Will Stroud’s ‘racist’ blackboy clock fall?
Britain’s statue wars are rumbling on. Stroud District Council wants to take down an historic Jacquemart or jack – a mechanised figure which strikes the time with a hammer on a bell – clock located on Castle Street in the centre of the Gloucestershire town. Whilst jack clocks are fairly common in France and Germany, there are only 20 in the UK, most showing knights or similar striking the bell. Stroud’s jack, however, is a thick-lipped black boy in a leaf skirt and hence offends today’s mores. In the aftermath of the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests and Bristol’s Edward Colston statue being toppled by a mob and thrown into
