It is a commonplace that provided you ask the right questions, even the most mundane of inanimate objects can tell a story; but a 200-year-old gold watch really can tell us so much more than just the time: it can illuminate whole areas of eighteenth-century economic and social history, not to mention those perennial elements of human nature – boundless ingenuity, technical skill, desire, greed and deceit.
We begin simply enough: a stylish and elegant eighteenth-century gold watch engraved thus,
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John Berru
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London
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746
and draw from this the understandable conclusion that the watch was no. 746 made by John Berru in London. We would, however, be completely mistaken in every particular – because these bare ‘facts’ conceal a great deal more than they reveal.
To begin with, and counter-intuitive though it may be to the modern mind, eighteenth-century watch ‘makers’ were nothing of the sort: Thomas Windmills, Daniel Quare, George Graham, John Ellicott and Thomas Mudge are all great names from the period, celebrated today for their skill and innovation, but they were not ‘makers’ of watches; the actual labour of making a complete watch was subdivided into its constituent tasks to an extraordinary degree – springmakers, engine turners, wheel cutters, chainmakers, casemakers, dial makers, springers and engravers and others all worked away at their narrowly defined allotted tasks in a lengthy industrial production chain that would have made Adam Smith proud. And so immediately, the mental image one may have of the aged master watchmaker hunched over a workbench for hours at a time, devoting a lifetime of hard-won skills and knowledge to painstakingly making and assembling his latest piece falls away to be replaced by something rather more prosaic. A truer picture of our watchmaker would be of a man largely removed from such intricate and laborious work, but rather experimenting with innovations, planning the watch, ordering the separate parts from a variety of sources, supervising and directing its assembly, and perhaps making small technical adjustments before finally bringing the watch to a finish acceptable to the paying customer. Indeed, the master watchmaker may never have actually handled his product, but he certainly did channel and bring together the exhaustive labour of many others, and it was his name – carved on the watch itself – that acted as a guarantee of quality. So the watch in this picture actually represents the efforts of an unknown, but almost certainly extensive, number of craftsmen and out-workers; we have their work but their names will never be known to us and such profound anonymity is in some ways a sobering thought.
Another deception: there was, in fact, no watchmaker named John Berru working in eighteenth-century London, and as far as we know there never has been; the name was a fiction, although the engraver may have been attempting the name ‘John Berry’ (misspelled names on watch plates are apparently common). There were certainly two individuals of this particular name (a father and son) working in St Clement’s Lane near Lombard Street in London in the early to mid-eighteenth century, and although posterity has not ranked them among the supreme masters of the trade they may have acquired a sufficient contemporary reputation for reliable and quality work to render themselves vulnerable to imitation. However, all this is – and only ever can be – mere speculation.
And nor was the watch made in London; experts agree that it was almost certainly made in Switzerland, a classic example of horological piracy, quite possibly from the mid-eighteenth century, the period when Swiss imitative watches were just starting to undermine British dominance of the trade (we know that in 1764 the Clockmakers’ Company of London was being pressed to do something about the increasing number of Swiss-made ‘London’ watches appearing on the market). To fully explain this large-scale traffic in counterfeit goods we need to consider the context of eighteenth-century European watchmaking. British – and specifically London – horological skill and achievement reached a peak in the eighteenth century. In an era when simply being able to tell the time was a mark of wealth and status (how alien that seems to us now!), superb London-made watches commanded high prices all over the civilized world, a fact that was not lost on Swiss craftsmen who understandably looked on with envy and saw an opportunity. A thriving shadow industry sprang up in the Jura in Switzerland, specialising in the production of high-grade imitation London watches. Our modern sensibilities, shaped by trading standards, reliable guarantees and perhaps a sense of lofty honesty, might well be offended by this, but perhaps we should not be too outraged: imitation is, after all, the sincerest form of flattery, and there is the simple fact to recognise that a piece such as this watch is of itself an item of great beauty. And of course over time the imitators became the masters – in the nineteenth century Swiss watchmakers supplanted the British as the finest exponents of the art of watchmaking.
So although eighteenth-century watchmaking was plagued by forgeries and imitations, of which this watch is one, it cannot be denied that a certain level of skill is needed to produce a convincing fake. We should not underestimate the collective technical and artistic achievement of the men who – represented by the misspelled name John Berru – made this watch.