Patrick Comerford
Wandering through the streets of Buckingham, I have often gazed at Dial House at 7 Bristle Hill, and wondered about the sundial that fills the lower of two recesses above the front door, and its Latin inscription and Roman numerals.
I could find no reference to house or the sundial in architectural guides, local histories or tourist leaflets, nobody in the tourist information office in the Old Gaol in Buckingham seemed to know about the dial or the house, and so last week I began to wonder about the origins, antiquity and purpose of the dial and the story of Dial House.
Dial House is at the bottom of Bristle Hill, at its north-west end, where it meets School Lane, close to a bend on the River Great Ouse.
Across the top of this vertical declining dial on the first floor is the Latin inscription Super collem saetigerum septem / semper luceat sol. Below there is a fading translation, Upon seven Bristle Hill let the sun shine still, though this is now difficult to make out, and a peculiar sequence of letters and numbers ‘AGR 080808’ that seem to create a puzzling conundrum.
The blue painted slate dial plate is set in a recess about 30 mm deep. The hours XI to X are shown with full length hour lines originating from a sun, below may be the letters ‘GMT’. There are declination lines labelled for the solstices and equinoxes, although they may not be accurately drawn, and another dashed line that is not identified. All the remaining dial lettering appears to be gold or gold leaf.
I inquired around and eventually learned that the initials AGR are those of an interesting and creative local figure, the late Anthony Gordon Randall (1933-2021), and learned too how he erected the dial almost 18 years ago to mark his 75th birthday on 8 August 2008 – hence the puzzling numbers 080808 beside his initials.
Anthony Gordon Randall, once a website developer and printing entrepreneur, was born into Quaker family in Woking on 8 August 1933, the third and youngest of three children. He was educated at Leighton Park, a Quaker-run public school in Reading, and at Trinity College Oxford (BA 1957), Insead (MBA 1962) and the University of Buckingham (MA 2012).
He moved from Richmond to Buckingham in 2007 and there, at the beginning of 2008, as he was looking forward to his 75th birthday, he began thinking of suitable ways to celebrate that milestone. He heard how the number 8 is regarded as lucky in China because the word eight sounds similar to the word that means ‘prosper’ or ‘wealth’. The date 08.08.08 would be a particularly auspicious one in China, and coincided with the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics.
His house on Bristle Hill was originally a couple of old two-storey cottages with a third floor probably added shortly after the canal arrived in Buckingham in the early 19th century and with a Georgian façade added to form the front of the house.
Above the front door and between the two windows on each of the upper floors are niches, probably designed to resemble windows in more stately houses that were blocked up in the 18th century to avoid Window Tax. Randall decided the lower of the niches would be a suitable place for a sundial.
An online search led him to David Harber, whose list of commissions included Oxbridge colleges, stately homes and international corporate head offices. The wording for the Latin inscription was provided by Bishop Stephen Verney (1919-2009), a former Bishop of Repton, who lived near David Harber’s workshop.
Randall wanted a motto related to the house at the bottom of Bristle Hill. He thought of the words in the funeral, Lux aeterna luceat …, ‘Let light eternal shine …’, and transformed this into ‘Let the sun always shine’ (Semper luceat sol …), ending (or beginning) with ‘upon 7 Bristle Hill’.
But he met some problems with his efforts at creating a Latin phrase. When he looked up ‘bristle’ he got saeta, and so he submitted to Bishop Verney Super collem saetae (‘of the bristle’) septem … He got back Super septem (before, not after, the street name) collem saetigerum (‘bristle-bearing’).
Meanwhile, during a visit to Naples, he thought he might find the correct position for the number seven (VII) during a visit to Pompeii. But the people of Pompeii did not use numbers for addresses: ‘this was a new-fangled Greek idea, which might be all very well in Alexandria, but really wouldn’t do for us Romans in Campania.’ And so, imagining the modern Italian method of putting the house number after and not before the street name was perhaps based on some Roman precedent, he decided to do likewise.
The bishop’s opinions about the word ‘Bristle’, however, were supported by a family member who had won a classical scholarship in Oxford college. He was convinced that forming adjectives from nouns by adding ‘-bearing’ in cases such as this was a common occurrence and was derived from Greek practice. They arrived at what they agreed was a reasonable Latin motto, adding a translation into English in small print at the bottom. There he produced a rhyming couplet to render semper (‘always’) as ‘still’, or continuing until this time, and produced: ‘Upon Seven Bristle Hill / Let the sun shine still’.
In addition, he chose the typeface Trajan for the wording on the dial.
At the installation of the sundial at No 7 Bristle House, David Harber and Anthony Randall discussed a follow-up project for the empty niche above, with Harber suggesting a weather cock on the chimney that would link through gears to a pointer on a compass rose in the niche: ‘This birthday you’re tracking the sun: the next big one, track the wind!’
No 7 Bristle House became Dial House, the sundial was nominated for a prize for the best recent embellishment of the town of Buckingham, and Anthony Randall began planning for his 80th birthday on 8 August 2013. But those plans never saw the light of day, and he died on 18 January 2021.
The house at the bottom of Bristle Hill was sold recently and is being refurbished. I hope the sundial is restored to its original glory, and that the new owners have a vision for the second-storey niche above.
As for Bishop Stephen Verney, he died on 9 November 2009, just over a year after the dial was installed. As a conscientious objector during World War II, he first served with Friends Ambulance Unit but later became an undercover agent in occupied Crete, working with the Greek resistance.
He was as an Oxford classicist and his Water into Wine (London: Fount Paperbacks, 1985) had a profound influence on my understanding of Saint John’s Gospel. Perhaps I should return to his story in the weeks to come.
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