And that is just one, albeit the largest, British royal residence of many. Balmoral seems to have quite a few clocks as well if historical pictures [1] are anything to go by. They seemed to like stuffing in as many clocks as possible back in the day.
If you click the '+' to enhance you can make out what looks like bells that appear to have a pendulum underneath them, and the length of each line seems to follow a harmonic series so it must be some kind of musical alarm chime but I've never seen anything like it :)
Can we also talk about how the vaulted ceiling has a similar, but altered motif as the floor? Really talented stuff!
They look like bells. I saw something similar in an old house where they were used to call servents and different bells corrosponded to different rooms.
"horological conservator of Windsor Castle" - what an awesome job! Seriously, I feel like I should have tried harder in my youth to find some super obscure but interesting job.
It sounds romantic at first, but then you read "He plans to spend about 16 hours over the weekend changing all 400 clocks on the Windsor estate, including about 250 in the castle itself, along with seven tower clocks" and then it just sounds tedious.
Yeah, but that's only twice a year. The bulk of his job is further down in the article:
> The rest of his week is spent in his workshop servicing and repairing clocks, many of which are 200 to 300 years old. When a part breaks or wears out, Fjodor makes a replacement using a lathe, a milling machine and lots of hand tools.
Tedious, but that's only twice a year. I think this one hits even harder:
> When he's not changing the time, Fjodor's job includes spending one full day a week winding up the mechanical clocks to keep their pendulums swinging.
They should just go with the high school clock mechanism, where all the clocks wait at the top of the hour for the central synchronizing signal and snap to the :00 all together.
(And then once per day they wait for the midnight signal to catch up any clock that's that far off)
It's explained in excruciating detail here in the Sovereign Grant Framework Agreement[0], it is a grant of £85.9 million from Treasury. However, this amount is proportional to the value of Government revenue received from Crown Estates.
This is in keeping with the agreement between King George III and Parliament to give up revenue from the then unprofitable Crown Lands (now more precisely termed The Crown Estate[1]) in return for a Government stipend. The Crown Estate (which is still "owned by" The Crown[2]) now makes £345 million a year[3].
In contrast, The Duchy of Lancaster and The Duchy of Cornwall and the Royal Collection are not funded by Government, and are instead funded by the Royal Family, or admissions/donations, for the later.
Of course it costs the taxpayer. The government could simply stop handing over millions of pounds a year to these people if it wanted to. But it doesn't. This decision costs the taxpayer.
Taking the logic further - all privately owned property and revenue "costs the taxpayer", relative to the public owning it instead.
The UK treasury is formally Her Majesty's Treasury, and the sovereign grant paid to her is actually a small portion of the money she puts in through the Crown Estate. So she is a net donor to the treasury, although she gets a major out in that the Crown Estate is not subject to inheritance tax.
Through the royal grant, yes. But it's notable that the royal estate directly earns more money for the taxpayer than the royal grant, so effectively this didn't cost the taxpayer anything.
Except, if the royal family didn't exist, wouldn't the same amount of money still be coming in, only now 100% of it would by used for the taxpayer's benefit (supposedly)?
Yes, ideology really seems to confuse people with stuff like this.
By way of illustration, consider two scenarios:
A: The government sends the Royal Family 100 million pounds directly, every year.
B: The government via property law enforces the Royal Family's ownership over a property portfolio, allowing them to collect 100 million pounds a year in rent.
Which of these "costs the taxpaper" and which doesn't? Many people will insist that A does, and B doesn't.
But in fact, both A and B do "cost the taxpaper" much the same.
Sadly, you are afflicted with exactly the ideology I'm talking about, which prevents you from thinking clearly.
> The government does not 'send' the family anything, it takes £200m from the profits of their assets and leaves them with £100m.
You are obviously unfamiliar with how it actually works. The revenues of the Crown Estate belong to the Treasury (aka, the government). On a regular basis, the Treasury makes a payment to the monarch personally equal to 25% of these revenues, because a law says they must.
The government literally sends money directly, exactly as I said, and this represents a direct cost to the taxpayer, as I said. If they did not send this money, the taxpayer would be better off.
Right, so you're talking about the new civil list system; vs. taxes on their private assets.
From the way you were speaking it seemed like you were just calling the private assets of the monarch their estate.
If you mean the income provided here, then it is for the execution of the sovereign's duties, ie., all the staff; diplomatic costs, building costs, etc.
You may be able to argue it would be less if we had another head of state, but i'd imagine the whitehouse spends a similar amount. (Likely, much more so, given the cost of presidental travel).
Yes; the Queen's own (extensive) property would remain hers, but the Crown Estate would almost certainly remain with the state. It's a holdover from the days when there was little separation between the King's own money and the government's, and the King paid the expenses of government himself.
Yes, the Crown Estate is already administered by a public body that would presumably continue to operate much the same should the UK become a republic.
Of course, the public would benefit immensely by no longer having to send a quarter of the revenue to the Queen personally.
Daylight saving time is a practice about just as obsolete as the monarchy.
edit: I really don't care if this gets downvoted or not. The monarchy is a horrible institution to glorify and daylight saving time is just as awful. Neither of these have any relevancy in a modern age.
I don’t understand why people have such an issue with DST. Longer summer evenings where you can wander around with light late into the evenings are glorious.
What would be a better option? A presidency like in the US?
In the UK the Royal approval rating is something like 80%. In the US the Presidential approval rating is by design something like 50% because they’re party-political.
Our head of state represents us more satisfactorily than theirs. Doesn’t that make it a better system in practice?
> What would be a better option? A presidency like in the US?
If you want to have a purely ceremonial head of state, it could still be an elected elder statesman rather than an aristo "by god's grace" and "divine" right. I.e. the German/Austrian/Italian presidential model where the president exercises about as much real power as queen Liz (i.e. a once-a-year state of the union speech).
Or you go entirely without - since Liz refuses to use her corrective powers even in such blatant cases of procedural abuse like the proroguing of parliament, then the post is useless and the Prime Minister might as well be Head of State officially.
I suspect that's partly because the Queen is a symbol of Britishness, and partly because Elizabeth has been a really good constitutional monarch. (And I say that as an ardent Republican. I'd certainly elect her our first ceremonial president).
Charles, on the other hand... I suspect that the monarchy is always only two mediocre monarchs from abolition.
"People are still amazed that at Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace there is a small time zone in the kitchens, where the clocks are always five minutes fast. This is so that the food arrives on time... it's a constant reminder that this is important."
I guess what I'm amazed at is that he thinks that the Queen of England getting her food on time is what qualifies as important.
1. https://www.rct.uk/collection/2103688