Clocks, Watches & Jewellery

Golden Age collaboration between two London clockmakers leads a look at the market including hammer highlights, auction previews and dealer news.

Eardley Norton, who is listed at 49 St John’s Street, Clerkenwell between 1762- 94, enjoyed a reputation as a skilled mechanic and the maker of complex timepieces, sometimes with musical and astronomical movements.

The series of Victorian carriage clocks by James McCabe – the son of a Belfast clockmaker of the same name who came to London in the 1770s and worked at the Royal Exchange from 1804 – are typically beautifully made with exemplary twin fusee striking movements.

Kensington Church Street clock dealer Howard Walwyn will offer this previously unknown Thomas Tompion walnut and mulberry longcase at the Masterpiece fair in London.

By the 1980s, Thomas Mercer of St Albans had made almost a third of all chronometers in history – including that used by Ernest Shackleton to navigate his men to Elephant Island and eventual rescue during the Trans-Arctic Expedition of 1914.

Remarkably, of the approximately 110 clockmakers recorded working in Lewes from the mid-17th to the early 19th centuries, as many as 10 were operating almost side-by-side at this town on the River Ouse in the late 18th century.

A rare regulator bracket clock signed by Thomas Cole was among a fine selection of English 18th and 19th century horology offered by Hutchinson-Scott (20% buyer’s premium) in Skipton, North Yorkshire, on May 23.

A mahogany longcase clock by Thomas Mudge (1715-94) is priced at £45,000 from Cheltenham dealer Tobias Birch.

The complex precision electromechanical pendulum clocks made by William Hamilton-Shortt, engineer for the London & South Western Railway, and Frank Hope Jones, horologist of the Synchronome Company, were the most accurate pendulum clocks ever commercially produced.

As the vast majority of Georgian clockmakers signed their work, most regional brass-dial longcase clocks have a great sense of place.

Undoubtedly the most evocative account of the workshop of the celebrated clockmaker Joseph Knibb comes from a letter written by the Restoration-era politician Richard Legh (1635-87) of Lyme Hall in Cheshire to his young wife, Elizabeth.

These two mahogany library mantel timepieces – for sale at Dreweatts of Donnington Priory in the autumn – were supplied to HM Government by Benjamin Lewis Vulliamy in the early days of Victoria’s reign.

This c.1790 Georgian mahogany bracket clock by John Scott is among the stock of Olde Time Fine Antique Clocks & Barometers, which holds its second open weekend this summer.

During an expedition to the wreck of the Titanic in 1996, a marine chronometer made by JW Ray, Liverpool, was recovered and brought ashore.

We regret to announce the death of jewellery collector and historian Anne Shannon who died peacefully with her family on May 11.

On July 2 Sotheby’s will hold the first of a four-part series of sales to disperse an important collection of clocks and pocket watches.

Estimated at a token £100-200, a large twin fusee wall clock sold to an online bid of £2400 (plus premium) at Wessex Auction Rooms (17% buyer’s premium) in Chippenham.

Bonhams will offer the most valuable English Golden Age clock ever to appear at auction as part of next month’s sale of the Clive collection.

In the Late Middle Ages the chaplet, made in many materials from boxwood to precious metals, was a commonplace aid to keep count of the repetition of prayers or the chapters read in a Book of Hours.

The Watch Sale at Fellows in Birmingham on June 18 includes arare Rolex Oyster Cosmograph Daytona chronograph with ‘reverse panda’ white on black dial.