts, and you have to make any replacements yourself,” he says.

The clock was originally manually wound, but was upgraded to a self-winding weight system in the 1950s, which Ennis then overhauled in 2005.

But apart from that it’s pretty much original.

The third generation of the Ennis family to maintain the clock, he says there’s only been one major incident when a huge cable snapped, sending the clock into free spin.

He said Big Ben in London had the same issue in the early 1960s.

Situated on on the corner of Barrack and Hay Streets, the Town Hall clock used to be the highest building in the city. People would use it as a meeting point and large crowds would gather beneath it on December 31 to bring in the new year.

The Ennis family were always there on new year’s eve to make sure it was working, including having a hammer on hand to whack the bell if the clock failed at midnight – but it never did.

“I knew times were changing when I was there for New Year recently and there was only a hobo and me – there used to be crowds of up to 5000 people,” Ennis says.

Ennis says he never had a formal contract with the City of Perth and it was a sort of old-school gentleman’s agreement that he would fix it.

He used to go up and check the clock every two weeks when he owned a jewellery store on Hay Street (his second trade was jewellery making).

Now in semi-retirement, a “young fella” has taken over maintenance of the clock, but Ennis is still on hand to offer advice when needed.

“It was a great honour to get the citizen award, and also recognition of the decades of service my family put in to keep the clock going,” he says.