George Daniels - Why I started the George Daniels Educational Trust (62/85)

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To listen to more of George Daniels’s stories, go to the playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLVV0r6CmEsFzkr4WCsqrhvkOpA-pLIGmS English watch-maker George Daniels (1926-2011) was most famous for creating the co-axial escarpment and could make a complete watch by hand. In his lifetime, he received many awards, including the rarely-given Gold Medal of the Clockmakers' Company of London. [Listener: Roger Smith; date recorded: 2003] TRANSCRIPT: So then I was virtually finished with the Clockmakers' Company, except I turned up at all meetings and I never had very much to say. It seemed to me that they never actually did what they said they were going to do any more than the BHI does what it said it's going to do, so there was little point in commenting on it. And then after a while I decided I'd had enough of it and I passed it over to a friend, who had then just come on to the court and he took over the scheme. He's never had any apprentices you see, he hasn't got any money, but I think we might find him some now. But on my... for my part in education, after I'd resigned from this horological industries committee, I got to thinking about some correspondence I read in the Horological Journal, which... to the effect that Rolex Company were no longer going to allow watchmakers to buy materials because they didn't trust the watchmakers who did bad work and Rolex got a bad reputation. I'm sure there's a lot of truth in that, but it seemed to me that depriving them of spare parts wasn't really the way to go about it. The British Horological Institute took it up with the Minister of Trade, which of course couldn't possibly do any good because the industry is so small, and how could we prove that we weren't wrecking the watches? So that didn't work, and I decided that if these watchmakers weren't good enough, we'd better train them to be good enough and that would solve the problem. And so I started my Horological Industries Educational Trust and I raised the money from the Burton family. Burton, the tailors of taste who sold suits for 50 shillings for years, and I knew the Burtons quite well, and Stanley Burton, who was a liveryman of the Clockmakers, had died a couple of years earlier. And so Audrey said, you know Stanley would have wanted to be associated with any plans you had for education. And so I said I've got one and I'm going to need £10,000 a year for five years. So she paid up the money and we got cracking on it and so far we've done very well. We have our own certificate and we have issued 29 certificates out of 90 class members. So we're not giving the certificates away ad lib, they've got to work for them, they've got to get it right. We've got a very, very good instructor and so far it's been very successful and all the students enjoy it and their work is better and I'm hoping now to see if this argument arises again with Rolex... and now other companies have started, jumped on the bandwagon... but if the argument arises again, I've got this group of men whom I can take and show them they know exactly what to do. In fact, they know more what to do than the Rolex technicians do because my students have done it; the Rolex technicians only talk about it. They go by the handbook, but we've done the work. So, it should be a stop gap against further erosion of their desire for components, we can only wait and see. But at least we're prepared.