Silver Pair-Cased Quarter Repeater

Movement number 125 places this watch in the first few years after Viet's freedom in 1698, and within about fifteen years of the repeating mechanism itself, which Daniel Quare and Edward Barlow had fought over before the Privy Council in 1687. Viet's number 833 is cased in silver hallmarked for 1720; this one is seven hundred movements earlier, made while the repeater was still a new idea.

The inner case is the original repeater case. Its band is pierced with two staggered rows of oval and round holes so that the bell fixed inside the back can be heard through the silver, and the back hinges open to a full plate, fire-gilt movement with turned pillars and a single-foot balance cock pierced and engraved with scrolling foliage. The regulator is the early form: a numbered disc with a steel square, set into the plate beside the cock. Across the plate, in the same script as the number, runs the signature Viet Lond. Pressing the long pendant sounds the last hour and quarter on the bell. The winding square sits beneath the hole in the back, and the hands are set from the front with the same key, which is how the watch was wound and set for its first century.

The outer case is plain polished silver, worn, with a dent to the rim beside the hinge and a long scratch across the back. Inside the back is a case maker's punch, the letters IF in a rectangle, and nothing else. English silver watch cases carried no assay marks until the Act of 1739 sent them to Goldsmiths' Hall, so a maker's punch on its own is what a London case of 1700 should show.

The dial is not the one Viet fitted. Early repeaters left the shop with silver champlevé dials and blued steel hands; this one was re-dialled in white enamel with Arabic numerals around 1800, and given gilt pointer hands at the same time, when the watch was a hundred years old and still being carried. The enamel dial is hinged at 12 with the bezel and the brass of the hinge shows through the silver at the knuckles. At 49.6mm the pair cases are on the small side for an early English repeater.

The watch winds, runs, sets and repeats as it should. The marks, the movement and the condition are set out in the drawers below, and the signature and the dating evidence in The Record.