A historic clock from 1930 that belonged to the bell chair of Goes, has surfaced in Hijken. The clock has made a special story and a lot of wanderings. Since this weekend it has been showing off in the clock chair on the Brink where now not one but two large clocks are hanging.
“I always thought: some monkey story and it is not true. But now it is one hundred percent certain for me,” says Cees Vermeeren of the Klokkenstoel Stichting Hijken. “Very special and very beautiful that we can tell this story to the village.”
The story of the clock starts in 1930. The collection to which the clock belongs then has 47 clocks, all of which are part of the municipal tower of Goes. The church bells are removed in the Second World War because of the German owner who aquer. The material can be used well for weapons. But it doesn’t come that far. While the clock is transported over the Zuiderzee, the fleet sinks and ends up on the bottom.
“One story is that a club of people who were on the board of the church wanted to make the clock safely and that a group of five clocks to Friesland was on the road. That boat was sunk. The other story is that the complete freight with clocks had already been demanded by the Germans and that they had the boat sinking to prevent them from going to Germany.”
Anyway, the clocks ended up on the bottom of the Zuiderzee, now IJsselmeer, where the fleet remained. When the Noordoostpolder was drained, the clocks emerged again, after which some people were auctioned. “The Reformed municipality of Hijken has been able to buy the clock,” says Vermeeren.
Vermeeren itself will be involved in the project in 2014 when the village found in the village after the closure of the Reformed Church. “The clock was always at funerals, in the event of death, at Kerkgang and at once that noise was no longer there.” In this way he came to Stichting Klokkenstoel in Hijken and a new bell chair in the village was realized. “Goes’s clock was too small, it did not fit and it then disappeared from the screen. We have purchased a larger clock and it has been in the chair since 2016.”