Roger W. Smith - Building Watches From Scratch

[Music] thank you so much roger for having us here on the isle of man in your workshop that you actually opened 20 years ago what really fascinates you so much about watches i think for me it's the sort of mechanical side of it i've always been interested in the mechanics of anything really at school i wasn't very switched on at all really but give me anything mechanical and you know there's not natural sort of interest there so i was um i suppose i was directed to it through my father he was collecting a few clocks at the time and i became interested in the mechanics of those clocks and then he directed me in the direction of a course in manchester and does that uh does that school that manchester school of vorology still exists today it doesn't actually no no it closed several years after i left um there are now there is now another course running out of manchester one of the swiss courses the wasstep courses but no my calls subtly folded so so being here in this workshop for for 20 years now running your own workshop can you tell us a little bit about what has happened in watchmaking your career over that 20 years but what you also think about what you make in january yeah so i mean for well i suppose for me my journey yeah i mean it doesn't seem like 20 years really it's it's um just flown by but for me i set up the workshop in 2001 and my work i still doing bits of work for george but really i had to develop my own name in my own right and that's something that we've been gradually doing over the years there's so much work that's been done you know basically when we were or when i was setting out to make watches i didn't want to make one watch a year as george had done you know that was him i didn't want to follow that i wanted to go into big numbers um so now we're doing 15 pieces a year so um i wanted something different and i wanted to in some way try and re-establish british watchmaking so that's been my goal uh we've you know introduced production watch production back into britain into great britain and um obviously in our own small way but you know that's that's what i'm trying to do with my sort of watchmaking what we've tried to do over the last 20 years so who are your customers then who are the people who are interested in british watchmaking while swiss watchmaking as we know it is so big these days well i think what we find is um people you know these collectors who we you know work with they're always looking for something different you know and they've often been on the journey they've always often bought the swiss watches and you know started off you know reasonable watches and getting i suppose more expensive and more exclusive as they um sort of move along their journey and learn more and again i think it's them just looking for something again different just to expand their knowledge and understanding of watchmaking and where that can take their collecting really so is it mainly collectors or other people who just want one watch by you we i mean we have had the occasional client who's literally just i mean there's one guy he said i've never ever bought a watch before but i just want one of your watches and that was it and he's not a collector per se you know um but yes i mean generally yeah you know our peop our clients are collectors and they'll have many many watches and are those collectors usually collectors are interested in very unique pieces everybody wants this personal kind of influence in the watches to which extent do you do you work with this wishes of the collector because you have your own collections yeah i mean again it depends it depends on the clients i mean we are i'm working with a couple of people now where we are building or i'm designing completely one-off watches for them um these clients have been sort of you know long-term clients that bought a lot of the other work and so they kind of progressed into that sort of area but there are also you know my if you like the day-to-day watches the series ones twos and threes and so on we can still you know we still put personalization into those watches and people can have a say when it comes down to material choice or engraving and so on or um so yes there's lots of we're able to create very unique very individual watches but still you must have uh developed your own philosophy for creating a a watch especially a watch movement can you describe that that philosophy of how your perfect watch looks like yeah so um i mean i suppose my perfect watch would be um one of my watches in its sort of original form you know so the gilded plates the frosted plates the screwed and gold chassis you know the real traditional english or british style of watch finishing and then a very straightforward silver engine turn dial maybe with a golden set chapters and so on so um for me i mean british watchmaking has always been very understated and that's i suppose my my perfect watch so when a client comes to me for a watch they are buying my work my watches you know they're all follow that sort of basic philosophy and even if they are asking me to design something original it's still got to be my style and my it's got to feel like one of my watches for to obviously leave the workshops so so since we're here where uh george daniel's not physically but um uh invented kind of the the co-actual escapement are you up to inventions as well i mean is there anything for complications or other functionalities you are kind of inventing as well you want to invent something i think for me you know i mean we're still doing a huge amount of work with the coaxial scheme we're still improving that that's been a journey that i started really in 2006 when i built my first um series two wristwatch which housed the coaxial scammers and we've been tweaking that ever since and changing it and improving it and we've changed the mechanism as a whole so that work is ongoing as for individual inventions i mean i suppose the series four um i came up with this idea for a traveling date aperture um and that was completely original never been done before and it's been since been copied by several other major brands actually which um is great i mean that came out of me wanting to design a triple calendar complicated watch but i was always put off by the fact that you had a hand which sat across key pieces of information for several days at a time and how do i get around that problem so again i don't set out to be an inventor as it were you know it's it's it it comes about as a result of my watch designing really i mean coming coming back to the place here um what i also find very interesting that you have very uh or at least a couple of young people working where do you get your your craftman so yeah i mean again this has taken us a long time to work out you know the type of people we need and generally i mean they're all predominantly from obviously from the uk um they've all worked in the sector in the service sector generally you know there's obviously a big service need in the uk for the watches and so on so the work within the service sector they've usually been on uh one of the recognized courses like wasstepper there's a very good one also in operating out of birmingham so they've had a good basic training and then they've had a good number of years of work experience within the trade they are our sort of ideal people really because they understand they they may not know obviously the skills that we require we can teach them those for skills but they have the basic understanding and and i suppose the respect for what they need to try and achieve and if you've got that in there then you know we can teach the rest sort of thing and uh so but you are still the only watchmaker in the in this in the whole in the sense of the whole um uh work or is there other full watchmakers here so i mean no i mean i'm i'm the i suppose chief designer i mean i i create the watches you know i i come up with ideas um i sit down i uh will design the watch in its entirety and then we'll go into the prototype phase where we'll build the first one or two sort of pieces and i'll work on those with um our sort of machine sort of workshop and so on uh the prototypes and then once we're happy with all the tweaks and changes then we'll go into production how did you how did you come to the to this idea of creating i mean like 15 or 14 watches a year i mean is this number has this number some kind of some kind of relation to to its production process or to the prototyping or to the numbers you want to sell or no it's something that's just um so behind it all is this this sort of approach to watchmaking so we call it the daniels method so it's something that i mean george back in the 1960s late 1960s he built this first his very first pocket watch and it was um he was probably one of the first people in history to have sat down and designed and built in its entirety every single component with a watch he built a complete watch from the raw material that's never been done before because up until that point the trade had always been subdivided into different areas as it is today in switzerland but when george was building his watch the british watch industry had all but disappeared and so that's why george was forced into creating a single watch so for me i'm still holding on to that idea of being completely self-sufficient so literally raw material enters the building at one end and a completed watch leaves at the other end with no i mean i think we bind about five or six components for each watch which are mainsprings jewels and sapphire crystals and a leather strap so building watches that way is very restrictive because it slows down the process and you have to have extremely highly skilled people in order to create a complete watch so the business model is very restricting in that respect we can only grow if we can find more watchmakers to help to assemble and finish these watches to the standards that i want right so that's the restricting side of it you're also applying 21st century technology um to enable you to to make these watches which is i think one of the big differences to george daniels himself who did a lot with old machinery and so on maybe you can enlarge a little bit on that what does it really mean and what where's the for you the borders which you don't cross yeah again it's i mean that's a very personal thing really um so in my early days i was making everything by hand and i would make pocket watches in the same way that george did when i went to work with george on the millennium daniels millennium project um we had a rory bush delivered to us from switzerland which contained george's coastal statements and that rory borsch i was responsible for finishing and adding on a calendar complication and making the dials and hands and so on and that was a real shock to the system and the reason why i was a shock to the system was because for many years you know the previous seven eight years i'd be making everything by hand but in pocket watch scale and when you're making pocket watches it's fairly straightforward-ish process to work to the tolerances of a pocket watch which are about one to two hundredths of a millimeter that's fairly achievable with fairly rudimentary equipment such as george had um but the problem is when you move to wristwatch scale those tolerances increase um to three to four thousandths of a millimeter and that becomes a challenge and so when i was working with george on the daniels millenniums that was a real challenge working at that scale and then when i set up at my own i made nine series one wristwatches and i also their wristwatches those were and then i also made a couple of tourbillon wristwatches for george and they were again completely handmade and is a fascinating project really was but they were incredibly difficult watches to make because of the scale and what i was finding uh was that you're always chasing the errors through the watch you know it's um a hugely complex process because of these fine tolerances and i knew that if ever i wanted to build more than one watch per year i'd have to embrace modern technologies manufacturing technologies and so we bought our first cnc machine in 2005. which is still a lot of work to work with one machine and to have the right people to work with it and to do so small numbers oh yeah i mean it's i mean the um a cnc machine you know it's not about just pressing a button and walking away i mean they are hugely complex machines that need a huge amount of attention and you need a really highly skilled people to operate them yeah because um you're still trying to achieve these tolerances of three to four thousandths of a millimeter and it's very easy to lose those if your machinist is careless or doesn't fully understand what they need to achieve so um again that took many years you know we never operated a cnc machine the first one that we bought i was operating with one of my colleagues andy [Music] let's go back to the watches you designed to apply to work for george daniels i mean it was two pieces actually because the first piece was not his acceptance yeah tell us about this this story i guess you have told it quite a bit yes yes so the first pocket watch i made i started when i was 19 years old and i finished it 18 months later and i was working out of a small workshop in my parents garage at home and i made it and so obviously the natural thing for me to do was to then contact george and asked if he'd look at it and maybe approve it um give me some advice so um showed him the watch and it was anything but congratulatory i mean he as as he said you know he said look you've you've managed to get a watch together that works and but the quality simply isn't there you know you really need to go away and focus on these 30 34 different skills or trades which are traditionally used in the com in the creation of a complete watch for me the goal was just to get a watch to work and i did that i remember the first time it ticked um and i was i was amazed it ticked you know and i'd probably been working on the watch for a year at that point maybe even longer did you have anybody who looked at those parts from the the the standpoint of uh of a craftsman and and the skills of his of his field or did you just get it out of books because that was before internet times yeah no exactly yeah no so it's majority through books there was this um this guy actually in manchester who's a keen collector of watches uh he's quite elderly now but um he invited me around to his house once and he showed me some pocket watches some pocket watch movements which were made by there's a tompion and there's a much movement and um also a reggae and you know he's really great actually because i hadn't seen these movements before then and so it's really good just to uh you know see these mechanisms say that's what i need to be trying to achieve and so that was yeah i mean it stuck on my head is obviously hugely important for me um but apart from that i mean now i was just following george's book and i used to pore over the book you know i read it several times over i even used to get a magnifying glass an eyeglass onto his images in the book you know so much so that you could see the pixels and the the dots and the in the prints and just trying to glean a little bit more information out of it so it's difficult but it's all i had at the time and how long did that watch team so the second one took five and a half years and that was just because of this sort of um this yeah i mean i i knew i was improving all the time and i think i made the watch within a year the first watch and is working and it is much better than the first watch and but then i looked back at the components i made earlier that year and they're of a far poorer quality than what i was making just that week so i'd go back to the beginning and remake those and then go through the whole watch remaking all the bits and that process went on for as i say five and a half um yeah five and a half years you must have been so excited when you after five years showed this piece to to george this watch i mean could you describe that again we met george went into his workshop he grunted about on the way down there he sort of said why did you bring the first watch he was appalling as he as he was and you know i thought crikey this isn't going well but um he we got into the workshop and i put the watch in front of him um at his bench and he looked at it open the box he turned it round in his hand he um asked to see what was open the back of the watch so he did and he looked to the mechanism and turned it around in his hands and then he started asking who made the various parts you know um and i said i did to all of them obviously um and then he snapped the back two stood up congratulations you're a watchmaker and um that was amazing that was you know sort of seven years seven years of you know bloody hard work really you know to try and get to that point and um i didn't hear anything he said he just carried on talking for probably i don't know it seemed like 10 15 minutes he was just walking around the workshop and i didn't i can't remember a word he said and that was it really that was extraordinary moment it is one thing to to be you know like working for someone but to establish your own workshop to establish that and to get become independent of your master how did that establish in your mind working for george i guess here on the island of man yeah so i always had in this idea that i'll be making my own watches again at some point and so in the last i suppose a year 18 months i was starting to form ideas so in those days so yeah as i say going back to 2001-ish yeah pocket watches i mean so he he made his career out of making pocket watches i think he made about 24 or so pocket watches there were some prototypes like what a buff 30 with a with a prototype yeah yes and with the wrist watches eventually had to start making wrist watches because the collecting world had completely moved away from pocket watches and it's never returned i mean obviously your very best your very finest pocket watchers you know there are some great pieces out there they still have a value obviously george daniels pocket watches are going through the roof um but general collecting had gone and is moving over to wristwatches so i sort of thought well i'm going to have to um move in that direction into the wristwatches and fortunately my work on the millennium project had been good that to chase those fears away because it was always a terrifying prospect to move to that scale i mean um it may this may sound bizarre to people this having this conversation but you've got to remember there was nobody in britain making watches it's just george and myself that was it that was a watchmaking industry in britain do you think that being in a remote place like this which uh might we might remind a little bit of you know the valle de joux which is also like used to be a very remote place is helping uh you to today in this busy times to to kind of um be clearer with your thoughts or be be um more straightforward with your product without a doubt i mean there's i mean one of my colleagues andy jones here he went on the well step course when i was starting to make my pocket watch and um i do look at the way he progressed and his depth of knowledge watchmaking knowledge and skills was far out strip mine you know because he'd been on the wasstep courses a brilliant training course and me moving into sort of watchmaking and trying to fumble my way through it of course it took a long long time and had i had that swiss experience i think i would have been far more advanced you know is as i say is a great training and but looking back at it now in the cold light of day i'm glad i didn't go down that route because i would have made friends acquaintances relationships that would have changed my watchmaking forever and there's no doubt that had i set out without knowledge in my head i would have approached my watchmaking completely differently and i wouldn't be making the watches i'm making today i mean that's that's there's no doubt about that and today again i'm very isolated i'm not in contact with any of these watchmakers very nice though they are um and i do occasionally meet them when we bump into each other somewhere you know somewhere but i'm glad i don't have that relationship that ongoing day-to-day relationship where you speak to a wheel maker down the road or an escapement maker or a case maker or a dial maker who may influence your design because of the way they make their components so what about going out and have a look at some of your pieces i heard we have three here yes and i cannot wait to have a first glimpse on a yeah roger smith watch yeah very happy thank you thank you so much so um right so well obviously three watches here these are watches which um are in their test test period now uh prior to delivery to the clients and um they are actually all series one watches and i suppose they're they're good examples as to how you know how much sort of influence the clients can have in each individual walk so basically this piece here is um they're all 38 millimeter diameter watches this one is 18 carat yellow gold cased and then we have a silver engine turn dial with gold inserts and then blued steel minutes hour and second sands and roman numeral buttons and then we flip the movement over and we have this sort of very typical english finish mechanism with its gilded and frosted plates we have um a design there engine turning design on the raised barrel bridge and the balance um gold chat ons blue screws or this sort of purple blue color that i like throughout the watches um so that's sort of our series one wristwatch it's an intriguing how how how three-dimensional it comes because usually you would need immediately a magnifying glass to discover a watch but here you have the feeling you have the the three dimensionality of a of a pocket watch and wristwatch well it's interesting that you've pointed that out because um when i was making the first pocket watches and i was looking at some english pocket watches at the time and um these watches to me were alive you know they they were they were thick watches very deep good size you didn't really need much of an eyeglass to study them in detail and at the same time i was comparing these pocket watches to modern wristwatches which i was working on in the trade repair work that i was doing and what i noticed that these mass-produced wristwatches they'd lost that depth of quality which i was really coming to appreciate in the pocket watches and so when i set out um designing my very first wristwatch i wanted to put some of these real three-dimensional qualities back into the wristwatch and it's my take on how the british watchmaking industry continued and moved into wristwatchmaking then this is perhaps where they'd be today so when did you come up that you you put the isle of man um like kind of coat of arms on the wall yeah yeah so that's um that's called the monks that's a try skillion yeah which is a three legs or monday symbol so um i think i put it on the first watch maybe could have been sort of almost 10 years ago now put it on a daniel's anniversary that's when we started and this the danielle's anniversary was a series of watches that started making with george before he passed away and we're still completing that series still a few pieces to make and then we've just um taken that triskelion idea um and added it onto our watches and if you if you look at the the the guilloche and then and and those details are there um are they linked to british watchmaking away or is that like your personal approach so it's um so if you look back in history so engine turning an engine turned out was always put on the very finest watches so brege obviously a real exponent of that um but also british contemporaries of breguet at the same time on their very best work they were adding engine turned dials to their watches so um if you look at people like cole and so on or jump they all had engine turned dowels that's something that has carried on i mean george obviously put engine turned onto his dials onto his watches and i've carried on using his original equipment as well how long do you usually have one of those pieces um in your workshop when they are ready i mean well you have to have three well yeah you you've come at a great a great time really so usually about three three to four weeks um i mean the watches have already been well tested for many months as the watch has been built up and so on but um just after casing we always like to test them for that sort of period of time and just to make sure everything's right and i love this style design it's it's so it's readable like i mean look at that it's a 38 you know and you go from a distance you definitely can see this yeah i mean it's as you say you get real clarity from it and this whiteness is achieved through heating the dial up yeah with a flame and then you um it brings this pure silver oxide through to the surface yeah yeah yeah the only parts that are that are not possibly not made is the the sapphire mainspring mainspring balance spring and jewels well yeah everything else we do in-house [Music] so is there anything you want to be remembered for um well i don't think i'll ever be making anything groundbreaking like you know george i don't think you'll see an escapement out of me i mean who knows but um i think for me it's just about trying to make watches well you know to a standard that simply isn't being made in the industry today yeah um i'm trying to build a body of work um and there's another few watches to go into that sort of collection yeah as it were um and yeah i mean i want to i mean i'm now wanting to i mean this never set out to be a business but i'm now wanting to create a business which you know is sustainable and will continue long after i'm sort of gone but could you imagine to some extent that your children one day would take it up or is that something you would rather withstand and say no it's not kind of i don't want to establish a family business or a family tradition out of that is that something that comes into your mind or because you were the chosen student and not the given kid to someone yeah i mean it's um i think i think for me it's i mean if the children are interested then wonderful great yeah you know and i'll give every help that yeah i you know i can um but for you it was also the way you found and was not the way your father decided you shouldn't go huh yeah yeah yes yes i mean i found it yes so you know if they have no interest in watches that's fine yeah you know and i'm very happy to sort of you know walk away from that and um allow them to you know find their own way yeah um so no very relaxed about that really and um um so yeah i mean it's uh yeah i mean i was left to my own devices to a certain i mean i was guided there's no doubt about it but my father but you know i think this this world of watchmaking you have to be really engaged in it to make a success of it you can't come into it half-heartedly i suppose like any profession isn't it you know you have to really commit to it to make it happen and work really but if they want to come into it and change the business into whatever they you know if they do want to increase numbers it's up to them you know i can only do what i yeah what i'm able to do but i do appreciate that other people have different ideas and so if they did get involved and it did change that's great you know fully support them and what they're trying to achieve really [Music] you

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Id: M23jir7Q-Y4

Length: 34min 54sec (2094 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 01 2022