Roger Smith “Masterpiece” Pocket Watch No. 2 Up for Auction at Phillips

In every professional life, if you are very lucky, very smart, work very hard, really believe in what you are doing and have talent (which is ultimately far less important than believing in yourself and working hard), there will be a few moments when you produce something that no one else could ever have produced (or at least, there are vanishingly small odds that anyone else could have produced it) and which mark a kind of inflection point.

In watchmaking, as in any other craft, you need someone who has gone before you and who is not interested in flattering you, nor even in flattering your worldview. For the English watchmaker  Roger Smith that person was George Daniels, a man who needs no introduction to even a casual watch enthusiast. The two men met while Smith was a student at the Manchester School Of Horology, where Daniels was a visiting lecturer, and, after Smith graduated (at the top of his class, for which he won a bronze medal from the British Horological Institute) he decided he would make a pocket watch, following the so-called “Daniels System” as outlined in Watchmaking.

The Daniels System is simple: one watchmaker makes every single part of the watch, from the case to the movement mainplate and bridges; mainspring; gears and pinions; escapement component; balance … the works. The chapter headings do not exactly promise that the book will be a page-turner, and they are almost brusquely laconic (“Hand Tools,” “Turning” and, if you’re feeling really frisky, “Making Small Components”) but it is nothing more or less than a complete all-in-one manual for making a watch, from soup to nuts, by hand.

One may be tempted to say that this is doing things the old fashioned way but the reality is that for most of the history of watchmaking, no matter where and when it was done, watchmaking has been a highly specialist craft (fun fact: the single longest sentence in Karl Marx’s Capital is a list of all the subcategories of watch component makers in Neuchâtel) in which one person making the entire watch was almost unheard of, except in the earliest days of the profession. This was and is so much the case that the London Tradesman of 1747 pointed out that, ” … The Watch-Maker puts his Name upon the Plate, and is esteemed the Maker, though has not made in his Shop the smallest Wheel belonging to it.”

This is all by way of saying that in order to make an entire watch, by hand, according to the Daniels System, you must be a person possessed of both great patience and a certain dogged determination – if you are the kind of soul who gives up a crossword puzzle at the first slightly taxing clue, the Daniels System may not be your brand of vodka. The first watch that Smith made – a pocket watch – was shown by Smith to Daniels in 1990 when Smith was 22 and Daniels responded by saying that the watch looked too obviously handmade. Undaunted, Smith returned to the bench and took five years to make his second watch. On his return, Daniels began quizzing Smith about the various components, asking who had made each of them and the answer was always, “I did.” When Daniels finished his inspection, he was satisfied and said to Smith, “Congratulations, you are now a watchmaker,” and Smith became Daniels’ apprentice, then coworker, and then one of the most well known and most respected independent watchmakers in the world (and he picked up an OBE along the way).

That second pocket watch – Roger Smith No. 2 – was and is a very complicated pocket watch, with a tourbillon with spring detent (chronometer) escapement, four year perpetual calendar and moonphase; with an extremely elaborate engine turned dial and of course, every single component was made by Smith, by hand. When Smith decided to produce his Series 2 watches under his own name, he required start-up capital and so, No. 2 was sold into a private collection. The watch is now going to go under the hammer at Phillips New York Watch Auction EIGHT, which will take place on June 10 and 11, and the watch will be available to preview June 3 – 9.

To say that this is an important piece of watchmaking history is to say nothing at all. The watch is of course unique and it also represents a moment when Daniels began to pass the torch of his philosophy in watchmaking on to the next generation. Smith has continued to refine his watches and his watchmaking, including the construction of the co-axial escapement, continuously in the years since he set up his own workshop and they stand in a class by themselves.

At only about ten or so watches produced per year, any Roger Smith watch is extremely desirable (and correspondingly expensive, a Series 2 hammered at Bonhams last year for about $627,000, which was $400,000 over the high estimate) and, of course, No. 2 is also a watch made in a very different design idiom than Swiss-French watchmaking, which relies on multiple bridge movement architecture, and the use of rhodium or nickel plating as well as a number of other finishing techniques designed to dazzle the eye. Daniels, on the other hand, felt that that sort of flash bordered on undignified – he once wrote that, in his view, when watchmakers have no real technical problems to solve, ” … they distract themselves by creating a jewel-like finish” and he favored the sober dignity, as he saw it, of classic gold gilt plates, blued screws, and black polished steel (all of which have extremely pragmatic reasons for existing, mostly having to do with retarding corrosion).

Sober dignity is something that Roger Smith No. 2 has, and to spare. This is not to say that the watch doesn’t also have a little of the ol’ razzle-dazzle – the dial and hands are nothing short of spectacular, and the intricate floral engraving on the mainspring barrel cover is to my eye a direct reference to the very similar engraving found on the mainspring barrel of John Harrison’s H4 marine chronometer. But overall, the watch has an air of austere refinement which stands in refreshing contrast to the “jewel-like finish” found in the Swiss-French tradition – a kind of statement about the inherent dignity of craft, and the inherent dignity of the skilled craftsman. I suspect this watch will go for something in the low seven figures – of course that is just a guess but this is one of those instances when I think spending millions on a watch is worth it.