Watches & Watch accessories

A seemingly never-ending bidding match ensued at Cortrie in Hamburg on May 9 for a tourbillon-watch by the German watchmaker Richard Miklosch (1939-2014) .

The watch-makers in the Vallée de Joux in Switzerland were a textbook 19th century cottage industry – typically self-employed men, and some women, working either in the ateliers based in the hamlet of Crêt-Meylan or at home. Seldom did they receive credit for their great skill.

Two years after a Wiltshire auction house set a record for Titanic memorabilia with ‘the watch recovered from the body of John Jacob Astor’ at £900,000, another timekeeper making precisely the same claim has sold in Chicago for $800,000 (£592,000).

As vintage wristwatches continue to dominate the watch market, finding interesting examples at reasonable prices has become a challenge. However, opportunities are out there

The London watch and clock maker Brounker Watts (c.1670-1717), an apprentice to Joseph Knibb, became a member of the Clockmakers Company in 1697.

Two years after a Wiltshire auction house set a record for Titanic memorabilia with “the watch recovered from the body of John Jacob Astor”, another timekeeper making precisely the same claim is coming to market.

The latest Special Antiques Sale at TW Gaze (22% buyer’s premium) in Diss included this rare Ralph Gout of London gilt brass horse-rider’s pedometer watch.

If the period from the 19th to early 20th century was the ‘golden age’ for carriage clocks, it was equally a superb age for pocket watches

While London throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries produced much fine watchmaking, Paris could also lay claim to some of the limelight.

Very little is known about the late-18th century London maker John Grantham other than that he made many watches for the Chinese market, one of which came up for sale at Cortrie (21% buyer’s premium) in Hamburg.

Pocket watches owned by Horatio Nelson, Thomas Hardy and Cuthbert Collingwood and consulted throughout the Battle of Trafalgar were sold together as a single lot in London on December 9.

The Ivoire group of auction firms has salerooms across the French regions that regularly hold auctions covering a range of specialist categories as well as more general sales.

The 165.024 reference Omega Seamaster 300 was one of the most robust and practical dive watches of the Sixties.

Philippe Auguste Courvoisier (1803-73), a member of the famed Courvoisier family of Swiss watchmakers, specialised in the production of watches with portraits of 19th century royalty, such as Queen Victoria, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte or, in the case of watches sold in London and Stuttgart, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid I.

Jean Rousseau (1606-84) came from a renowned watchmaking family that settled in Geneva, the cradle for prosecuted French Protestants in the 1630s.

Early November is always a busy time for pocket watch collectors. In the space of a few days, specialist sales are traditionally held in Switzerland and Germany which offer a broad selection of historical watches for all tastes and most budgets.

The Rolex reference 6150, often dubbed the ‘Pre-Explorer’, was introduced in 1953 and famously tested by various Everest mountaineering expeditions over the coming years, including the first official summit by Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay of Mount Everest on May 29, 1953.