“There were always people willing to come and work, but the challenge has always been finding the right people, those who are willing to learn, not only from me, but also in their own time and develop their skills,” says Smith. And it’s not a problem isolated to Switzerland alone. With mainstream production of watches increasingly becoming more assembly line-driven, it’s getting harder to find people with the right skills. There was Derek Pratt but he was in Switzerland.” When I started, there was just George Daniels in England. These are tiny steps but it can only be good news for the industry. Struthers, Bremont and Frodsham are all doing their good thing. In the early days, it’s always going to be small, but there are things happening. I’m hoping that one day someone will leave my atelier and start his own watchmaking company. “Yes, we are employing people and training them in our methods. Once an industry disappears from a country, it is very difficult to replace that,” says Smith. But for the best part of the decade, Roger W. While the aviation-inspired Bremont has a more mainstream focus, boutique brands like Charles Frodsham and the Birmingham-based Struthers have flown the flag for artisanal watchmakers. In the last decade or so, a clutch of British brands have risen to prominence. By then Britain was losing the skills required to stay in the game. The next big nail in the coffin was when Switzerland industrialized the wristwatch-making process in the 20th century. “You could buy a very high-quality American pocketwatch for a third of the price of a British one and that really was the start of the decline,” says Smith. British watchmakers couldn’t cope with the cheaper, more industrialized pocketwatches that were produced in the United States. The decline of British watchmaking began in the 1850s with the advent of industrialization. More recently, George Daniels invented the co-axial escapement in 1974, considered by many as the greatest horological invention of the last 250 years. To recap, the balance spring was invented by Robert Hooke around 1664, and Thomas Prest is credited with introducing keyless winding to watchmaking in 1820. Switzerland may be synonymous with high watchmaking today (although some might argue the German town of Glashütte is more deserving of this accolade), but let’s not forget that some of the most important inventions in horology are attributed to British watchmakers. That is just not possible with the kind of techniques we use in the workshop and the direct link back to The Daniels Method, which is very important to me.” “You’ll never hear of us making 50-100 watches a year. Smith was bequeathed Daniels’ workshop following the latter’s death in 2011 at the age of 85. We might increase production to about 13 pieces a year spread across the range of five models.”įrom left: Series 1 to 4 starting with a simple time-only movement to an instantaneous triple calendar “The new workshop will let us take on some extra staff and extra pieces of equipment. “As a result, production will always be low – we only make 10 pieces a year,” says Smith when we caught up with the soft-spoken watchmaker during the Horology Forum hosted by Dubai Watch Week and Christie’s in London last September. Smith set up his own studio in 2001 “with our unswerving ethos to only craft watches by hand.” It takes the studio about 12 months to complete a watch it can take weeks just to engine-turn the dial of a Series 2 wristwatch. In what is an antithesis to the assembly line production that is the norm in the mainstream industry, a watchmaker must master 32 of the 34 skills requisite in handcrafting a watch to be able to follow The Daniels Method. These timepieces produced by Smith and his team follow “The Daniels Method” – every component is made from raw materials in the Isle of Man studio without the use of repetitive or automatic tools. Smith wristwatch, which may cost them in excess of $150,000. Awarded an OBE (Order of the British Empire) this year for his services to British watchmaking, Smith is renowned for producing watches by hand in the splendid isolation of the Isle of Man using the traditional methods espoused by Daniels.Īt a time when it feels like mainstream brands are running out of ideas to reel in new buyers, clients have to wait close to three years to get their hands on a Roger W. Smith has assumed the mantle of Britain’s preeminent watchmaker for close to a decade now following the passing of his mentor. A protégé of the esteemed George Daniels, Roger W.
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