Further Thoughts: Rentzsch and Berrollas

My article entitled, The Novel Technology of Sigismund Rentzsch, was published in the September 2017 issue of Clocks Magazine.  Rentzsch’s contemporary, Joseph Anthony Berrollas, was the subject of my article published in Volume 38, Number 2, (June 2017), of Antiquarian Horology, journal of the Antiquarian Horological Society.  I referred to these two distinctive watchmakers in the post here of 8 June 2017.

Both have been featured in enquiries I’ve subsequently received, confirming the especially interesting nature of their lives and work.

Regarding JAB, a horology enthusiast kindly sent me details of Berrollas timepieces he has owned, most particularly a drum alarm, #1500:

Having also owned a Berrollas carriage clock, my correspondent was able to reflect on the maker’s apparently peripatetic lifestyle between England and the Continent.  He comments: ‘His English work has French characteristics, and the French clocks have English details. On his English clocks I have only seen going barrels, not fusees. On the French clock escapements there are English details, like the recessed index, jewelling & hairspring stud, as on my carriage clock, (on the main spring of which is the date 1842).

He adds: ‘About 30 years ago I looked at a similar clock to #1500, in The Museum of the History of Science in Oxford.  The Museum’s example is signed, James McCabe, and the curator had no wish to be told that Berrollas had made it!’

I would like to think that my article on Rentzsch would have been a further contribution towards his profile, though this should have already been high enough to support the notion that examples of his work merit above-average valuation as they come to the market from time to time; certainly I would expect to Rentzsch to be considered ‘collectable.’  So I’m somewhat surprised that it has been possible to acquire a good-looking example in 2020 for less than £600.

Dating from 1807, the open face pocket watch featured in a Bonham’s sale last month:

Reverting to 2017, shortly before my Clocks Magazine article was published, this Rentzsch alarm came up for sale at Auktionen Dr. Crott, Frankfurt Airport:

Circa 1830, it was described in the catalogue:

An exquisite “Pendule de Bureau” with “Petite Sonnerie” and alarm.  Case: brass; Dial: silvered;  Movm.: circular brass full plate movement, heavy gold screw chronometer balance, 2 x chain/fusee, 3 hammers/1 bell.

A good deal of quality and plenty of horological interest/complication I’d suggest in return for the modest €1,500 winning bid.

Another missed

Further to previous posts - 2019 and 2015 - another Alexander Hare Pocket Watch was included in the Jones & Horan sale, 2nd June, described:

The watch sold for $1,800. It's another that I feel I've 'missed,' (because I was overly-focused on the Alexander Watkins Chronometer in the same sale.) But I'm intent on acquiring a timepiece by Hare and will keep looking.  Meanwhile - courtesy of Jones & Horan - here are some photographs of #406:

Henry Delolme

Born in Braunschweig (Brunswick), Lower Saxony, in 1799, Henry Delolme was the youngest son of horologist Antoine Nicolas Delolme. The name Delolme is associated primarily with that part of south west France abutting the Swiss watchmaking region centred on Geneva.  It is logical to conclude that the Delolme family was of French origin but relocated progressively for reasons of trade during the seventeenth/eighteenth centuries to Switzerland and subsequently to the central German state.

Antoine gained a reputation for high quality work and was appointed Clockmaker to the Braunschweig Court in the 1780s.  The City experienced considerable turmoil during the early decades of the nineteenth century, being occupied by the French as a Napoleonic conquest in 1806.  Subsequently, the Congress of Vienna established a Duchy of Braunschweig, with the City as its capital.  The regime was notably illiberal, (resulting in 1830 in an uprising and the Duke’s (Charles) replacement by his brother William,) and this was no doubt the main reason why the Delolme family (and others of their like) emigrated around 1810.  Antoine’s later clocks are signed Delolme, Paris, whilst by circa 1827 Henry had set up business in London.  It is likely that Henry formed a partiality for the French in deference to his family’s origins and his own experience during his brief period as a teenager residing in Paris, perhaps as their capital offered a welcoming milieu much in contrast with the repressions and conflicts he had observed in the city of his birth.   The earliest documentary evidence for Henry’s residence in England has been found in the archive (Volume 515) of the insurers, Sun Life, with the entry:

23 January 1827, 1054306, Henry Delolme, 23 Rathbone St., Watchmaker.  On his household goods wearing apparel printed books and plate in his now dwelling house only situate as aforesaid brick, £80 £80. Stock utensils therein only £220, £220, £300.

The next extant record results from his marriage in 1829 to Amelia Lebarthe.  A newspaper report of the theft of watches from Delolme refers to the Business’s location at Rathbone Place but does not clarify the apparent anomaly regarding the building’s number – no.23 in the insurance record, but always no.48 elsewhere.

Fig.1 Cylinder pocket watch

by Antoine Delolme c1820.

Courtesy of Dr Crott Auktionen

Henry and Amelia had six children: John Lewis Anthony, born 18-10-1829, Henry, born 4-01-1833, (died aged 11 months), Jules Charles, born 4-01-1836, Charles John, born 11-09-1837 (d. 1915); Henrietta Charlotte, born 15-03-1839 (married Walter Gorges (Brunswick) 10-10-1867); Louise Gustave, born 08-07-1841.  Charles John initially trained to become a civil engineer, but by 1871 he was assisting in his Father’s business and is referred to as a watchmaker in the 1881 Census return.  The family home and business premises were, as above, at 48 Rathbone Place, which is a turning off the north side of Oxford Street, close to the major junction with Tottenham Court Road.

The 1842 edition of Robson’s London Directory features the listing: 48 Rathbone Place – Henry Delolme, watchmaker and importer of Parisian clocks and Musical Boxes and Importers of Geneva Watch Tools and Materials.  Throughout that decade Delolme developed the quality and range of his products.  Notably, he began to offer Marine Chronometers, for which at that time there was ready and increasing demand in accordance with the navigational needs of an expanding shipping industry driven by global trading.  Thus, by 1851, Delolme’s exhibits in the Great Exhibition included, in addition to seven gold Pocket Watches, two Marine Chronometers.  The latter were based on rough movements sourced from the Prescot (Lancashire) manufactories.  Probably informed by his Continental heritage, he was differentiating his Pocket Watches from those of his more traditional English competitors by seeking to make them as unbulky as possible.  In reviewing his exhibits, a newspaper report observed:

Mr. Delom (sic), of 48 Rathbone-place, exhibits a handsome collection of watches, containing many improvements in construction, the result of his long scientific experience.  By dispensing with the fusee he obtains more room for the other works, and is thus enabled to comply with the present taste for flat watches without any sacrifice of strength or durability.  The duty of the fusee in regulating the inequality of the mainspring is performed by an ingenious contrivance which he very learnedly calls an ‘isochrone pendulum spring’ – this sonorous epithet being the only part of his work which is not entirely of English manufacture.

(Note:  There’s some ‘marketing-speak at play here in order to suggest novelty and a unique feature: after all, as long ago as 1782, John Arnold’s patent, #1328, was summarised as being applicable to, ‘Escapement and balance, to compensate the effects of heat and cold in pocket-chronometers or watches, also for incurvating the two ends of the helical spring, to render the expansion and contraction of the spring concentric with the centre of the balance.’)

Regarding his Chronometers, Delolme was bracketed with some of the most renowned English makers:

In marine and pocket chronometers we have a very creditable display of first-rate workmanship . . . we may mention the well known names of Arnold, Frodsham, Barraud, Dent, Delolme, Gowland. (Morning Chronicle, 9 May 1851)

Around this date Delolme adopted an image of a Marine Chronometer for his advertisement:

Courtesy www.925-1000.com

This is earliest extant Delolme Marine Chronometer currently found:

Courtesy eBay member ‘martawatch’

It has a 2-day movement with Earnshaw-type spring detent escapement.  Numbered 501, it is probable that this is an example of Delolme’s output considerably prior to his participation in the Great Exhibition.  The highest number extant is 1002.  In Chronometer Makers of the World, Tony Mercer indicates a known movement number of 2248 with date attribution of 1899, (9 years after Henry’s death).  He also records examples in a movement number range of 96 to 1355.  Mercer also wrote of Delolme, intriguingly, ‘Honest and straightforward but lost all his money; also, ‘George Oram, chronometer maker, collected funds to his modest requirements.’  There is, however, no record of a formal business partnership involving Delolme and Oram, his contemporary and proprietor of a commercially successful horological business based at Wilmington Square, Clerkenwell.  But whether or not Delolme made the most financially of his talents, the Business was substantial enough to support the employment of four watchmakers.

And beyond his own enterprise he had a care and concern for people employed in the Trade.  With the difficulties English watchmakers experienced in the mid-nineteenth century, especially as a result of loss of market share consequent on the popularity of imported products from Switzerland and America, came a desire by the more successful ‘names’ to alleviate hardship in the Trade’s workforce.  In particular there was a need for accommodation for elderly practitioners who could no longer work and/or afford to rent a home or premises.  As a partial solution, a community of alms houses in New Southgate, known as the Clock and Watch Maker’s Asylum was established in 1857.  Henry was a noted, prominent attender at the Asylum’s inaugural dinner held at the Albion Tavern, Aldersgate Street.

That Delolme had a finely developed social conscience is further indicated by his association with the French Protestant Evangelical Church.  Henry was nominated as a trustee in 1867. He subsequently took on the role of Treasurer to safeguard the funds sought by charitable appeals, an example of which being:

Mission of the French Protestant Evangelical Church in Bayswater:  This mission, by means of which large numbers of foreigners are every year in many ways benefitted, irrespective of creed or nationality, stands in deep need of aid at this present time.  The mission supports a deaconess and a Bible-woman to visit among the foreign population, and administer to their bodily as well as their higher wants.  This mission is without any endowment whatever.

The success of the Great Exhibition inspired further similar international fairs elsewhere in mid-nineteenth century America and Europe.  It also left an appetite for a repeat in London and the realisation of this in 1862 was partly funded by profits from the 1851 event.  Delolme’s Establishment status was affirmed by his appointment to the Exhibition’s horological department planning committee along with elite clockmakers Cole, Webster, Bennett and Upjohn, meeting at the organising Society of Arts’ premises in the Adelphi in August 1861.

The Exhibition opened in Kensington in May of the following year with Delolme again contributing an impressive range of watches and clocks, reviewed as follows:

Mr Delolme exhibits many specimens, including marine chronometers, one of them with metallic mechanical thermometer; astronomical regulator, in plate-glass and ormolu case of entirely new design, with gravity escapement; the pendulum is suspended on friction rollers.  There are also transparent eight-day clocks, for night and day, with invisible movements of novel construction, and lighted by the usual night light; a watch, with metallic thermometer; and a first-class English independent seconds watch, with one train only, being on the principle of the remontoir escapement.

(The ‘remontoir’ solution to the problem of varying input force to the balance is succinctly summarized in Hodinkee’s Watch 101, https://www.hodinkee.com/watch101/remontoir-degalite.  Watch 101 is also instructive in regard to the tourbillon feature seen in the chronometer illustrated below.)

Delolme received a medal in recognition of the excellence of his exhibits.

An example of Delolme’s later production appeared in the Dr Crott 91 Auction sales catalogue, May 2015.  This is attributed with number 8820 and dated to circa1875:

Courtesy of Dr Crott Auktionen

The specification is impressive, summarised in the catalogue:

A heavy hunting case pocket watch with minute tourbillon.  Case: 18k gold. Tiered, engine-turned, a goutte, gold dome with engraving.  Dial: enamel, radial Roman hours, auxiliary seconds, paste-set hands.  Movm,: bridge movement, keywind, signed, nickel-plated, decorated, chain/fusee with Harrison’s maintaining power, finely executed mirror-polished steel tourbillon cage, screwed gold chatons, pivoted detent escapement, gold screw compensation balance, pink gold train, freesprung blued balance spring.

Henry continued at the helm of the Business into his eighties – still recorded as a watchmaker (master), not a retired watchmaker – in the 1881 Census.  As mentioned earlier, son Charles, age 44, is on the same census return and described as a watchmaker.  There is no evidence to suggest that he assumed control of the Business before Henry’s death in 1890.  Equally, with the exception of Mercer’s citing of number 2248/1899, it does not appear that the Delolme name continued to appear on watches made after that date.  So Henry’s brand did not substantially survive him, but during his lifetime it was one which represented technical quality and aesthetic excellence.

John Cashmore

Earlier this year I became interested in John Cashmore, a later-nineteenth century London watchmaker.  Although not especially innovative, Cashmore's quality was consistently  good and he achieved a reputation for excellence.  Here, below, is an example of his output:

Described as follows:

A Minute Repeater in 18ct. Gold Hunter case and with keyless, lever movement. Signed John Cashmore, London, no.5955, 1881.  A frosted gilt three-quarter plate movement jewelled to the centre with screwed chatons, free sprung bimetallic compensation balance with diamond endstone, gold cuvette, white enamel dial with roman numerals, subsidiary seconds, gold hour and minute hands, polished case with engraved monogram and repeat slide in the band, casemaker's initials GAP,  diameter 56mm. (Description and photograph courtesy of Christie's.)

Over time 'John Cashmore' became a brand, watches by this name being marketed for some time after his retirement in 1899.

My illustrated article on John Cashmore features in the June issue of 'Clocks' magazine.

Function or Fashion?

The original draft of my article on John Grant of Fleet Street, published in the February 2016 issue of Clocks Magazine, included some extensive narrative about and depiction of Benjamin Webb’s Patent Polar Watches.  During the editing process a good deal of this was removed, mainly because of some difficulties experienced with the copyright holders for the images I had intended to use for illustrative purposes.  Subsequently the issue has been resolved – not just in regard to the specific material, but as a broad principle.  As a matter of policy, the Museum of the History of Science, Oxford has now decided to allow images available on its website to be freely downloadable for use by academic publications with a low print-run.

John Grant’s business was distinguished by an innovative approach both to manufacturing and retailing.  This latter aspect was well evidenced by the offering of Webb’s Polar Watches.  These dual-purpose instruments are certainly interesting in their own right.  They are an example of a favourite ‘branch’ of watchmaking of mine: multi-functionality – a trend that emerged in the late 18^th/early 19^th centuries, including Coach Watches – with four or five time metrics – Chronographs, and such as the Watch-Pedometers of Ralph Gout and Polar Watches of Benjamin Webb. 

I’d like to reproduce here the ‘look’ of the Polar Watches and the related promotional material as I believe it represents the period extremely well:

The Times 9-10-1799

 

 

© Museum of the History of Science, University of Oxford

 

Sotheby’s offered a Polar Watch, #81, at their sale, ‘Important Watches, Clocks and Automata’, 20 October 2009, New York, with an estimate of $5,000-$7,000:

 

Courtesy of Sotheby’s

 

This is #146, sold by Sotheby’s in 2002 for £1,292:

 

 

Courtesy of Sotheby’s

#45 can be seen on the Antiquorum website.  It is very similar to #81. 
 

#123 – movement only, is held at The British Museum and further examples are in the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers’ collection, (#129) and York Castle Museum.  According to Paul Tuck, in his ‘Horology Under the Hammer’, Antiquarian Horology, Vol 21, #2, 1993, the Polar Watch featured a Duplex escapement. 
 

Although Webb liked to feature, ‘The King’s Patent’, prominently, it was not his own.  The reference is to Patent #2280, December 1798, in the name of John Randall Peckham of Bermondsey.

 

Webb was amongst the Makers quoted in a 1798 Parliamentary Report on the petitions for repeal of the Duties on Clocks and Watches Act 1797.  Webb summarized his loss of business with the following data:

 

	1796	1797	1798	Decrease from 1st July to 31st December:
From January 1st to June 30th	1,220	1,088
July 1st to December 31st	1,990	565
Total	2,410	1,653		625
In the last Four Months				Decrease in:
November	231	123		November  108
December	126	53		December    73
January	101	125	47	January       78
February	249	267	6	February    261   Total         520

Webb stated that he had been in business for 27 years and had never before seen such a sudden fluctuation in business volume.  He added that it had become very common to substitute silver/base metal for gold in the making of cases.

 

Evidence from John Grant was also heard in regard to the Act. 
 

The Polar Watches are usually ascribed to the dates, circa 1800-05, and evidence of Webb’s subsequent prosperity is lacking.  The British Museum notes him as active up to 1811.  Although the trading title, Benjamin Webb & Son was in use at the time of the marketing of the Polar Watches, little is known about his offspring, James.  Baillie lists him: London (St John’s Sq) 1799.  There is also a Robert with St John’s Sq given as location, and dates 1815-25.

 

Although the Polar Watch concept and its marketability were unproven, just in case it was about to become highly sought after, the commercially vigilant Swiss were not slow to create similar – though less elegant – similar instruments, this for example:

 

Courtesy Cogs & Pieces 

 

The theoretical ‘need’ for Webb’s creation was probably not sustained by practical experience.  The carrying of a compass would not have been especially onerous for a mariner or explorer, used to working with one in any event.  Equally, a relatively small compass housed in tandem with a timepiece would be unlikely to offer the accuracy/stability of a stand-alone instrument.  No doubt there was an initial talking-point value whereby the flourishing of his Polar Watch emphasised the trendiness of a young Gentleman about Town.  However, as the new century got into its stride the underlying quality and elegance of form implied by the term ‘Chronometer’ probably soon attracted the fashion-conscious watch buyer’s attention, at the expense of a ‘novelty’ such as Webb’s.