The intricate stories timepieces tell

Humans live rigidly by the ticking hand of the clock, but few notice the passing of time with such precision as a horologist. Horology is the science of measuring time, and Rebecca Struthers is the first watchmaker in British history to earn a doctorate in antiquarian horology.

In her debut book Hands of Time she offers a personal history of time and watchmaking, inviting the reader inside her remarkable world. At her workshop in the Birmingham jewellery quarter, she dissects mechanisms that are ‘often smaller than a grain of rice’. Timepieces she has handled range from 18th-century pocket watches to Omega and Rolex wrist watches. One that landed on her desk was a silver Movado wrist watch which, with its owner, survived a crash landing on 9 June 1940 when the three-man crew of a Bristol Blenheim light bomber was gunned down over Normandy:

Chunks of metal had been knocked out of the case, the strap had broken and the rotating bezel he’d used to measure bombing intervals was long gone, but both watch and its owner had made it – battle scarred, but alive and ticking.

Struthers weaves such tales into her book to tell the story of time, for ‘time thrums constantly underneath everything we do. It is the backdrop and the context for our existence and our place in what is now a supremely mechanised world’; and a watch is ‘an inanimate but uniquely human repository of life itself’.

Since the first humans, time has determined the rhythms of life through the cyclical nature of day and night, the sun and the moon. In 1940, archaeologists discovered a 44,000-year-old piece of baboon fibula, the length of an index finger, carved with 29 notches.