Watch collecting and the search for the white whale
In the world of watch collecting, time does not stand still. That’s the joy of it: you never know what might be the prize of tomorrow, says Andy Blackmore
In the 1996 Christmas special of Only Fools and Horses, lovable Cockney Derek Trotter was still dreaming of getting rich. “This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires!” How, exactly? Well, it could be anything! It could even be the dusty old 18th century Harrison marine chronometer Derek finds in an old box, which turns out to be worth more than £6m.
The lesson here is that, when it comes to collectible timepieces, you never know what will be the white whale of tomorrow. It could be the humblest pin-lever Ingersoll ‘Mickey Mouse’ watch or it could be Gérald Genta’s luxurious interpretation of that theme (a series of watches that so offended the sensibilities of the organisers of the 1984 Montres et Bijoux watch fair, they asked him to remove them).
What was once crass may some day become collectable, what was once eccentric could become a design icon, and what was once on the cutting edge will become obsolete. In the world of watch collecting, time does not stand still.
When Alien fans bought the industrial-looking Seiko reference 7A28-7000 designed by Italian Giorgetto Giugiaro in 1983 for about £130, they probably thought they were buying an interesting – if rather ungainly – horological curio. I doubt they expected it to appear on Sigourney Weaver’s wrist in Aliens three years later, much less that examples would one day sell for more than £2,000.
That’s the thing about watches, whether it’s a Rolex Submariner or a Samsung Galaxy Watch: they all tell a story. A vintage timepiece had a life before you laid eyes on it, and it survived. And likewise, your Panerai or Hublot will probably still be ticking long after your ticker has stopped.
Watch collecting is all about story telling
When you cradle a pocket watch with more than 130 years on the clock, do you ever think of the person whose waistcoat it once adorned? What combination of luck and misfortune led a path to your door? How did it survive when so many of its brothers and sisters were scrapped for silver or gold? I have a Longines 6B/159 in my collection and I sometimes imagine its former custodian leaping into his Spitfire: what near misses did they both survive? And when I look at one of my Winegartens, I picture some City gent, perhaps after a long liquid lunch in Pomeroy’s, picking it out as an unofficial bonus and slipping it through on his expenses…
This is why I love collecting watches – not just for that one in a million chance it will one day make me a rich man (it almost certainly won’t), but because I like the idea of holding a piece of someone’s personal history.
When I first came to London – a time of slam-door trains and men wearing bowler hats – I used to drool at the window of Winegartens’ Liverpool Street store, filled with longing for watches that were, on a photographic assistant’s meagre wage, as unreachable as the moon.
In some far-off land in the future, will a 22nd century watch wonk gaze at a tarnished timepiece that once adorned my wrist with that same sense of wonder? What tales will it tell of me?
My ultimate watch collecting dream is to be reunited with an original Heuer Airline I once parted ways with thanks to a combination of misfortune and poor accounting. How would I even know it was the same watch? I guess I wouldn’t – but either way it would have a story to tell.
• Andy is picture editor at City AM