jonthornton timepicker : How to get hours and minues

I’m using the jonthornton/jquery-timepicker and could not find the hours and minutes selected.
All I could find was a string output of the form ’10:30pm’.
Can the hours and minutes be accessed directly from the control?
I imagined you would be able to do this but could not find it.
The best I’ve been able to do is what follows, anyone got anything better?

$('#StartTime').on('change', function (timeControl) {
var hoursString;
if (timeControl.target.value.indexOf("am") >= 0) {
    hoursString = timeControl.target.value.replace("am", ":00 AM");
}
else {
    hoursString = timeControl.target.value.replace("pm", ":00 PM");
}
var oneDate = new Date(Date.parse("2000-01-01 " + hoursString));
var minutes = oneDate.getMinutes();
var hours = oneDate.getHours();

console.log("Hours : " + hours + " | Minutes : " + minutes);

});