Inside the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers
James Nye has the assistant chaplain at school to thank for his career. For any boys not interested in rugby at Ardingly College in West Sussex in the 1970s, Reverend Waters offered lessons in basic clock repair. In a workshop packed with benches, Schaublin lathes and cleaning machines, Nye learned about simple English dial clocks, longcase clocks and French drum movements. He was smitten.
It also owns and maintains the world’s oldest clock and watch collection, known as the Clockmakers’ Museum. The collection includes more than 600 watches, 90 clocks, 30 marine chronometers and a number of sundials.
Nye had not long returned from a prize-giving ceremony for Birmingham City University’s BA in horology, where the number of students this year is higher than in any previous year. “We hope to support those people, through our nascent apprentice scheme or by providing the funding that’s needed for people to get through college,” he says.
“We suddenly had a precision instrument, this kind of kit,” says Nye, standing next to an oak-enclosed longcase clock commissioned by Thomas, 1st Earl Coningsby, for a visit from King William III, and later owned by Sir Richard Arkwright, a celebrated entrepreneur in the industrial revolution. “There’s a pendulum inside here that’s a meter long and takes one second to swing from side to side, because the centre of gravity to the suspension is very close to a meter.
Triumph and disaster followed in the 19th century. The ability to navigate accurately contributed significantly to Britain’s ascendancy at sea, allowing the country to explore and to colonise. The refinement of marine chronometry was greatly encouraged by the Clockmakers’ Company, who regarded those employed in their manufacture as “the elite of the workmen, selected out of the great mass”.
The knock-on effect of the shutdown of specialist part-makers has meant that those entering horology have had to master multiple skills. This has led to some pioneering independent British watch and clockmakers, including Martin Burgess, Derek Pratt and Anthony Randall. Daniels, who has been called “the greatest watchmaker of the 20th century”, died in 2011. But his fierce dedication and meticulous practises live on in the hands of his only apprentice, the aforementioned Roger W Smith. A tourbillon watch called The Blue, designed by Dr Daniels and assembled by Mr Smith between 2001 and 2005, recently sold for £1 million.Courtesy of the Clockmakers Museum
Sat across a wooden table from her is Camilla Szymanowska, clerk to the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. Szymanowska comes from the world of rare books, a job she got into “because I decided I didn’t want to be a corporate lawyer”. Plus, it’s not as if they haven’t had to roll with the times themselves. “We used to have the right to go on boats in the Thames, and if there were foreign-made things, you could smash them up,” Szymanowska says. “People fiercely protected their trades.”
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