JEFFREY HEBDEN was born 1823 in Stalling Busk, though at some stage he moved into Hawes, a local bustling market town, home of Wensleydale cheese.
There he married JANE DINSDALE in 1851 but within a few years she had died. His second wife, who he married in 1857, was ROSE DINSDALE and they had just two children, Mary Plews Hebden and Jeffrey. Neither Mary nor Jeffrey ever married and both died within a short period of each other around 1933. Jeffrey senior died in 1912 in Hawes where he had plied his trade as clockmaker, building up an excellent reputation.
His son also became a clockmaker and made something of a name for themselves locally.
Hawes
EXTRACT TAKEN FROM THE BOOK THE OLD CLOCKMAKERS OF YORKSHIRE, BY UNKNOWN.
“At the head of Wensleydale, at Hawes, the Hebdens, father and son, seem to have done a fair trade in the 19th century. Both were named Jeffrey, and one who knew them in his boyhood gives a vivid description of two typical Dales characters:
“Hebden senior invariably described himself by saying, “They ca’ me o’d ‘Ebden.” He was full of tall yarns. One was that once when he had been shooting rabbits, a rabbit kept dodging him round a haystack. So he bent the barrel of his gun and fired. The bullet went a few times round the haystack and finally killed the rabbit. He was a snuffer and as he sat on a chair in his shop he would hep himself pretty liberally from his box and much snuff lay on his vast expansive waistcoat.
“Hebden junior was then a middle aged man, very clean and dignified. It was a treat to see him dressed up in his best clothes to go winding at the local big houses. An old black frock oat and a black cloth cap shaped more or less like the pillbox caps worn by railway porters. It was quite evident that he regarded winding day as a really solemn and important occasion. The old men were just such characters as Dickens could have immortalised, characters from a bygone age. They had definitely been makes of clocks. I remember them telling me that it took them a fortnight to make one, so that after they had paid the case maker and the cost of their own materials, there could not have been very much for their own work, for the whole clock would not cost more than five pounds.”
The Hebdens‘ wheel-cutting machine is in the museum of the Newcastle Society of Antiquaries, while the writer possesses relics of them in their eyeglass and an unfinished wheel and pinion for one of their clocks.
