![]() "The work is fascinating, and a job is virtually guaranteed." "A newly-qualified graduate can expect to earn £16K as a starting salary," he says, "and getting by on that in London can be difficult." However, he is adamant that though the rewards aren't financial, they are there. If the art of watchmaking does die out, it won't be for want of effort from John Murphy, course lecturer at Manchester City College. But, at least, in those days you could always find at least one person in any town who understood the insides of a watch. They would be languishing there still, had it not been for the unpaid restoration work of Rupert Gould, a clock obsessive. John Harrison never received the recognition he deserved for his series of marine chronometers that effectively enabled sailors to determine longitude at sea, and by the 1920s all four of them were gathering dust, forgotten in some corner of a cellar in the Maritime Museum. ![]() Horology has never been exactly sexy, and one could argue that watchmaking has always lived in the shadows. What's more we now have a situation where most of the main Swiss retail outlets are in the capital and we don't have a single training establishment in the south-east." "The average age of those working as horologists is going up and up and we aren't attracting young people in. "No one even thinks of watchmaking as a possible profession these days," says Tony Lewis, vice-president of the BHI. Tomorrow, manufacturers, such as Omega, Seiko, Rolex and Rotary, along with training providers and careers services, will link up at a conference hosted by the British Horological Institute (BHI) at its Nottinghamshire headquarters to find ways of halting what they fear is a terminal decline in the industry. ![]() So at a rough estimate, the Swiss watch manufacturers are almost certainly 20,000 watchmakers short of the full cog. Our lack of enthusiasm is matched abroad, with America, mainland Europe and Australia showing an equal reluctance to make things tick. Together, they send out between 30 to 40 graduates each year. The horology course at Hackney College closed down three years ago due to lack of demand for places, and the only remaining institutions offering this training are Manchester City College and the University of Central England. ![]() Britain's response has been muted, to put it mildly. ![]()
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