Brownsword's: Derby watchmakers crafted beautiful silver timepieces

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Maxwell Craven traces the history of Derby watch and clock makers, the Brownswords, who made beautiful, elegant hand-crafted silver timepieces in the 18th and 19th centuries, which are very collectible items today.

A watch dated 1815 by Peter Brownsword of Derby

THE collecting of things with a good local provenance is one way Derbyshire loyalists can express their patriotism – and the scope is enormous both in range and price, from a £25,000 piece of 18th-century Blue John to a 25p postcard of a local church.

About in the middle come clocks and watches.

There are numerous makers recorded for the county, mainly concentrated in Derby, and years ago you could pick up a local 18th-century or early-19th-century silver-cased watch for £50-£100, although they’re a bit pricier today.

They are not only attractive and useful but also easy to store. They are exquisitely made for, while the cases are in most instances plain, the movements – the one place you see least of – are in beautifully crafted and decorated settings.

For the purist, there is, however, a distinction. Most 18th-century watches, at least up to the 1770s, were made by the man whose name they bore.

After that, many of the lesser watchmakers assembled watches from parts supplied by larger firms, often outside the region. Eventually, many such people, still customising the watches and clocks they assembled, took to diversifying as jewellers, opticians and the like.

Some families, however, continued into the 19th century, making clocks and watches by hand in small artisans’ cottages, only buying in cases and component blanks.

The watch illustrated here is an example by a Derby family firm whose products are always a delight. It is a silver pair-cased, verge watch by Peter Brownsword the elder, of Derby, made in 1815.

Pair-cased means there is an inner and separate outer case, both silver and, in this case, assayed in London in 1814.

Verge refers to the device that regulates the watch’s movement. This particular type – the inventor is unknown – was the first developed for a portable timepiece and was therefore fairly universal for watches until superseded by more advanced escapements towards the end of the 18th century and later.

This watch has an elegant enamel dial with slim gilt hands and a profusely engraved movement. This is floridly signed and unusually dated AD 1815. Usually, the movement would carry a serial number rather than a date. In this case, the prefix “AD” is the giveaway. The fact that the case was assayed the previous year suggests that Brownsword bought about a dozen to keep him going and made the movements as required.

Brownsword was born in February 1773, the son of a William and Jane Brownsword. The family may have come from Parwich. A sister married George Smith, a brazier, who emerges as a relation of the 19th-century Smith clockmaking dynasty of Queen Street. Braziers were useful associates of clockmakers, as they could produce the brass plates into which movements were fitted, along with blanks for moving parts.

At almost 22, Peter married Ellen Bates at Calke church and they had two daughters and three sons, of whom two, Peter and Robert, became watch and clockmakers.

They were probably apprentices to their father. While Robert, the younger, set up in High Street, Nottingham, later moving to Carlton Street and dying around 1852, the two Peters lived and worked at 11 Fingal Street, Derby.

This, incidentally, was a street which, along with Ossian Street, connected London and Osmaston Roads and was originally named after the fictional Irish hero dreamt up by the 18th-century poet James MacPherson. It was renamed the rather more prosaic Upper Hill Street in the mid-1840s after MacPherson’s fancies were exposed.

By that time, however, the elder Brownsword had died and the younger had moved to Duffield, dying after 1857.

He left three daughters but the family name was continued by the descendants of the elder of the two Peters.

One, Anderson Brownsword, became a wealthy lace manufacturer in Nottingham, serving as sheriff in 1890 and mayor in 1892-3, before retiring to Norfolk.

Nor did clockmaking die out with Peter Brownsword the younger. There was a W Brownsword of Derby working in 1890, conceivably the William Brownsword who was listed as a jeweller in Fowler Street in 1852, but to which branch of the family he belonged, I am unclear.

Nor can I place John Joseph Brownsword, who was a flower painter at Royal Crown Derby until 1893 when he was appointed principal of the Hull School of Art, a post he held for 40 years.

So, I suppose, for the collector of locally associated objects, a Royal Crown Derby plate painted by J J Brownsword ought to be juxtaposed with a clock or watch by one of the Peters. But I’m afraid the day of the £100 verge watch has long gone!