The specific purpose of the collection is to collect, restore and preserve ébauche Swiss made ladies silver key wound pocket or fob watches from the period of approximately 1882 to 1905 for the enjoyment of this and future generations.

Please do note though that whilst the collection is viewable via this website it is my private personal collection which is not part of any museum or gallery, and is not as such open to the public for inspection or viewing, in any way.

Why is the collection so type specific?
The answer to this is simple, firstly these watches are normally classed of a type as commercially uneconomic to repair professionally, thus they are not being preserved in the same way as a more valuable Waltham, Elgin, Hamilton or famous name Swiss watch would be. Many parts are now almost impossible to easily obtain and if the labour costs required for the job have to be considered then this often exceeds the value of the watch by a large margin. However by concentrating restoration efforts on a few specific types of internal mechanisms a much higher degree of proficiency can be achieved in repair and parts remanufacturing than if a broader base was considered.

Why silver watches only?
Whilst the internals are pretty much the same, the watch cases were generally available in gold and silver, of various purities, also brass and gunmetal. For the price of buying one gold watch the collection can expand by three or four silver ones. Generally speaking the brass and gunmetal watches are smaller sized gents, or perhaps boys, watches and do not have the same level of detail and engraving on the cases so are not so interesting to me.

Why keywound and set watches only?
The keywound types of pocketwatches represent a very important chapter in the development of the pocketwatch that is often overlooked by collectors.
Prior to around the 1880s general ownership of a pocketwatch was very much more restricted to the upper and professional classes due to cost. Timekeeping for the general population was done via large display municipal timepieces in squares, plazas, railway stations and the like.
The refinement of the cylinder escapement mechanism with few moving parts and introduction of high precision tooling made it easy to mass manufacture a relatively cheap, simple and affordable, thin, accurate watch with interchangeable parts for ordinary people, when compared with the considerably more complex verge fusee and lever watch designs which were not so suited to high volume mass manufacturing.

Historical perspective
During the period when these types of watches were manufactured two main markets existed, watches for gentlemen, which were largely plain and unadorned except for engine turning designs to the rear, and those for ladies, which were nearly always highly engraved and varied from simple plain to extremely ornate faces.

A ladies watch would have been more of a special occasion accessory item, whereas a gentleman’s would have been subjected to far more use as a daily item of apparel.
Thus a ladies watch would have been used much less frequently, more likely being wound and set, worn for a few hours, then allowed to quietly run down until it was next used.

As fashions changed there may have been longer periods when the watch was not used so often, until eventually, with the domination of wrist watches, it was left unused in a jewellery box or drawer.
Over the years it might have become separated from its key, or as is the way with silver items, so tarnished and in need of a clean that it was discounted as something that could be worn.

One of the main developments of the next generation of these watches was to do away with the separate key, thus the crown wound and pin set design was born.

Many of these watches would have originally been received as a gift, marking a birthday, special anniversary or occasion in someone’s life and would have been held with great sentimental value by the recipient. This is often reflected in engravings within the case.

However as the watch has been passed down the generations these memories have faded and been lost.
As I sit here and write this in early 2007, a little girl who received a pretty fob watch as her 12th birthday gift from her parents, that’s now in the collection, would have been 139 on her last birthday. To put that into better perspective, that little girl would be someone’s great great grandmother at least by now, long forgotten except maybe for a line or two in a family tree.

Its quite sad in a way that something that has obviously been treasured and passed down so many generations of a family has, for whatever reason, ended up on an internet auction site as part of someone’s bric-a-brac clearout.