One of the questions answered by Timothy Treffry found in the People section. Poignant and surprising.

For the full interview, read here.

5. What made you decide to go in the direction you are currently in?

Currently, I’m retired, so that was “the passage of time”. What got me interested in Horology was just a sequence of events: we bought an old house, I thought it needed a “grandfather” clock, I didn’t want to buy one without knowing something about them. I bought a book on English clocks, I found out about, and joined, The British Horological Institute, became Editor of its Horological Journal and was invited to my first Basel Fair in 1989.

Soon I was also attending Inhorgenta in Munich, Orogema in Vicenza and SIHH in Geneva. More significant was my introduction to the industry and a number of very talented independent watch and clock makers. The AHCI stand at Basel became an important focal point for meeting some extraordinarily gifted people.

After 17 years, in 2006, I resigned as HJ Editor but continued freelance writing until a couple of years ago, concentrating on mechanisms and new technology. Those 17 years were a very special time…

 In 1989 the mechanical watch industry in Switzerland was still in the grip of “the quartz crisis”, many old marques had disappeared and thousands of jobs had been lost. On my first visit to Audemars Piguet traditional watchmaking was still going on but I was proudly shown their ‘divertisement’, a new enterprise making pumps for medical equipment. Not far away, Jaeger Le Coultre (then owned by VDO whose primary interest was in making automotive instruments) was stuck in a time-warp with vast workshops. The cam-operated lathes took so long to set up there was a separate machine for each watch part. Patek Philippe operated from a number of separate locations in Geneva and the Vallée du Joux. While still making mechanical watches, they were also producing quartz watches, solar powered quartz clocks and ultra high precision quartz clocks for ocean liners. 

About this time I also met some interesting young men: Stephen Forsey was in the watch repair department at Asprey-Garrard and Peter Speake(-Marin) in a basement workshop below George Somlo’s antique clock and watch shop, both in London's up-market shopping area; Roger Smith was a promising horological student in Manchester greatly inspired by a visit to his college by George Daniels.

Visits to Basel were enlivened by staying on to spend a day or two with the remarkable Derek Pratt whose watchmaking skills are considered to have at least matched those of Daniels.

As the millennium approached, the transformation of the mechanical watch from an obsolete item to a desirable piece of masculine adornment, had begun. By the year 2000 the total value of the Swiss mechanical watches produced exceeded that of quartz. A mechanical watch was something to be proud of and, if sufficiently vulgar, you could buy shirts in which your watch could be worn over the cuff!

A highlight of this period was observing the launch of Ulysse Nardin's “Freak” and Omega's adoption of the Daniel’s coaxial escapement. I had special access and was the first journalist to visit, and photograph, escapement production at Nivarox-FAR. The fall of the Berlin Wall and collapse of the Soviet Union revived watch production in Glashűtte, with the emergence of Glashűtte Original the reemergence of Lange and Sőhne and the arrival of Nomos bringing new choices to the market.