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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: When I reached the age of five, I was due to go to school, which I did at the local school, of which I have very fond memories. And there I met Miss Crawford, who was the headmistress and we got on very well together and it was discovered that I had a talent for drawing and painting. And this gave me a very easy passage through my primary school, because pictures are wanted desperately in primary schools. I think most of their work is done with pictures and I could paint these pictures. And I had been an assiduous reader. My sister was two years older than me and she had learnt to read, and so I learnt to read from her, simply by looking at the picture and she would say what it represented and I just had to remember what it was. And so I had that advantage also that I could not only draw and paint, but I could read. So I was a star pupil and got on very well at school.
Unfortunately, we moved from that location and so, of course, I had to go to another school where even so there again I shone with drawings and paintings and so forth, and it was a tremendous asset to me because I wasn't any good at anything else. I mean geography and history and mathematics meant nothing to me. I couldn't understand and didn't want to know about them. But I could write, I could write an essay, with atrocious spelling, but however, the essays and the writing... sorry, the essays and the drawings and the paintings got me through my early schooldays.
And after that, I changed schools several times. They were all very undistinguished schools and I didn't do anything to make them distinguished. Again, I could draw and paint, which was beneficial, and I had to do quite advanced stuff, and I learnt the art of perspective drawing and that was very useful and it earned much praise so that I wasn't too often chastised about the things I couldn't do.