General   (General discussion, talk about anything.)

Good Evans! Could this fine fellow be any relation, Dostaf?!

"The apostle of synchronisation, 1897

George Henry Evans was a scientific surgeon, who had settled in the growing town of Leigh in 1858. He lived in King Street next to the old Town Hall. During the war against Russia Evans was a naval doctor on board the Cornwallis, which was helping to blockade the Baltic and which was commanded by Capt. Wellesley, a nephew of the great Duke. But the surgeon's main interests lay in scientific experiments and he was fascinated by the adaptative possibilities of that new source of service, electricity. In 1868 he changed his residence to Avenue House, where he installed all sorts of electric gadgets, which together made his household fireproof and burglar proof. He created a local sensation when he spoke for the first time from Bedford Basin to Gibfield Colliery in Atherton by telephone. But it is in connection with the Leigh Time Signal, which he began in 1870, that he is chiefly to be remembered. He saw the waste of time occasioned by lack of means of determining the correct standard time and how its importance had grown with railway travel and industry. In 1870 he initiated the practice of sending up a rocket, five seconds before 10 p.m. each night. The rocket signal exploded exactly at ten and local clocks, timekeepers and watches in Leigh were set right in homage to the public spirit of a good neighbour. In later life, one man had told Evans that he could see the flash at Frodsham, more than twenty miles distant. Foggy nights upset the regularity of this night rocket signal. The telephone overcame this, so the night watchman of the Albion Foundry was called and he then blew the works whistle. From the sand hourglass and earliest clocks in Leigh, from the tower dial clock of the parish church to Evans's signal and night whistle was a giant stride in the onward sweep of progress. If this great citizen of Leigh could only have seen national synchronisation by wireless and television, it would have held him hypnotized. But he died 11 December 1897."