No clocksmith could repair it and, to paraphrase the song, it eventually stopped, short, never to go again, when the second brother died, aged 90.

But after a dedicated clocksmith discovered it, this beautiful Welsh heirloom could now return home - after it turned up 4,000 miles away in Mississippi.

Then, master clocksmith Mohammad Saatchi-Hamedani, 81, was asked to come over and take care of it.

Big Ben malfunctioned in August when the bongs were delayed by six seconds, a clocksmith explaining that it was down to age.

Most of these were four-wheeled carriages of some sort and, though some were quite elaborate, a few were more practical, such as the band-cranked three-wheeler--the ancestor of the wheel chair--made by the paraplegic German clocksmith Stephan Farrier for his own use.