![]() For a twenty-year-old Roger Smith, it was starting to take up more of his time than he could give it. Even for a well-trained watchmaker with a fully functioning workshop, it can take a long time. Luckily, the young Roger had the presence of mind to take anything he was working on, or any precious materials, out every night, but it still stands out as a vivid reminder of how imperfect the situation was.īuilding a pocket watch from scratch is a significant task. In fact, while he was working out of this workshop cum garage, it was broken into. Andy would also go on to work at TAG Heuer and would in fact stay for just over a year before completing the refresher course at WOSTEP in Switzerland.Īs you can imagine, this wasn’t an ideal set up to try and craft something that was going to be scrutinised by the critical eye of George Daniels. He would go on to be a full-time member of staff after graduation. ![]() After doing some servicing for Mappin & Webb, Adamson brought Roger over to the brand, where he started to do some part time work in the final year of his three-year course. ![]() Smith Watches, Adamson would scout the best from the course at Manchester to come and work with him at TAG Heuer where he worked one day a week. According to Andy Jones, the current Production Manager at Roger W. So, if you bought a watch from Mappin & Webb in Manchester in the late 1980s, it could have been a young Roger Smith that helped you in the process.Įventually, this led to Roger being offered, through Adamson, the opportunity to fix carriage clocks that had been given to the shop for repair. As part of this business, he did trade repairs for the Mappin & Webb branch in Manchester, where Roger got a Saturday job on the sales team while at college. While he wasn’t teaching, he ran a repair business, “charging good money for his work,” as Roger describes it. Adamson would come to the college once a week on Fridays to teach wristwatch repair and would become a big influence on Roger’s career direction. Speaking with Roger about his time in Manchester, he told us one of his teachers was called Bernard Adamson. While this is a great story on the surface, it doesn’t quite present the whole picture. Astonished by this intricate and complex piece, which Daniels had made entirely by hand, it has often been said that this was the spark that began Smith’s quest to make watches entirely from scratch. In response, he pulled the second Space Traveller out from his pocket. Daniels had been invited to give a talk to the students at the Manchester School of Horology, with an inquisitive Roger asking him what watch he had with him that day. Many of you may have heard the story of how Roger was first introduced to George Daniels. As he has said many times before, “that first day at Manchester was the best day of education I had ever received.” We were being treated like adults.” A novel experience for a sixteen-year-old who had been told he was no good at school. ![]() “I was amazed that we were just allowed to use these machines and hand tools, though with a bit of training, of course. “We were pretty much making stuff from day one,” he told us. Luckily, this meant that most of the machines that his cohort were let loose on, were fairly familiar to Roger from his metal working classes at school. The majority of this course was focused on clockmaking and repairing, with a small portion dedicated to watch repair. This proved to be rather beneficial, as he shares, “I love to learn from people, and we were thrown in with all these adults.” According to Roger, this meant that he was learning alongside people who had already lived through an almost full working life and who were now starting to retrain. Half of the available spots were filled by people who had gone through the Manpower Services system, a government scheme set up in the 1970s to get unemployed people back into the workforce. Ideally located for him attend, all the young Roger had to do was pass the interview and he was in.Īt the time, the course was run by the British Horological Institute (BHI) and was in fact shut down several years after Roger graduated. Entry wasn’t exactly competitive in 1986, yet Roger still made sure to do some research before the interview. For our readers who aren’t familiar with English geography, Bolton is only a half-hour drive from the centre of Manchester. The story goes that after deconstructing and reassembling an old clock at home, Roger’s father pointed him towards the horology course that was being held just down the road in Manchester.
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