What happened to the most important collection of watches ever achieved by a private collector?

How best to record the passage of time is a problem which has exercised the mind of man from the beginnings of history. The mechanical clock dates probably from the end of the 13th century, and since that date clock-making has evoked the finest and most precise — and often the most complicated — mechanism of which each succeeding age was capable. Not content with that, the clockmaker called in every appropriate form of applied art to decorate his efforts — the goldsmith, silversmith, enameller, lapidary and others.

The study of horology is, therefore, one which covers a great many forms of mechanical and artistic effort.

No one even remotely connected with horology would ever think of referring to 'the Ilbert Collection of Clocks and Watches.' All over the world the Ilbert Collection, without qualification, is known as the most complete collection of clocks and watches there ever has been, or is ever likely to exist.

The making of it called for the leisure, means, mechanical knowledge and artistic taste that are rarely found in one man. Courtenay Ilbert had them all, and he devoted 50 years to his tremendous achievement. Primarily, the emphasis of the collection is mechanical and scientific, but nearly every form of decorative art is also represented, and there is hardly any — certainly no important — aspect of horology from about 1500 to 1850 which is not worthily represented.

Ilbert died in February, 1956. The British Museum quickly realised the importance of acquiring his collection for the nation, and for two years his executors continued to hold it while the Museum has investigated the possibilities of raising the relatively modest sum of £85,000 for which it was offered to them. Unfortunately, at this time, their budget up to the end of this year had been fully bespoken, and although various substantial offers have been made towards raising the sum, the Treasury has so far refused a special grant for the balance.

Accordingly, despite their desire for the collection to remain intact and in this country, the executors and beneficiaries under Ilbert's will can no longer delay, and short of a miracle or a change of heart by the Treasury, the clocks will be auctioned at Christie's in November. This unique and never-to-be-repeated work of a lifetime will thus be broken up, and probably many treasures of national importance will go out of this country.

The oldest surviving clocks date from the late 14th century; they are monumental mechanisms such as the Salisbury Cathedral clock of 1386. Exceedingly few domestic clocks exist from before 1500 and the Ilbert Collection starts at about the beginning of the 16th century with the typical late Gothic house clocks, with iron movements, and up to three trains, for the main timekeeper and for striking hours and quarters. These are surmounted by one or two bells carried in a framework with crocketed decorations. The trains are weight-driven, and the escapement is the verge and foliot which was universal for clocks until the application of the pendulum in 1657, and for watches until the practicable development of the balance spring in 1675.

Until these two dates, accuracy of timekeeping made little progress and, perhaps as a compensation, this is the great age of decoration in clocks and watches. Watches, or at any rate portable, spring-driven time-keepers, date from the end of the 15th century. The oldest spring-driven clock is dated 1525 and belongs to the Society of Antiquaries of London. The earliest surviving watches, which could be carried about the person, date from 1550, and the Ilbert Collection has a small, drum-shaped instrument from the mid-century, almost completely without ornamentation, which was certainly intended to be carried. Towards the end of the century watches became less uncommon and the collection is well represented with French fusee and German stackfreed specimens in typical pierced and engraved, metal-gilt cases of flattened drum shape. Clocks became more adventurous, such as the lovely little drum clock with rock-crystal sides and a superimposed, dome-shaped alarum.

An alternative to the fusee or stackfreed, as a means of equalising the variable torque of the mainspring, is found in a mechanism by Hans Kiening. The almost drab, box-shaped case contains a movement of superlative finish in which the depth of engagement of the verge with the crown-wheel is reduced as the pull of the mainspring diminishes. Part of the pierced and engraved blued-steel fretwork which decorates the movement plates was missing, and a replacement was made by Ilbert himself. It is indistinguishable from the finest contemporary work.

Of unparalleled importance is the great clock of 1598 by Nicholas Vallin; it is the earliest dated clock of British make, and probably the oldest surviving musical clock. At each quarter a long performance is made of 13 bells, and the outer case is of architectural form, in metal gilt.

The first half of the 17th century saw increasing richness of decoration, and the collection has a superb variety of watches cased in painted enamel, cut rock crystal, engraved silver and silver-gilt, form watches, pin-work, and so forth; and examples of the early Baroque table clocks with complicated astronomical movements and gilt cases in 'tabernacle' shape.

The collection may have had rivals, but it is with the invention of the pendulum for clocks and the balance-spring for watches that it really comes into its own. Reasonably accurate time-keeping became possible after some 350 years of little or no progress; and British masters leapt at the new opportunities, so that within two decades they had established themselves as pre-eminent, and an export trade had been established.

The Dutchman Huygens first brought the pendulum to a stage when it could be produced commercially, and he confided his method to Samuel Coster, who made the first examples. The Dutch family of Fromanteel had previously settled in London, and they sent John Fromanteel to Holland to learn the new system from Coster.

By 1658, they were advertising pendulum clocks in England, and cased them in what was to become the standard British long-case or grandfather clock. Ilbert's specimen, from details of the pediment-topped case, can be identified as probably the oldest surviving British long-case clock. From it stems a selected range of long-case clocks. Next is an early example of the long pendulum and anchor escapement (Britain's first great contribution to horology) in the form of a superbly proportioned, very simple clock by Joseph Knibb. Then come three Tompions; a year clock by Quare; and then one of the first regulator clocks by Graham. George Graham, by his invention of the deadbeat escapement and mercury-compensated pendulum, brought timekeeping from limits of a minute or two a week at best, to a few seconds a month by soon after 1725. Ilbert's Graham regulator is a superb example, giving sidereal and mean time. It is matched by the slightly later sidereal and mean time regulator of Thomas Mudge, with a gridiron pendulum. This perfectly-proportioned piece was about Ilbert's last important addition to the collection.

Then came John Harrison's first practicable marine timekeeper and Mudge's invention of the lever-escapement. Of Harrison's two successful marine timekeepers one is in the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich and one, belonging to the clockmakers' Company, is in the Guildhall Museum. No example is in private ownership; but of the next steps in the development of the marine chronometer the Ilbert Collection is unsurpassed. Mudge's constant force escapement was too complicated for quantity production, but its performance was unsurpassed for a century. Of the three earlier timekeepers made by Mudge, Ilbert has one. Mudge is also not known to have made more than three instruments with the lever escapement, of which the only watch belongs to Her Majesty the Queen. Of the two clocks, Ilbert's is certainly the first. By 1780 John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw were producing relatively cheap marine chronometers on lines which have not been seriously departed from or improved upon. It is questionable if any very early Earnshaw survives, but the Ilbert Collection has every important type of Arnold's work, and typical specimens of Earnshaw's.

Correspondingly came improvements in the accuracy of pocket watches, with the development of Mudge's lever escapement by Emery, Leroux, Grant and Breguet, and the detent escapement by Arnold and Earnshaw. All of these are represented in fascinating profusion, with cases of appropriately simple perfection. The last great step in the perfection of the pocket watch, by the virtual elimination of position errors, was Breguet's tourbillon. His first perfected specimen he gave in a simple, silver drum-case, with an inscription dedicating it to John Arnold. This unique piece and many other Breguet examples are in the collection.

Also of this final period of the artist-craftsman, before Swiss mass-production methods took the field, are some superb late decorative watches such as transparent enamel over engine-turning, complicated astronomical movements and a variety of unusual French clocks, including a bracket year clock by Berthoud.

As a background to all these mechanically and decoratively perfect clocks and watches is a huge chest of some 2,000 watch movements representing every imaginable facet of mechanism from earliest to latest.

There are many fine collections in the world of clocks and watches, but none covers the whole field so comprehensively as Ilbert's vast collection. With the fierce competition among collectors to-day such a thing could never be got together again. For the three and a half centuries covered by the collection, horology has commanded man's greatest mechanical and decorative skill. That the nation, on the responsibility of the Treasury, should throw away the chance of securing the finest horological collection there will ever be, for the want of part only of the agreed valuation of £85,000, seems almost unthinkable.

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