Anna, who has had her own storied career in the media industry, including being the first female Controller for BBC Northern Ireland, features within this film in the Digital Film Archive. The film shows her helping her father, the Belfast City clock maker, check the tilt on the Albert Clock. She details the experience below.

My father loved tinkering and especially tinkering with clocks and watches, managing to qualify as a horologist in the 1950’s. He was appointed the Belfast City clock maker, responsible for the City Hall clocks, and the public clocks, the Gasworks and the Albert Memorial Clock – the Albert to all of Belfast. As children we were proud of this connection – March and September were red letter days as he disappeared out in the early evening to ensure that the time was accurate to the minute as midnight came and went and every Christmas Eve he went to the Albert to ensure the revellers did no damage before returning home to do his much more important Santa duties,

By1962 Belfast’s famous sleech had given the Albert its distinctive tilt and UTV decided to make a short film defining the extent of the list; my father took me, then aged 14, to be his helper so in we went, the weighty metal key letting us into the tower, up the steep winding stone stairs to almost the top where a decidedly rickety ladder led us up to the holy of holies, the clock mechanism room, an enormous contraption of wheels and rachets, whirrs and clicks, four sided windows with the hours dimly visible through the white glass. Another door was unlocked and we went out to the parapets.  High Street, the Lagan Bridge, Belfast Lough, the yard all looked like children’s toys. The film crew stood below, waved at us and we got on with the job of measuring and adjusting until my father was satisfied and was ready to drop the plumb line down, down and down until it reached the pavement and the producer could solemnly measure the breadth of the tilt.

Seeing that footage after so many years took my breath away – the almost innocence and carelessness of it, my father wearing his good suit, no sense of health and safety, no hard hats or high vis, or concern at bringing a 14 year old to the top of the clock; the cars that are now vintage models, the ladies in hats. And yet so much unchanged – the river and lough, the bridges, the Belfast hills, the distant City Hall.

But above all it was seeing my father living and breathing; he died suddenly a decade later when I was in my twenties and my first child was two. My children and grandchildren, and those of my brothers and sisters, have been able to look at the footage and it’s opened a window to them of what their grandfather looked like, how he walked and smiled, his work, the city we all grew up in.

When he died so suddenly none of us thought about the Albert; but the clock stopped the next morning. The local papers ran a headline “Belfast clock maker Tom Carragher died yesterday and the Albert fell silent”