page_title: St John's College, Cambridge
section_title: New Court's Clock Tower
hierarchical_section_title: St John's College, Cambridge / Traditions and legends / New Court's Clock Tower
caption_attribution_description: English: New Court of St John's College, Cambridge.
context_page_description: St John's College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge founded by the Tudor matriarch Lady Margaret Beaufort. In constitutional terms, the college is a charitable corporation established by a charter dated 9 April 1511. The aims of the college, as specified by its statutes, are the promotion of education, religion, learning and research. It is one of the larger Oxbridge colleges in terms of student numbers. For 2018, St. John's was ranked 9th of 29 colleges in the Tompkins Table with over 30 per cent of its students earning first-class honours.
  The college's alumni comprise the winners of 11 Nobel Prizes, seven prime ministers and 12 archbishops of various countries, at least two princes and three saints. The Romantic poet William Wordsworth studied at St John's, as did William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson, the two abolitionists who led the movement that brought slavery to an end in the British Empire. Prince William was affiliated with the college while undertaking a university-run course in estate management in 2014.
context_section_description: New Court's central cupola has four blank clock-faces. These are subject to various apocryphal explanations. One legend maintains that a statute limiting the number of chiming clocks in Cambridge rendered the addition of a mechanism illegal. No such limitation is known to exist. More likely explanations include Hutchinson's fear that the installation of a clockface would spoil the building's symmetry, and that the college's financial situation in the early nineteenth century made completion impossible.
  Other legends explaining the absence of clockfaces claim that St John's College and its neighbour, Trinity College, Cambridge were engaged in a race to build the final (or tallest) clocktower in Cambridge. Supposedly, whichever was finished first (or was tallest) would be permitted to house the 'final' chiming clock in Cambridge. Trinity's Tower was finished first (or, in another version of the same story, was made taller overnight by the addition of a wooden cupola), and its clock was allowed to remain. In truth, the completion of New Court and Trinity's Clock (which is in King Edward's Tower) was separated by nearly two centuries. Trinity's famous double-striking was installed in the seventeenth century by its then-Master, Richard Bentley, a former student of St John's, who dictated that the clock chime once for Trinity, and once for his alma mater, St John's.
caption: St John's College New Court and blank clock tower face
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