If you collect starburst clocks in South Africa, you'll know the frustration: everyone talks about the George Nelson Ball Clock like it's the starting point of the whole genre, and yet none of us have ever actually held one. We certainly haven't. In years of hunting through South African homes, deceased estates, and dealer floors, an original Howard Miller-made Nelson clock has simply never crossed our path. Not once.
There's a real reason for that, and it starts with a bit of a myth to clear up first: the clocks everyone calls "George Nelson clocks" weren't really designed by George Nelson at all.
The Ball Clock — that instantly recognisable starburst of wooden balls on wire spokes — launched in 1949 as Model 4755, the first of what would eventually become more than 150 clock designs sold through the Howard Miller Clock Company. But the actual design work was done by Irving Harper, a designer at George Nelson's studio for nearly two decades. Nelson's own approach to credit was, by his own design, to put the *firm's* name in front of the public and reserve individual credit for the design trade. So the clocks went out into the world as "Nelson," even though Harper (and later designers like Don Chadwick and John Pile) did the actual work.
None of this history involves South Africa in any way, and that's exactly the point. These were American-made, American-marketed pieces, sold through Howard Miller's own distribution into American homes from 1949 into the 1980s. They simply weren't part of the import pipeline that brought mid-century design into South Africa during that era — which leaned heavily British and European imports.
Which brings us to our own favourite: the Seth Thomas Star Flower. Seth Thomas is a genuinely old American clockmaker, dating back to 1813 — but by the mid-20th century it was no longer a purely American operation. Our own Star Flowers are marked "Seth Thomas, Scotland" right on the dial, and that's not a fluke: Seth Thomas (by then part of General Time Corporation, alongside Westclox) operated a Scottish factory producing clocks, battery movements included, for the British and European market. That's almost certainly how pieces like the Star Flower found their way into South Africa when the original Howard Miller Ball Clock never did — not via some special American export route, but through the same British-led import channels that brought most mid-century design into the country during that era.
It also explains something else any local collector will have noticed: Westclox turns up constantly in South African homes, far more often than Seth Thomas does. That's no coincidence either — Westclox and Seth Thomas were sister brands, both owned by General Time, and Westclox ran a genuinely enormous operation out of Dumbarton, Scotland, from 1948 until 1988. At its mid-1960s peak the plant employed over a thousand people and, along with Seth Thomas, exported more than a third of everything it made to some 110 countries worldwide. Two General Time brands, manufactured a few miles apart in the same corner of Scotland, funnelled into the same global export network — which is exactly why both show up here, decades later, while the true American Nelson originals never do.
Seth Thomas's own starburst and sunburst models from the 1960s and 70s are frequently described, by dealers and collectors alike, as designed "after G. Nelson" — so the format wasn't Seth Thomas's invention (that claim shows up in some listings, but the more widely accepted history credits Nelson's studio with defining the genre in the early 1950s). What the Scottish-made Seth Thomas clocks did do was arrive here, in real numbers, working within a design tradition Harper and Nelson's studio had established years earlier.
So if you're hunting Nelson clocks in South Africa: stop looking, or at least lower your expectations. If you're hunting Seth Thomas or Westclox instead, you're chasing something genuinely findable — a real design lineage, just one step removed from the source (via Scotland, of all places), and considerably easier to actually bring home.