An Irish Clock Museum Welcomes the Cuckoo

New York Times

31-03-2025

'How often do you get the chance to buy a whole museum?' asked Colman Curran, a retired lawyer turned horologist, as he delicately attached a pair of hand-carved bone hands ('probably cow or horse') to the dial of a wooden cuckoo clock.
In January 2024, he did just that, traveling to England with representatives of the Irish Museum of Time here to buy more than 600 19th-century cuckoo clocks — what he described as 'the finest collection in the world to go on public display.' The 1 million pound price of the collection, which had been displayed at a private museum in Cheshire, in northwestern England, was provided by an anonymous patron.
Now the Cuckoo Clock Experience, as the new attraction has been named, is scheduled to open in September in an annex to the Waterford museum.
As Mr. Curran, 69, twiddled with the clock's hands (they had been removed during shipping) he explained that the wall clock was made in the mid-19th century by Johann Baptist Beha, a premier cuckoo clock maker in Germany.
Many people associate cuckoo clocks with Switzerland. (And sometimes not kindly. As Orson Welles, playing Harry Lime, said in the 1949 noir thriller 'The Third Man': 'In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.')
But the clocks actually originated in the Black Forest, a region in southwestern Germany near the borders with France and Germany. And the first ones were made in the late 18th century, Mr. Curran said, when residents, mainly farmers and hunters, had little to do during the harsh winters and took to carving the elaborate cases and creating mechanical movements.
'In the 20th century, cuckoo clocks became very commoditized,' he said. 'They became cheap and cheerful tourist tat. They were not terribly well made, whereas the ones from the 19th century are all different, they're all hand carved, the mechanisms in some are superb and some are cuckoo and quail clocks — the cuckoo does the hour, and the quail does the quarters.'
A Blackbird's Song
On a bright February day, I arrived at Mount Congreve, a stately home owned by the Irish government, where the clocks were stored while their future home in the city center was prepared.
Four rooms were filled with hundreds of bulky packages bearing big red 'Fragile' stickers. Inside were lumpy mounds of plastic packing sheets, wrapped around clocks, parts and some tools. They had traveled in five vans to Holyhead, a port in Wales, then were shipped across the Irish Sea to Dublin — all of them arriving by December, despite Brexit paperwork and a demand from the Irish government — since withdrawn — for a costly import tax payment.
As Mr. Curran unwrapped one lump, he uncovered a clockwork bird in a cage that, when wound, moved and sang realistically. (It reminded me of 'The Nightingale' fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen.)
'It was probably made in Triberg by a maker called Griesbaum,' Mr. Curran said. He explained that the music, meant to sound like a blackbird's song, was generated by a bellows and flute arrangement in the base. 'It's exquisite,' he said.
A cuckoo in another package was not in such good condition. 'But he's still got his wings.'
The clocks had been collected and restored over the past 50 years by Roman and Maz Piekarski, brothers who operated Cuckooland, a private museum in an old Cheshire schoolhouse.
They had always been fond of the cuckoo style, Maz Piekarski said, as they learned to tell time from a cuckoo clock in their childhood home. When they began buying the clocks in the 1970s, they found they could pick them up relatively cheaply because cuckoos were considered unfashionable.
A couple of years ago, the brothers decided to sell the clocks and retire. 'Roman was very poorly,' said Mr. Piekarski, 70, 'and things were slowing down. Visitors to the museum kind of hit a dead-end when Covid came along.' (Roman Piekarski died in June 2024.)
The Piekaraskis' one condition was that the collection be kept together. 'Waterford came in just at the right time,' Mr. Piekarski said. 'What a fabulous way to end it.'
Six Elves
At Mount Congreve, Mr. Curran checked on the most valuable clock in the collection, an elaborate five-foot-tall cuckoo that he had unwrapped earlier and was sitting on the floor.
'I call this the Kaiser Wilhelm clock, and it is certainly of a size and scale that indicates it was probably made for a royal patron around 1879,' he said, adding that it was rumored to have hung in a Dutch hunting lodge owned by Emperor Wilhelm II of Germany after his abdication in 1918. 'More research to be done!' he added.
The clock had an extra-large seven-inch wooden cuckoo — cuckoos generally are only about three inches tall — and a mischievous theme. 'These are fantastic carvings of six elves who are fixing and winding the clock,' Mr. Curren said, indicating the figures surrounding the dial.
But not every cuckoo has such decorative detail. While about half the collection's clocks feature abstract imagery (what Mr. Curren described as 'rococo designs with carved spirals') or themes from nature (such as 'carvings of edelweiss, leaves or flowers, animals frolicking around'), others have unexpected motifs.
For example, the collection's walnut table cuckoo clock dating from about 1860 has a standard cuckoo, but on the base there is a picture of a lion whose eyes move from side to side with each tick, a design called an 'eye catcher' clock.
'There are over a dozen eye catchers in the collection,' Mr. Curran said. 'Some are animals such as lions, tigers or dogs and there are a couple of creepy ones featuring male portraits. People like them or hate them. I think they are fantastic, and I want a section in the new building where we will have a number running all the time. Kids will love them!'
Into the Black Forest
The collection's new home, the Irish Museum of Time, opened in 2021 in a refurbished Gothic-style church in Waterford's Viking quarter. Most of the museum's more than 400 antique Irish timepieces were donated by Mr. Curran and his wife, Elizabeth Clooney, and David Boles, a fellow collector who is a pharmacist in Dublin.
The museum, which markets itself as the country's only horological museum, was created by Éamonn McEneaney, a historian who at the time was the director of Waterford Treasures, a six-museum group that includes the Museum of Time and is owned by the Waterford County Council. He had retired in June 2023, but returned to work in March 2024 when the Waterford Treasures board asked him to establish the Cuckoo Clock Experience.
Once it has opened, a museum visitor will be able to walk directly into the cuckoos' exhibition area, a room of about 1,450 square feet, where the walls will be covered in 16-foot-high screens displaying photos of Black Forest trees in various seasons. (The museum commissioned the images from a specialist in forestry photography.) About two-thirds of the collection's clocks are to hang there, with the Kaiser Wilhelm clock hung on its own in a small side room and the rest of the collection kept in storage.
'It's going to be like stepping into the Black Forest,' said Mr. McEneaney, 70, as he stood, surrounded by scaffolding and ladders, in the early 19th-century building, which had been a Methodist chapel and, more recently, a private theater.
The first exhibit visitors will see is a Black Forest fairground organ, built by Gebrüder in 1825 to play more than 50 tunes. The eight-foot-tall organ, part of the cuckoo collection, is to be suspended about nine feet off the museum floor and a hologram of a child will appear to wind it three times a day.
'Kids will like this,' Mr. McEneaney said, 'I'm very conscious of getting children interested in history. The cuckoo clocks will be interesting for them because of all the beautiful carvings. And, of course, the cuckoos themselves!' (Once the cuckoo attraction is opened, entry to both the museum and the cuckoo attraction will be 10 euros for adults, free for children younger than 12.)
Mr. McEneaney and Rupert Maddock, a local architect, are overseeing the building's refurbishment, estimated to cost €1 million. They started moving the first clocks from Mount Congreve to the museum in March, but Mr. McEneaney noted it would take months to hang them all. 'It's an absolutely huge job.'
Mr. Curren said he was confident the collection would enhance Waterford's reputation as the center of horology in Ireland. 'There are plenty of naysayers, but this is creating jobs in this community,' he said. 'More than 115,000 people bought tickets for the museums in 2024, and Waterford has a population of around 60,000. It's a cultural endeavor, but it has an economic purpose for this city.'
And Mr. Boles, a lifelong collector who grew up with a cuckoo clock on the wall of his childhood bedroom, echoed the comment. 'Clocks can sound a bit stodgy to some people, but cuckoo clocks sound a lot more exciting.'