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• George Daniels (Master...
English watch-maker George Daniels (1926-2011) was most famous for creating the co-axial escarpment and could make a complete watch by hand. In his lifetime, he received many awards, including the rarely-given Gold Medal of the Clockmakers' Company of London. [Listener: Roger Smith; date recorded: 2003]
TRANSCRIPT: Well, my interest in watches was first aroused by the discovery in the house of a watch. I don't know who it belonged to, but it was fair game to open it up with the bread knife, and examine its contents. I found them quite fascinating. The watch wasn't going but it had all the potential qualities of the complexity of a watch, which is very intriguing. Later on, I turned to the household alarm clock, which offered better opportunity of dismantling, being larger and more easily accessible, and having learnt all I could from that, my early exploratory horology ceased. I was then six years of age and couldn't find any watches to take to pieces and I had to abandon it all. I had nothing to do with watches then for some five years, when again my interest was quickened by the ability to make some pocket money selling firewood, which enabled me to go and buy the clocks I wanted from jumble sales, and one could obtain a very good clock for - as it was in those days - sixpence or a shilling. And so I found plenty of material to exercise my horological interest with.
Later on, by the age of about 12, I had advanced sufficiently to start actually charging people for repairing their watches. I couldn't charge many people because I didn't mend many watches. I think I wrecked more than I repaired, but at least I learnt how a watch works and made some money out of it. And the interesting thing about it was that I knew that I was the only pupil in that school of a couple of thousand pupils who knew anything about watches, who knew anything about how they worked and what they looked like inside, and so it was my private information. I didn't discuss it with anybody because nobody knew enough to discuss it and it was a very comforting thing as I was rather a bad scholar in other realms. It was a great comfort to me to know that I knew something that no one else knew.