The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

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problem son
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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by problem son »

Even though as watch collectors and amateurs we know probably all understand something of how a mechanical watch works and what complications are possible. Nevertheless, I feel sure that most of us still have a sense of the magic that is a mechanical watch. For those of us who get great pleasure from mechanical timepieces, the onward march of technology and the popular takeover of the highly accurate and barely mechanical quartz watch has not dimmed our response to a finely made mechanical wristwatch, old or new.





The incredible hand-made Space Traveller's Pocket Watch by George Daniels, front and back - a modern timepiece redolent of the fictional watch featured in "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" (pics from hodinkee.imgix.net):
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It is with this sense of the mystery of mechanics and clockwork that I introduce my lengthy quote from, "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street," by Natasha Pulley, a strange and haunting tale that features the magical nature of mechanical watchmaking as one of its themes. This book, published in 2015 by Bloomsbury Circus, takes us into the world of the later 19th century in both this country and Japan, and I suppose that if I had to typecast the work's genre then it would be, "magic realism."

Natasha Pulley has certainly researched the Japanese aspects of the book, and I therefore feel pretty certain that the watchmaking elements are also taken from a factual baseline. The period covered in the novel is also that during which the Swiss were undergoing what has been called "The first Swiss watch crisis," when fierce competition was now coming from the rapidly industrialising American watch industry. American firms were introducing automation and machine tools on a far greater scale than previously by the mid 1870s and wherever watchmaking was still fundamentally a cottage industry, the cheap prices of mass produced watches had a devastating effect. In "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street," the watchmaking described was already on the way out, in Switzerland of course but aso in Britain. In the novel, the making of watches as seen is largely an individual process - one watchmaker, his own ideas, and bought in rough parts finished and assembled by the watchmaker to his own pattern. One interesting mention is the use of workhouse children to make fusee chains and I can see that this may well have occurred.




Idealized picture of a Victorian watchmaker's shop by Anton Pieck (1895-1987) perhaps somewhat reminiscent of Mori's or Spindle's workshop in "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" (pic from pintgerest.com):
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Before I read from the book, so to speak, let me just set the scene, which in the book takes place in the London of 1884:

Thaniel Steepleton, a Whitehall telegrapher, has been mysteriously left a gold watch in his apartment, and has tracked down its maker - a Japanese clockwork maker called Mori. At the same time, Clan na Gael have started setting off bombs in the capital, and the remains of one of these devices, which had exploded at Scotland Yard, has been sent over to Spindle, a rival watchmaker to Mori, for official examination. Thaniel has become friendly with Mori, but, at the same time, there is a suspicion that Mori might have been responsible for the clockwork timer inside the Irish nationalist bombs. In the passage I quote, Thaniel has brought his mysterious watch to Spindle both to find out more about it, and at the same time, make comparison has with the remains of the bomb that Spindle is officially examining for the police. Superintendent Williamson was responsible for both hiring Spindle to look at the bomb and asking Thaniel Steepleton to let Spindle look at his watch.

Before quoting from the book, I must just apologise for the slightly odd paragraphing and formatting. The copy I have been using is the Charnwood large print edition and although it is complete and unabridged, I do wonder if the formatting of the text has been altered somewhat. Whatever the case, it is quite difficult to sort out where actual paragraphs begin and end, partly because of how Natasha Pullen has organised direct speech in the text. Anyway, please bear with me, and enjoy this particular passage from, "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street."

I quote:




Spindle's watchmaking shop was in fact not far from Mori's, nor from three or four other watchmakers in neighbouring streets. When Thaniel opened the door, which clanged a loud bell, Spindle himself was dissecting a tangle of clockwork with two pairs of tweezers. Flat on the desk lay a green velvet cloth marked into numbered squares, and in each square lay a tiny clockwork part. Spindle looked up from his work. Behind the several lenses of his glasses, his left eye, pale green, was more magnified than his right. He took them off and pulled a cloth over whatever the subject of the dissection was, hiding all but the outline of it.

"You took me by surprise," Spindle said, smiling. "I was rather absorbed in the Government work, you know. These are the remains of the Scotland Yard bomb. Is something the matter?"
Thaniel had stopped five feet shy of the desk. Williamson had told him the man was consulting, so he should have known the bomb would be here, but he hadn't expected to see it. "No," he said, and came the rest of the way. "Superintendent Williamson sent me, actually."
"My report isn't ready yet - "
"No, he wanted you to look at this."

Spindle glowed until Thaniel took out the watch, when his face changed. He took it with his delicate fingers and clicked it open. "This was made by Keita Mori."
Thaniel nodded. "What can you tell me about it?"
In what sense?"
"Anything."
"Well, the mechanisms it uses to tell the time are in perfect working order. As usual," he added bitterly. He prised apart something in the case and lifted out the glass face to expose the cogs below, and was silent. After a moment, he put his spectacles back on and clicked two extra lenses into place. He examined the watch for long enough for Thaniel to lose interest in him and glance around the workshop instead. The display cabinets contained only watches; there was no evidence of anything like Mori's flights of whimsy. behind the desk was a bank of square drawers, each labelled in even handwriting. It was seventeen drawers wide and seventeen down. He studied them for any sign that some were used more than others, but all of them had worn patches on their handles. Nothing like the chaos of loose parts over Mori's desk.

Spindle made an interested noise. Thaniel willed him to hurry along. Despite its wide front window, the shop was dark, and the light that did come in only glittered on the dust motes. The dead bomb under its shroud kept catching his eye.
"This clockwork behind the main mechanism was made to work for only fourteen and a half hours," Spindle said at last. "Powered by self-winding springs." He slid it under the microscope beside him. "God knows what it was supposed to do. Typical Mori. Has he paid you to come and annoy me with this?"
Thaniel blinked. "No."
"No, no, forget I said that, pardon me. Do you know, I used to make clockwork for the royal family? Not since Mori arrived in London." He smiled what he probably hoped was a self-deprecating and sportsmanlike smile, but it was more of a grimace.

"So you can't tell me what the extra clockwork is for?"
Spindle adjusted the microscope so that the lens almost touched the workings of the watch. "I cannot tell you what it was for, but I can tell you what it did," he said. "It has a microscopic compass and spitrit gauge, to which everything else is connected. This watch would know if you twitched. The weighting is such that one cog here turns by..." He picked it up and swung it experimentally by the chain. "... yes, turns by one tooth with every step you take. It compares that to a pre-set distance, represented by a fine-toothed and slow-turning cog in the centre here, and to that is connected an alarm bell, which was set to go off across a range of three or four seconds, or not at all, depending on where you were at - when did it go off? It would have been a big noise."
"About half past nine at night."

Spindle became very still. His hands stopped flicking over the settings of the microscope. "I see. So just before the bomb."
Thaniel said nothing. Spindle took off his glasses again and looked toward the bomb with his lips pressed together hard. He had seemed nearly happy before, taking it apart, but he was frightened now.
"Mori," he said, as if he were having to look at the idea from all angles. Thaniel thought he would say something else, but he took a deeper breath then and shook his head slightly. "You know you're carrying this around awfully casually for something made with about two hundred pounds' worth of diamonds."
"Two HUNDRED pounds?"
The watchmaker nodded. There are about ten times more jewel bearings in here than even the best chronometers need. Something like this is ... well, it would be only a method of hiding jewels, not using them."
"Hiding them."
"Yes." He pulled his fingers down his long nose and touched his already-perfect cravat. Having peered into the watch again, he twitched aside the cover he had placed over the remains of the bomb, and lifted out a blackened metal coil with a pair of tweezers. "Bimetallic mainsprings," he murmured.
"Pardon?" said Thaniel.
"One of the problems of clockwork is lost time. A solution is to use a mainspring made of two different metals, They expand and contract at different rates in heat and cold, which evens out the time loss caused by using just one. It is a signature of Mr Mori's to use steel and gold, so that you can see the colour difference. Like you can here."

He held up the watch. Thaniel leaned close. The mainspring gleamed silver on the outside and gold inside. Without speaking again, Spindle lifted the tweezers to present the bomb's mainspring. Although it was charred, the colour difference was still clear.
"Don't springs come from factories""
"Raw parts, yes, but the man who mentioned bimetallism to factories would be lynched. We do that ourselves. Every watchmaker makes his clockwork differently. This is not a business of patents. If factories got hold of our secrets, we would be finished."

Thaniel took a breath to say he understood, but Spindle went on over him.
"There is no such thing even as a standard cog; they arrive rough-cut and we all file them down ourselves. Each watch has unique cogs, each maker has his own methods, and his own inventions. This is one of Mori's, for certain. But, of course, anyone could have taken it from one of his watches knowing it was the best, and put it in here. Which is why I would not go so far as to suggest the provenance of this quite yet." He touched the bomb and Thaniel clenched his hands. "However, this IS his watch, and it is full of diamonds, and whatever the purpose of these extra mechanisms, they were measuring where the bearer was at half past nine yesterday. May I ask who was carrying it?"
"I was."

There was a pause. "Do you know Mori, then?"
"No. That watch was left in my flat months ago. I think it must have been meant for a different Steepleton."
"Indeed." he looked worried.
"You know, Williamson is going to some pains to keep you a secret and you're here telling everyone you've got the Yard bomb. Are you sure you should be?"

Worry turned to indiganation. "How I do my business is rather my own affair, don't you think?"
All right," said Thaniel.
Having been charged a punishing fee for the inspection - probably revenge for owning something of Mori's - he left the shop slowly and stopped in the sun. If he had been an organiser for Clan na Gael charged with the execution of a bombing, he knew what he would have done. He would have found a very good clockwork maker to put together the bomb, a long while before the fact so that there would be no demonstrable contact between the maker and the group in the months running up to the explosion. He would have had it planted, though, only a few minutes before it went off, or certainly after nine o'clock, because the chances of the police finding it in their own headquarters during their extensive searches was otherwise too great. he would have given the man who planted the bomb a watch made with identical clockwork and an alarm set to go off just before the explosion, so that he would know exactly when to get undercover as he left the yard. And he would have put the bombmaker's payment in that watch, so that he would only receive it if the alarm worked and the bearer was not blown up before he could return it.

Of course it all went wrong if the watch was delivered to the wrong man. he watched a pair of white horses sail by and could not think how it had been delieverd to the wrong man. It had been his name and his room. Williamson was probably checking census records now to see if there were other Steepletons in Pimlico.



This passage from "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" is evocative and draws idealised memories from me about going into similar establishments to Spindle's and being engrossed in all the minutiae of bits and pieces as well as the watch repairer himself. In fact, I can specifically recall one such occasion, when I was a young adult, in my county town of Lewes, yet I have hazy memories of former visits to such workshops, not all of them concerned with watch and clock repair. There is currently a trend for the recreation of shops, cafes, micro-breweries and other establishments in some notion of an original or authentic past style, but for me these modern retro-idioms, with their posed antiqueness just don't cut the mustard. I know that the atmosphere of these places is is very different from the real thing, and I am nostalgic for the workshops I knew as a child, with their unscheduled look and the knowledge that almost anything could be "fixed."

There is a sinister theme within The Watchmaker of Filigree Street," as evidenced in the passage have quoted, but obviously, I am not dwelling on that here. Instead, I just enjoy the watchmaking references and wonder if we will ever return to a mechanical world with its own frailties and problems yet with a magic and mystery that is now all but lost. I don't even mind if some machinery is involved, but there is nothing quite like the human hand and eye for the creation of beautiful objects.




A Watchmaker at work, as it would have been in the middle of the 19th century (pic from stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk):
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A picture that seems to be of the same watchmaking workshop but apparently dating to the 1950s, showing that there were still wonderful watch/clock repairing workshops in operation when I was young that had continued in the style to which they were always accustomed. A rare sight indeed these days (pic from stedmundsburychronicle.co.uk):
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James Opperman, watchmaker, in his workshop just before retiring in 2014 (pic from nnimgt-a.akamaihd.net):
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The watchmaking studio of British watchmaker Roger W. Smith (.1970) showing one of his seven employees at a lathe. Roger Smith follows in the tradition of fellow British watchmaker George Daniels and makes fine mechanical timepieces in very small numbers (pic from myvan.com):
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Re: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by smegwina »

What a wonderful and interesting post. (Yet another one!!)

I was not aware of that book, so am delighted that you brought it to my attention.

Victoriana/Steam punk etc is a huge passion of mine and accordingly a copy of "The Watchmaker of Filigree Street" has now been added to my Kindle! :)

It is lovely to see how the book brought back memories of your own history, and indeed I also remember gazing around in wonderment at the wonderful contraptions that I could only appreciate with no knowledge of how the magic occurred.

I believe the era of "tickpunk" is with us.


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Re: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by tempusmaximus »

A very good read Honour , the Daniels space travellers pocket watch is an incredible watch . Thank you for your time and effort .
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Re: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by Kip »

I finally managed the time to read this post (my apologies). I have found it quite interesting as usual. You have certainly piqued my interest as it now seems I must get this book to read. Well done.
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Re: The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by problem son »

Thank you so much for the kind responses. I did enjoy putting this topic on the forum and finding some pics to go with it.
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The Watchmaker of Filigree Street

Post by Ddavidsonmd »

That was a great post. Thanks for taking the time to post this

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