Take a virtual tour of Big Ben

One hundred and fifty years ago tomorrow, the great clock atop the Houses of Parliament began to keep time and became the symbol of political power — but also the focus of scandal, hand-wringing and bitter recrimination. Times have not changed.

The bell of the Palace of Westminster, later nicknamed Big Ben, rang out for the first time in the summer of 1859, accompanied by a deafening cacophony of recrimination in the letters pages of The Times.

As another wave of scandal swamps Westminster, it is worth recalling that Big Ben itself was originally a source of fierce dispute, skulduggery, insults and lawsuits. Everyone involved in the project fell out with everyone else, and just about everyone felt compelled to write to this newspaper about it.

Times Archive, 1859: The bell of Westminster

On Saturday the great bell of Westminster sounded for the last time, and while in the very act of striking Big Ben became dumb for ever

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• Letter from Mr Denison

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The original Palace of Westminster burnt down in 1834, and the competition to rebuild it was won by a young architect, Charles Barry. While Barry was in charge of the overall shape of the building, the man brought in to oversee the creation of the bell and clock was Edmund Becket Denison.

Denison, a barrister, was an amateur horologist who had made a fortune in the railway boom. He was irascible, brilliant and insufferable. Barry and Denison loathed one another.

By 1851 Denison had come up with an ambitious design, including a “double three-legged gravity escapement” isolating the pendulum from the hands and an enormous bell weighing 16 tons. Many believed the specifications for the new clock, accurate to within a second a day, and its vast bell, would be impossible to achieve.

The first bell cracked beyond repair while still on display. A second bell, slightly smaller at 13.8 tons, was cast at Whitechapel Bell Foundry by George Mears. A team of 16 horses dragged it from the foundry to Parliament, cheered by enthusiastic crowds.

After long delays and spiralling costs, the clock finally began to tick on May 31, 1859. The bell sounded for the first time on July 11, an audible expression of Victorian ingenuity and power.

Then the trouble, brewing for more than a decade, burst on to the letters page. One Thomas Walesby wrote to The Times complaining “the sound elicited is still a failure — wanting in gravity, power and solidity of tone”. Others disagreed, one writer from Kensington, insisting that “at this distance the sound was most sonorous”.

Far more seriously, a few weeks later the hands stopped and the mutual back-stabbing started. Barry wrote a letter to The Times, laying the blame on the clock designer. “Mr Denison, and he alone, is as fully responsible for those hands as he is for all the other parts of the clock,” he wrote.

Denison shot back: “The building has cost three times the estimate, and is full of blunders and inconsistencies . . . To his [Barry’s] statements that I approved those hands . . . I give the flattest contradiction within the compass of the English language.”

The lawyer then launched into a full-scale denunciation of the architect: “From the time when I was first asked to take this business in hand until now, there has not been a single stage in it in which we have not been put to needless trouble, and the nation to needless expense, by Charles Barry’s carelessness and blundering.”

Denison complained that the clock shaft was too narrow, the clock room was too dark and the windows opened into a chimney that poured out smoke when Parliament was sitting. An MP, Thomas Hankey, now charged on to the letters page, asking “who authorised Mr Denison to have anything to do with the business? . . . Is he merely an amateur?” Denison called the MP a fool, in print. “Everybody has the right to talk nonsense, so everybody else has the right to laugh at him for it.” Correspondence zinged back and forth with Barry until Denison announced he was going on holiday. No sooner had he returned from the North, a far more serious problem erupted. The great bell had cracked.

Once again, Denison blamed someone else, this time turning on the master bellfounder, George Mears, accusing him of poor workmanship. “There is a place on the bell full of holes . . . and every indication of unsound casting,” he wrote to The Times. Explaining why, as project overseer, he had failed to spot these supposed faults, he wrote: “The holes were all carefully stuffed as a bad tooth by a dentist . . . and the bell was washed over with some colouring stuff.”

Mears responded that Denison had insisted on using a bell-hammer weighing twice as much as the one he had recommended. Enraged, he sent “the most unqualified contradiction” to The Times, and threatened to sue. The Times itself now felt obliged to weigh in with an editorial which, sensibly, attacked all parties. “What is to be done about the Westminster Bell? It is becoming a serious affair, for all England is compromised,” it read. “Charles Barry has built a pretty tower — pretty in its way — and it answers the purpose of a clock tower, but a bell tower it is not,” the newspaper declared — wrongly, as the subsequent 150 years have proved. As for Denison’s claims, The Times noted: “Our own reporter has been unable, after minute examination, to discover the asserted ‘honeycombing’.”

Nor could the courts, and Denison lost the resulting libel action. Worse, the lawyer was found to have befriended one of the workers at the foundry, plied him with drink and bullied him into falsely testifying that the bell had cracked because of concealed holes.

Twenty years later Denison was still accusing Mears of fraud. He was sued again, and lost again. A careful scientific examination of Big Ben in 2002 found no evidence of filler.

Barry became Sir Charles. Denison became Lord Grimthorpe. Both were eclipsed by the obscure and overweight Sir Benjamin Hall, Commissioner of Works, who probably gave the bell its enduring name. As for the crack, a piece of the bell was ground out and the bell was rotated, so that the hammer struck a different point. It never sounded quite the same again.

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