“A Lifetime of Clock-watching”

This article appeared in the Cape Town newspaper The Southern Argus on January 23, 1992. It read as follows:

“Charles Morrison has loved and lived with watches and clocks all his life. The 81 year old Irishman came to this country [South Africa] in 1936 in the expectation of pastures greener. His decision to do so was motivated partly by the glamorous descriptions given to him by one Kennedy M’Arthur who came to South Africa as a policeman and won a gold medal at the 1912 Stockholm Olympics running for South Africa.

“M’Arthur was a terrible liar, as it turned out,” chuckles Mr Morrison. After painting an idyllic picture of a lifestyle that included sipping tea on a shady veranda, surrounded by hibiscus and with the sea lapping only a stone’s throw away, it transpired that M’Arthur had actually been living in Langlaate on the Witwatersrand.

But Mr Morrison doesn’t regret migrating and has made a success of a labour of love. As a school boy on a farm near the small Northern Irish town of Ballymoney, Charles Morrison (one of 13 children) was already tinkering with watches and clocks. “I used to fix grandfather clocks for farmers, who seemed to show endless faith in me. And I worked by candlelight.”

His first job in the trade in Cape Town was with Blumberg & Kleinman in Longmarket Street, who offered to pay him £18 a month. “I was delighted as I had been earning £6 in Ireland. After the war Mr Morrison started a small business in Church Street, Wynberg. For 19 years he worked there from eight in the morning until six in the evening, then took work home and after dinner worked until late into the night and at the weekends he repaired and restored timepieces. His elder son [Vere] joined him in the 50s and the company C A Morrison Pty (Ltd) was established in 1966. Although his daily quota of repairing watches isn’t quite what it was in his younger days, Mr Morrison still works a full day.”

Charlie Morrison passed away in early 1998. He would be proud to know that the business he started in 1946 is still thriving some 76 years later.