As Time Goes By

An old friend from our seven years in Bad Homburg was in Hong Kong last week in his new role as Director of Marketing for a German manufactory of exclusive hand crafted mechanical timepieces – that’s wristwatches to you and me. I am not referring here to any old watches for these beautifully fashioned works of art are so precious that only 5,000 pieces are made each year.

On Saturday evening we were invited to join a workshop to try at first hand the German watch making experience, followed by dinner. The invitation directed us to a beautiful neo-gothic style building known as Béthanie perched on a hill looking down over Pokfulam. Béthanie is now the landmark heritage campus of the Hong Kong Academy for Performing Arts, but was originally built in 1875 by the Missions Etrangères de Paris and was used by them for a century as a sanatorium. Restoration began in 2003 and the new home to the HKAPA School of Film and Television now includes performance venues, an exhibition hall, a chapel and the museum of Béthanie itself. For the night we were there, however, it had been transformed into a watch making manufactory with three studios laid out for master classes in watch making, polishing and finishing and engraving.

The watch making class saw us attempt to use fine hand tools to remove a ruby from the balance cock of a watch and then replace it. Jewels, we learnt, are used in watches to reduce friction between moving parts. Next we tried removing a minute screw from the rim of the balance wheel. A special tool was needed to hold the head of the screw which was way too small for the clumsy grip of thumb and forefinger. Sneeze and your pieces were gone. The tiny jewels and parts weigh next to nothing. And the parts we had before us on our desks but could barely see were actually some of the larger components of watch making.

I wondered whether using robots wouldn’t give better results. The master watch maker was far too polite to say, well in your case, probably yes, but patiently explained that the dexterity of the “mind’s tool” is far superior to computer-controlled machines and that no mechanism in the world is capable of working with such flexibility, measure and deliberation as the human hand. I looked at my own pair with new found respect.

We moved on to the polishing workshop. The polishing and finishing department is the second largest in the manufactory after the watch making itself. Here I was sure we would be given machines to file and polish the tiny parts. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We pressed a minute piece from the inner workings into a small chunk of soft wood with the help of a clamp and two brass discs. The wood became a holding tool. Then we flat-polished the miniature piece, moving the wooden holder in slow figure of eight movements on a special surface on the desk in front of us all the while trying to ensure the pressure was balanced uniformly to prevent skew. Only once the Meister was satisfied with our work were we allowed to move from one apparently smooth polishing surface to the next imperceptibly smoother one to continue refining our work.

Next came engraving. The master engraver who heads up this department invited those who were wearing one of these precious watches to hand them over so he could identify which of his seven member team had engraved their watches. The watches are not signed by their engravers but he could tell from the style of their craftsmanship alone. A Chinese gentleman made us all laugh when he passed his watch forward and said in a stage whisper behind his hand, Shenzhen copy, I wonder if he’ll spot it. We attempted to engrave an initial onto a piece of brass far larger than anything that would go in a watch. Our efforts were botched, heavy handed and generally inconsistent. They didn’t offer me a trainee contract but it was a fascinating experience all the same.

At dinner I was placed between two proud owners of these fabulous watches. To my right was a charming collector. Time pieces are his passion but to date his collection is down to 35. He sometimes sells two or three of his watches to buy the latest addition to his collection, he explained. He collects them as others might collect sports cars, art or fine wine but he doesn’t always tell his wife when he buys a new one. A watch is, after all, the only jewel a man can really wear he said. Tell that to P. Diddy I thought.

For me, however, the best part of the evening was chatting to the proud craftsmen who had demonstrated their skills to us. In a previous life I was an EFL teacher in Saxony in the former East Germany and lived in the foothills of the Ore Mountains not far from the small town where these watches are made. I arrived not long after German reunification. It was an incredible time to be there, living a piece of history in the midst of a nation under reconstruction. Despite the initial euphoria at the fall of the Berlin Wall long term unemployment was on the increase and the region and its people were downcast and faced great uncertainty. Many students in the school where I taught were required to retrain in order to qualify for their unemployment benefits. Most were women and amongst them were one time fork lift truck drivers or crane operators now starting over as bi-lingual secretaries or travel agency clerks.

In 1990 the great grandson of the watch making firm’s original founder returned to his home town in the Ore Mountains and established the company a second time 145 years to the day after his great grandfather’s pioneering act. The firm now employs 500 people. I am nostalgic about the years I spent in Saxony and I rejoice in every success story that emerges from within its borders. Hand crafted precision time pieces is one such story.