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George Daniels - My honorary livery dinner as master (61/85)

1,636 views · Published 12 July 2017 · 3:01 · Indexed 20 September 2026

Channel: Web of Stories - Life Stories of Remarkable People · 2017 · Science & Technology

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English watch-maker George Daniels (1926-2011) was most famous for creating the co-axial escarpment and could make a complete watch by hand.  In his lifetime, he received many awards, including the rarely-given Gold Medal of the Clockmakers' Company of London. [Listener: Roger Smith]

TRANSCRIPT: The master always had a dinner, the big dinner of the year. It's usually a very important occasion, full of pomp and ceremony, and for my livery dinner I had the Lord Mayor and his Lady Mayoress, Lord Denning and Lady Denning, and Lord Beecham, whether or not Lord Beecham was married I don't know, I can't remember. But the evening was going very well and we were all having a wonderful time because these are very lavish sorts of dinners, and of course that was 20 years ago. So it was a very lavish dinner in those days. And during the course of the evening the Lord Mayor makes a speech, in which he compliments the Clockmakers' Company, and he described how Tompion had written a letter to his case maker saying he wanted a case made, a particular style from pollarded oak and all the fittings to go on it, and the case was duly made and he went from some other aspect of his speech, and these speeches are always designed to pay a compliment you see. To mention the subject... [unclear], And so then it came to Lord Denning's turn. Now my wife had sat next to Lord Denning through the evening and she had got a Daniels watch in her hand and she carefully explained to Lord Denning that this watch was no ordinary watch, it was completely handmade by her husband who had done everything. He had done engine turning and the dial and the hands and the screws and springs and everything. And Julie knew how to describe watches. I mean she'd been seeing me make them all those years, and so Denning was very interested in all this and he came to making his speech and he had a wonderful country brogue, which he would put on on special occasions. And he stood up and said, 'Your master, is better than Tompion. He doesn't send down the road for a case, he makes it himself'. So, the liverymen all cheered. I shouldn't give those fake accents you know.

So that was a great evening for me and the next day I got a letter from Lord Denning in which he thanked me for his dinner and he wanted to give a present to a QC friend who was retiring and could I get him a carriage clock trade price, which I could without any trouble. So, that was a quid pro quo. It's funny, life is a quid pro quo, it's always six of one and half a dozen of the other.

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