Bell-Struck Quarter Repeater

It is a repeating watch. Work the slide set into the case band and it strikes the hour on a bell, then the quarters, so the time can be read by ear in the dark. A striking watch was among the most complicated things a maker could attempt in the early eighteenth century, and it is the reason the case band is pierced: the frets let the bell be heard. Few verge watches of the period carry the work. It is large, a full 61mm across, open-faced and wound by key, with no crown.

The dial is white enamel in the arcaded manner, black Roman hours within a scalloped chapter and an outer ring of Arabic minutes counted in fives, each figure set in a shallow wave. Gilt beetle-and-poker hands sit over it, the hour a chased fleur, the minute a tapering poker, cast and dressed by hand. The enamel carries the hairlines of its age and a small loss beside the centre, set down plainly in the condition report; the black on white still reads at a glance.

Through the back is the work that matters. A full gilt plate fills the case, and over the balance sits a cock pierced and engraved edge to edge with foliage, a silvered regulator disc numbered beside it. The very edge of the plate is engraved too, a running frieze of birds and scrollwork meant for whoever opened the watch and no one else. The repeat train and its rack sit within, driving the hammer to the bell, which is mounted over the movement and struck on its rim. Across the plate runs the signature, in flowing script, Fromanteel & Clarke: the Anglo-Dutch house that reached back to the maker of Britain's first pendulum clocks and kept a shop in Amsterdam as well as London. An engraved W keeps it company, a workshop hand that left no fuller name.

The silver that holds all this is younger than the movement. Its marks are Dutch and of the nineteenth century, so at some point in Holland the old watch was given fresh cases and kept in use, which for an Anglo-Dutch maker is a fitting place to have ended up. That is the honest shape of the piece: an early bell-striking repeater in later Dutch silver, working, whole and together. The marks, the movement and the condition are set out in the drawers below.