Tall Case clock by Isaac Wood of Shrewsbury, Shropshire, c1780. Quarter sawn oak on the door. Cutouts in the dial plate so not a Southern clock. Pendulum is lovely, somebody seems to have fitted a bottom in the case. Loomes talks about the dots on the chapter ring, came in during the 1760s, ran through the 70s and 80s. Isaac Wood (brother of Capt Wood and uncle of the diarist JC Wood) was a prominent Shrewsbury citizen: watchmaker, editor of the “Salopian Journal”, and enthusiastic promoter of the Shrewsbury House of Industry. The building was originally Dr Coram’s foundlings’ hospital, and later housed Dutch prisoners of war, before its incarnation as the Shrewsbury House of Industry in the 1790s, a literate protagonist of which was Isaac Wood. Wood was also secretary to the Salop Fire Office, subscriber to the rebuilding of the town’s English bridge in 1765, and secretary to the Unitarian Church in Shrewsbury’s High Street. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s letter to him of 1798, declining a preaching position at the church, has been preserved.
