'Out it boomed. First a warning, musical; then the hour, irrevocable," wrote Virginia Woolf. "The leaden circles dissolved in the air." I think we are supposed to find the sound of Big Ben friendly and reassuring, but I'm with Mrs Dalloway. I have always found it faintly depressing – melancholy, relentless, tuneless. The hour bell cracked in 1857 before it was even hung and has been slightly off a perfect E, and slowly deteriorating, ever since.
So I wonder what the highly strung Clarissa Dalloway would have made of the decision by the PR firm Colman Getty – commissioned by the House of Commons to commemorate Big Ben's 150th anniversary later this month – to make the chimes freely available as a mobile ringtone. Clarissa was only reminded of the grim inevitability of the passing hours while walking around London's streets; now even the quiet zone of a Virgin train may be no escape from those leaden circles.
I have never really warmed to Big Ben because I associate it, along with the excitable campaign to save the Routemaster bus, with our capital city's tendency to see any interference with its own icons as a kind of national sacrilege. When, in 1960, the BBC announced that the chimes would no longer be broadcast in full before the evening news, a tradition that had begun in the dark days of 1940, there was a long campaign – led, according to the BBC's director general, Sir Hugh Carleton Greene, by "some very strange people" – to reinstate them. The BBC held one of its first ever programme polls and about 3,000 listeners wrote in, mostly opposing the change. In the age of Sachsgate and "have your say", that hardly seems like a mandate, but the campaign won a historic concession. The strokes of Big Ben would gently fade away as the reading of the news began, as happens on Radio 4's midnight news to this day.
The BBC may have turned Big Ben into a national institution, but its chimes also announced that the whole of Britain, to paraphrase Henry James, had become a suburb of London. It is no coincidence that Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the most centralising prime minister of modern times, was one of Big Ben's biggest fans. As an up-and-coming MP in the 1960s she was photographed in front of it in her Ford Anglia; and she warned ITN viewers in 1991 against surrendering power to Brussels because "it was the chimes of Big Ben that rang out across Europe during the war".
There is a dissident Big Ben tradition, though – the one celebrated in the 1943 Ealing comedy My Learned Friend, in which Will Hay and Claude Hulbert, disguised as beefeaters, hang from the clock's minute hand in order to stop a bomb from blowing up parliament. Hulbert says, "You can't stop Big Ben, old boy – people set their watches by it," and Hay replies, "I don't care if they boil their eggs by it."
It is a classic Ealing moment: a great British institution is stripped of all its pomp and solemnity, before finally being saved and celebrated. Like Richard Hannay in the Robert Powell film version of The Thirty Nine Steps – a barefaced rip-off of My Learned Friend – Hay and Hulbert are outsiders who take it upon themselves to save the nation when the authorities are too incompetent or corrupt to do it themselves.
Perhaps the actor Rodney Bewes also had My Learned Friend in mind when in 1956, aged 18, he and a friend climbed the scaffolding around Big Ben to hang a pair of knickers on the clock hands. From the account in his autobiography, A Likely Story, it seems they were motivated more by Dutch courage than the British radical tradition. The stunt did them no favours: the police mistook them for Cypriot terrorists and they spent a night in the cells. But as Big Ben chimes in its 151st year, it is time to rescue the Big Ben Two from the condescension of posterity, and celebrate their brave, anarchic gesture. Rodney Bewes, we salute you, for refusing to surrender to the benign tyranny of the nation's timepiece.
