Queen Elizabeth ll looks at a gift of a replica of the St. Pancras Station clock as she officially opens St. Pancras International Station, the new home to Eurostar, on November 7, 2007 in London, England.
Preparing for daylight savings is a whole affair at the royal residences.
Anwar Hussein Collection/ROTA/WireImage
  • There is a team of people hired by the royal family to turn back the clocks for daylight savings.
  • They're called horological conservators and are responsible for over 1,000 timepieces.
  • Twice a year, they spend 40 hours in the Queen's residences tweaking the time.

Queen Elizabeth II needs a whole team of clock experts to spend a weekend manually changing each timepiece across her royal residences so they are ready for the one-hour time change under daylight-saving time.

The jobs of royal clock masters, known professionally as horological conservators, were spotlighted in a video posted by the official royal family Twitter account on Saturday, before daylight-saving time in the UK kicked in on Sunday morning.

Captioning the tweet, the account revealed how there are over 1,000 clocks across royal residences, and each is looked after by a specialist who comes in twice a year to tweak them before the time change. Lead horologist at Windsor Castle, Fjodor van den Broek, who says he's also known as "clockmaker of the castle," is featured in the video – he drops by the castle once a week to check on the clocks.

A post shared by Fjodor van den Broek (@vdbroek_clocks)

"I get to know every clock very well," van den Broek said in the video. "We have 400 clocks on the estate, of which 250 are inside the castle and the rest are distributed around the estate."

Clocks in the residences need service every few years on top of the biannual clock change, he added.

"When we set the clocks backwards in winter it's a bit of a different process for every clock," he said. "In summer it's much easier because every clock just goes forward one hour and for each time it takes me about a weekend to set all the clocks to the right time."

Clock maker at Windsor Castle, Steven Davidson puts a clock back by one hour in the Crimson Room to mark the end of British Summer Time.
A clock master tweaks a timepiece at Windsor Castle.
Michael Stephens - PA Images/PA Images via Getty Images

Clocks in the Queen's residences are part of the Royal Collection Trust (RCT). Per the RCT website, staff spend 40 hours tweaking them individually before daylight-saving time kicks in. Buckingham Palace has the most at 600, while Windsor Castle has 450, and the Palace at Holyroodhouse has 50.

Buckingham Palace and Fjodor van den Broek did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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