![]() Phillips sold a Daniels Spring Case Tourbillon for SFr4,083,500 in November, a world auction record for a wristwatch by a British maker. ![]() Jonathan Darracott, global head of watches at Bonhams, which last December sold a yellow gold Smith Series 2 (2011) for £516,900, more than double the low estimate, says recent keen prices have been led by increasing valuations for Daniels’ watches. The next test of the market comes on Sunday in Geneva, where Phillips is offering an 18-carat pink gold Series 1 (2021) with pink gold chapter ring, the only Smith piece with this case/dial combination. However, he keeps an eye on the secondary market, where he says prices for his pieces “have been going up quite significantly of late”. He says the $1mn-plus estimate for his second pocket watch is “very flattering” but that he has always been driven by watchmaking and “never thought about the potential material gains from it”. Roger Smith launched his eponymous brand in 2001 © ©Stephen Daniels He disassembled his first to use some of its components in his second. It is one of only three pocket watches he has made. Smith sold Pocket Watch Number Two to a collector in 2004 to fund his then fledgling business. Today, with the exception of a few components, Smith and his team in the Isle of Man make everything in-house and produce 18 watches a year. Smith launched his own brand, Roger W Smith, in 2001, carrying on the Daniels method of one person designing and crafting a mechanical watch. “I don’t think there’s ever been a singular timepiece that has changed the life and career of a watchmaker as this has,” he points out.īoutros says it is the “cornerstone by which 21st-century English watchmaking is possible today” because, without it, there would have been a “gap” in continuity for high-end, handcrafted British independent timepieces following Daniels’ death in 2011.Īfter approving Pocket Watch Number Two, Daniels enlisted Smith’s help in 1998 to finish the Millennium Series of wristwatches he made to celebrate Omega’s adoption of his coaxial escapement. The London-based business previously sold the watch, delivered in 2007, for just over £250,000 in 2018.īut Smith’s Pocket Watch Number Two, which has a 66.5mm-diameter gold case, is “one of the most important timepieces to come up for auction in recent years,” reckons Paul Boutros, head of watches for the Americas at Phillips. Silas Walton, the platform’s founder and chief executive, and one of Smith’s clients, believes it to be the “most expensive wristwatch ever sold” bearing Smith’s name. The online platform, A Collected Man, the only approved retailer for pre-owned Smith watches, is due to announce on Friday that it facilitated the $1.2mn sale between two clients of the only stainless steel piece Smith has made, a Series 2, in January. The sale comes at a time when the British watchmaker’s work is achieving eye-catching prices on the secondary market. The current record of $840,700, for a Series 2 open dial wristwatch (2017), was set at Phillips in New York last June. Now, the estimate for this pocket watch when it comes up for sale at Phillips in New York on June 10 is in excess of $1mn - a sum that would set a new auction record for a Roger Smith piece. “Eventually, he said: ‘Congratulations, you’re a watchmaker,’” says Smith. “I remember him saying, ‘Why did you bring that first watch? It was awful’ . . . on the way down to the workshop.”ĭaniels, regarded by many as the 20th century’s greatest watchmaker, examined the piece and questioned Smith about how he made its components. “He was very frosty and complained,” says Smith. Undeterred, he spent the next five and a half years perfecting a second pocket watch, featuring a perpetual calendar and tourbillon with spring-detent escapement, and took it to Daniels in the Isle of Man, a British crown dependency, in 1997. “He said it looked too handmade,” says Smith. When a 22-year-old Roger Smith showed George Daniels the first pocket watch he had made, the master horologist sent him away to start again. ![]() Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
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