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.