2. 1985-1987 Hackney Technical College

Hackney Technical College was situated in an old Victorian building on Mare Street, Hackney, North-East London. My fellow horologists were a mixed bunch; there were about a dozen of us on the course aged from 17 to sixty-something. Some of the younger students were the children of parents who owned watch or jewellery shops and others were mature students, one at retirement age, another who had spent the previous years selling Rolls Royce.

The Horology course occupied the top floor of the Mare Street building. It was staffed by five teachers and two technicians (whose job it was to protect the machines and the tools that would be handed out and used by the students). 

One room was for technical drawing, when we still used pencils, another was the clean room for the assembly of wristwatch movements and the third had the electrical equipment needed for quartz movements. In addition, there were two machine workshops, the first filled with lathes where we would perform “big” work, and the second for smaller work, which contained tools such as watchmaker’s lathes.

The course was on general horology: it covered history, theory, clocks, pocket watches, mechanical wristwatches and quartz. One of the goals of the course was to help you determine which direction you wanted to take. Horology in all its forms is a diverse subject. 

To complete the course we needed to make a sample piece: base plate, balance cock, a balance wheel and balance staff, making all the parts from drawings plus making and polishing all of the screws. Once completed, each one would be checked and controlled, and it would go towards your final mark.

I finished at Hackney in mid-1987. At that time the idea of working in the basement of a small London watch shop didn’t appeal, although I would end up doing just that a few years later. The automatic choice was to enter the Swiss Watchmaking School *WOSTEP in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. With a Swiss Horological education there would be more commercial opportunities and the basic education from Hackney was quite thin from a commercial working standpoint.

As a general rule, students didn’t go from Hackney College straight to WOSTEP – the entrance criteria at the time required you to have two or three years of commercial experience before starting the course. But the ‘then’ dominance of the quartz watch meant that times were difficult for the industry, and admission numbers at WOSTEP were sharply down. To keep the numbers up and the school running they had to compromise, and the class I entered with was the youngest the school had accepted. The man who taught and kept the school alive was Antoine Simonin.

A quote from Mr Beany (real name) head of the Horology department at Hackney, “A good watchmaker isn’t one that doesn’t make mistakes; a good watchmaker is one who can correct them”.