In my ignorance, before reading this most instructive, entertaining and beautifully produced book, I had idly regarded sundials as agreeable garden ornaments with little or no practical purpose. To quote Hilaire Belloc, ‘I am a sundial and I make a botch / Of what is done much better by a watch’. Yet our expert guide to the subject, Sir Mark Lennox-Boyd, a former Tory politician who is now Patron of the British Sundial Society and a prolific designer of sundials, is having none of this. Echoing Professor Joad of The Brains Trust, he counters Belloc’s couplet with ‘it all depends on how you measure time’. He suggests that ‘you could just as easily say that sundials tell the right time but clocks do not’.
Sir Mark does concede, though, that after Greenwich time pips began to be transmitted in 1924 sundials began to decay: ‘The dial had gone down-market and was more often than not a companion to the garden gnome.’ But more recently there has been a renewal of interest in the design of dials. They are evidently flourishing once more as finely crafted symbols of the passing of time. Sir Mark argues persuasively that sundials are the oldest of scientific instruments: ‘Their beauty is often a reflection of great craftsmanship, as well as a design statement which is highly ordered and rational.’
As for the common misconception that sundials are merely garden ornaments, Sir Mark traces its origins to the Renaissance, when men of learning developed the idea that the garden should be an area for the demonstration of the sciences. To emphasise his point, he only includes one conventional garden dial among the copious illustrations, for of ‘the many hundreds of thousands made since the Renaissance, only a few have been designed for gardens’.
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