Trenkle Brass Twin Bell Wind Up Alarm Clock, West Germany, c. 1960–1980

The Piece

A small brass alarm clock with two bells standing over the case, a carry handle arched between them, and a band of applied filigree running right round the drum.

The case is a brass drum on three cast ball feet, and the side of it is where the work went. A panel of openwork filigree is applied the whole way around, scrolls and rosettes built up from beaded wire and set proud of a plain ground, framed top and bottom by a beaded border. It is the sort of decoration usually kept for jewellery boxes rather than spent on the side of a clock nobody looks at from the side.

Two domed bells sit above on threaded posts with turned finials, with the striker standing between them, and the handle arches over the top so the whole thing can be picked up and carried to a bedside.

The dial is gilt, engine turned with a scrolled ground, and set with twelve black cartouche numerals in white Roman figures. The hands are blued steel, pierced and shaped in the old manner, with luminous inserts, and small luminous dots sit at the hour positions. Under the numerals at the bottom edge it reads WEST GERMANY, and at the centre, Trenkle.

The back is a plain gilt plate with the winding key still in it, two knurled winding arbors, a regulator slot marked plus at one end, and small engraved icons showing which arbor drives the time and which the bells.

History & Provenance

This clock dates itself, and it does so from two places rather than one. WEST GERMANY is printed on the dial and stamped again on the back plate.

That is a hard bracket at both ends, which is rarer than it sounds. The Federal Republic came into being in 1949 and its export goods carried that marking from then; before it, goods from the western occupation zones were marked differently again. At the other end, reunification on 3 October 1990 ended the country and the marking with it. So this clock was made between 1949 and 1990 and it cannot have been made outside those years. No amount of style argument moves either end.

Within that span the object narrows itself. It is a mechanical clock, wound with a key, with two separate trains and two separate arbors, one for going and one for the bells. Quartz movements took the alarm clock market through the later 1970s and mechanical wind up alarms became a specialist product afterwards. And the design, a heavily ornamented brass drum in an old fashioned idiom with applied filigree, ball feet, Roman numerals and a carry handle, belongs to the West German decorative export trade of the 1960s and 1970s, when small Black Forest and Swabian works sold this kind of thing in quantity into America and Britain.

Trenkle is a Black Forest clockmaking name. Clocks marked Trenkle West Germany of exactly this type survive in reasonable numbers, which tells you it was a production line rather than a one off, and that the works knew what they were doing with a brass case.

It is worth saying plainly what this clock is not. It is not a nineteenth century object and it cannot be presented as one. The two words on the dial rule that out completely, and a piece that carries its own date is better catalogued honestly than stretched.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

Small brass objects are how a room stops looking arranged and starts looking lived in, and a clock is the only one of them that also has a reason to be there.

The filigree is why this one is worth more than the ordinary brass alarm clock. Run a thumb round the case and you can feel every scroll standing off the ground. Most clocks of this size were given a plain drum and a printed dial; this one was given a band of applied openwork that catches light from any angle and reads as worked metal rather than as a shape.

It has the right presence for the places a big clock cannot go: a bedside table, a bookshelf, a bathroom windowsill, a desk, the corner of a mantel already carrying something taller. The handle means it can move with you rather than living in one spot.

For a shop, small gilt and brass runs well because it photographs well and ships cheaply, and a signed West German maker with a legible dial gives a customer something to hold on to when they are deciding.