Before St. Matthew’s had a steeple, it called worshippers with a bell hung from a fig tree. The Timekeeper of the East How a steeple and its clock ordered the days of eastern NassauFor the first years of its life, the oldest church in the Bahamas had no steeple at all. When St. Matthew’s opened its doors on 18 July 1802, the building was complete but its tower was not — and so the parish did what parishes have always done when they need to call the faithful and have nothing grand to call them with. They hung a bell from a fig tree in the churchyard. From that humble beginning grew the most useful landmark in the eastern district: a steeple whose clock would, for the better part of a century, tell the whole east of the island when to wake, when to work, and when to pray. This is the story of how a church became a clock. A Bell on a Fig TreeThe earliest parish had a character all its own, and a Nassau Guardian columnist looking back in 1900 preserved a teasing rhyme about it: the young church had a parson with a cork leg — Father Groombridge had lost his in the Navy — a sexton with a wooden arm, and, since there was as yet no steeple, a bell that hung from a fig tree in the yard. It is an image worth holding onto: the oldest church in the country beginning its life not with bronze and stone but with a bell swinging from a branch, calling a scattered eastern congregation in from the new houses along the shore.The fig tree did not have to serve for long. The Steeple RisesIn 1807 — by the most detailed parish account — the builders John Arthur and James White raised the octagonal steeple at the western end of the church, and with it St. Matthew’s gained the landmark by which all of eastern Nassau would come to know it. The tower was a thing of use as well as beauty: the chamber at its base was first put to service as a depository for books, a quiet foreshadowing, perhaps, of the way this parish’s stones kept turning toward learning. For generations it was the only church steeple in the whole town.There is an honest puzzle in the dates, and the committee should know of it. The fullest parish sources place the steeple at 1807; several other published accounts — and a number of photographic captions — give 1816, the year most often attached to the clock. The likeliest reconciliation is the simplest: that the steeple rose first, in 1807, and the clock was added to it some years later, around 1816. But this is exactly the kind of detail that the commemorative volume ought to settle properly, against Finlayson and the vestry records, rather than repeat from memory. The Clock That Kept the TownWhenever precisely it arrived, the clock changed everything. Long before wristwatches were common and long before any other reliable public timepiece stood in Nassau, the clock of St. Matthew’s chimed every quarter hour — and its chime carried. By the parish’s own account it could be heard as far away as Montagu, clear across the eastern district to the old fort on the shore. In an age when most people had no way to know the hour but the sun, that was no small thing. The clock told the east of the island when to rise, when to eat, and when to come to church. It was, in the most literal sense, the timekeeper of the east.Consider what that meant for ordinary life. A carpenter on Shirley Street, a fisherman mending nets near Montagu, a household keeping the rhythm of meals and prayers — all of them ordered their day by the same quarter-hour chime drifting out from the church tower. The bell that had once hung from a fig tree had become the heartbeat of a whole quarter of the town. The church did not merely stand at the centre of the eastern district’s spiritual life; through its clock it quietly governed the district’s daily life as well. The Landmark That Outlasted the StormThe steeple has proved as durable as the faith that raised it. When the great hurricane of 26 September 1929 passed directly over New Providence, with winds estimated near 140 miles an hour over four terrible hours, the churches of the town suffered severely and St. Matthew’s was wounded. Yet the restoration completed by 1931 left the steeple standing as it was built. To this day, by the parish’s account, the tower remains essentially as Arthur and White raised it — and generations of parishioners returning home along East Bay Street have looked up for it and found it, the same silhouette their grandparents looked for, the same one that has marked the eastern sky for over two centuries. On the Road to 225From a bell on a fig tree, to a steeple raised by two named builders, to a clock whose chimes ordered the hours of an entire district, to a landmark that rode out the worst storm in living memory and still stands — the tower of St. Matthew’s is the part of the church that has spoken most often, and most widely, to the most people. Most of them never came inside; they only heard the quarter-hour bell and knew, by it, what time it was and Whose time it was. As the parish walks its pilgrim year toward the great day of thanksgiving on Sunday, 18 July 2027, the old clock keeps its faithful count — as it has counted out the generations, rooted in Christ, alive in the Spirit, and calling all who can hear it home.Sources and NotesThis companion article draws chiefly on the sources assembled for “The Cathedral in the East.” The points below should be confirmed against Iris E. Finlayson’s A History of St. Matthew’s Anglican Church (1988) and the […]