Robinson, Tom

Tom Robinson (1915–1999) was Chairman of the Antiquarian Horological Society from 1985 to 1991. He became a member of the Society in 1956 and contributed actively to its affairs and to its publications for forty years. He served as Editor of Antiquarian Horology in 1962–68 and 1975–78. He was elected to the Council in 1963 and served on the Libraries and Publications Committees for a number of years. During his Chairmanship of the Society he instigated its first specialist sections: he was the first Chairman of the Southern Section and the co-founder and second Chairman of the Turret Clock Group. In 1996 he was elected a Vice President of the Society.

Tom was a qualified Chartered Electrical Engineer, working for the Post Office at the time when it was the only supplier of telecommunications services in the UK. He masterminded the setting up of two of the company's training schools, of which he was the Director: Charles House in Kensington and the school at Kew, from which he retired in 1975.

His interest in horology started at school, when he repaired clocks for friends in his spare time. His later interests focused on the on the seventeenth century, but his broad knowledge and expertise in both clock making and cabinet making were well demonstrated by his major published work, The Longcase Clock (1981, 2nd edition 1995). His unpublished works include the internal catalogues of the remarkable collection of clocks at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

Tom was a member of the Furniture History Society from its inception in 1964, of the Conservation Committee of the Council for the Care of Churches, and Chairman of its sub-committee on Clocks Conservation. He also advised the dioceses of Chichester and Guildford on their clocks. He continued with his research right up to his death, his latest interest being lacquer-cased clocks.

Tom shared his horological interests with his wife Eileen (d.2015), to whom he was married for forty-five years and who was a Life Member of the AHS.

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For obituaries of Tom Robinson by Nicholas Goodison, Ken Shenton and Chris McKay, see Antiquarian Horology, vol. 25 no. 2 (December 1999), pp. 144-46.

Image drawn from Antiquarian Horology, vol. 25 no. 2 (December 1999), p. 144.