A farewell to the clockmaker who gave Maillardville its centrepiece

The clockmaker is gone but his work ticks on.

Head down Brunette Avenue and you’re struck by the site of a clock tower festooned with fleurs-de-lis. For many, that clock at once defines modern day Maillardville while providing a connection to the neighbourhood’s beginnings around a bustling, buzzing sawmill.

That clock, which includes a weathervane perched on a jewel inside the apparatus, was the work of horologist Raymond Saunders.

After a life spent crafting and curating timepieces, Saunders died last November. He was 84.

Saunders built more than 200 clocks around the world, including a clock in Katoomba, Australia that plays Waltzing Matilda and Vancouver’s Gastown Steam Clock, which he recalled as an early effort at beautifying the city.

“All around the city they’ve got these ugly cement planter boxes, mostly with dead trees in them,” Saunders recalled in an interview with Coquitlam Heritage earlier this year.

They didn’t want that in Gastown, he noted.

He eventually designed something that was: “A combination of Big Ben and a grandfather clock,” which would sit overtop a steam vent, whistling each hour and chiming every 15 minutes.

Saunders credited his high school education for giving him the tools to pursue the trade that would become his passion.

After focusing on drafting, metal work, and cabinet making at Vancouver Technical Secondary in the 1950s, Saunders spent a decade in the watch department at Woodwards.

Besides having an aptitude for the work, Saunders found a satisfaction in reassembling and oiling misfiring timepieces.

“The joy that I brought in people’s lives by restoring their family heirloom made me feel good, too,” he said in the Coquitlam Heritage interview.

“It’s also therapeutic to work on clocks,” he said. “It’s a little world you can work on . . . just dissolve yourself into that little world.”

That world was threatened in 2019 when Saunders fell from a ladder.

He cracked three ribs, dislocated and fractured his shoulder and suffered a laceration on his head that needed 15 stitches, according to an account published in the Vancouver Sun.

But wo years later, Saunders seemed to be in good cheer as he returned to Gastown to adjust his clock for Daylight Savings.

“I’m ready to retire from setting the clocks and I wouldn’t mind it,” he told a CBC reporter. “Every year I keep thinking this may be the last time I’m setting these clocks.”

At the time of his interview with Coquitlam Heritage, Saunders mentioned he was fixing a clock made in 1740.

His workshop is jammed with the tools of his profession, items he said he’d like to pass on to a young clockmaker. Finding a successor was a challenge, he noted.

“Horology is a dying trade, unfortunately.”

Saunders was in his 80s when he decided to give up fixing other people’s timepieces and instead focus on building sculpture clocks.

“I’ve got to pick and choose what I want to do now,” he said, leaning forward as though about to share a secret. “I’m running out of time.”