Roger W. Smith

Roger W. Smith OBE is the most important watchmaker working in the English tradition today — the sole apprentice and chosen successor of the late Dr. George Daniels, and the living embodiment of a craft lineage that runs from Thomas Tompion and George Graham through John Arnold and Thomas Earnshaw to Daniels himself. Born in 1970 in Bolton, Lancashire, Smith grew up with little interest in academic study but a powerful instinct for the practical and the mechanical. At 16 his father suggested enrolling him in the three-year horology course at the Manchester School of Horology, a British Horological Institute-affiliated programme. He graduated in 1989 at the top of his class, winning the BHI Bronze Medal — awarded annually to the most outstanding graduating student. During his studies, George Daniels visited the college as a guest speaker; from that moment Smith knew with absolute clarity what he wanted to do. He found employment servicing watches at Duval Ltd and briefly at TAG Heuer, but found the life of a repairer unsatisfying. Armed with a copy of Daniels' book Watchmaking and a lathe in a draughty garage in Bolton, he began making his first pocket watch entirely by hand — a one-minute tourbillon with detent escapement and regulator-style dial.

At the age of 22, he took the completed watch to the Isle of Man for Daniels to appraise. Daniels examined it and told him it looked 'too handmade' — meaning the evidence of the hand was too visible, the work not yet refined enough to transcend its own making. Smith returned to Bolton and started again. His second pocket watch — also a tourbillon with detent escapement, but now incorporating a four-year perpetual calendar complication — was made and completely remade four times over five and a half years as his understanding deepened and his standards rose. The completed piece was delivered to Daniels in early 1997. This time, it passed.

In 1998 Daniels invited Smith to join him on the Isle of Man — not as a traditional apprentice but as a collaborator, a distinction Daniels drew carefully. The previous year Smith had cold-written to Daniels requesting this; Daniels had rejected every prospective apprentice who had ever approached him before, and took years to respond. Working alongside Daniels from 1998, Smith was instrumental in the completion of the Daniels Millennium series — a collaboration with Omega in which Daniels agreed to design a series of watches powered by movements incorporating his co-axial escapement, produced over three years and completed in 2001. In the same year Smith established his own workshop and company in Sulby on the Isle of Man, beginning production of watches under his own name. The Series 2 was launched in 2006 as his foundational wristwatch — the first production watch in the world designed specifically to incorporate the Daniels co-axial escapement — and remained the cornerstone of his output for nearly two decades. Its movement formed the basis of the Daniels Anniversary wristwatch calibre, a project conceived with Daniels that was formally launched in 2010 and which Smith was entrusted to complete after Daniels' death in October 2011 aged 85; the 47 Daniels Anniversary pieces were produced across fifteen years in yellow gold (35 pieces), platinum (4), white gold (4), and red gold (4), with the final watch completed in 2025 — the end of an era, as the Anniversary was the last watch conceived and designed during Daniels' lifetime.

When Daniels died, he bequeathed the entire contents of his workshop to Smith: the Schaublin lathes, the Hauser jig borer, the hand engine-turning equipment dating back to the 1820s, and every tool with which Daniels had made his watches. Also among the inherited possessions was Daniels' final unfinished pocket watch — a complex piece incorporating a 15-second remontoir d'égalité mechanism, with over 250 components already made from raw materials but no drawings or plans, representing approximately 2,000 hours of Daniels' work. Smith has been engaged in completing it; progress was discussed in a 2024 appearance on the Scottish Watches Podcast. The George Daniels Educational Trust was formed at the time of Daniels' passing, with proceeds from the Anniversary wristwatch series supporting its work. Smith also further developed the co-axial escapement specifically: by reducing the weight of the escape wheel by 23%, he achieved transformative improvements in mechanical efficiency and longevity — enabling service intervals far beyond industry standards — first demonstrated in The Great Britain (2013), a unique one-of-a-kind wristwatch based on the Series 2 created as part of the UK government's GREAT Britain campaign, for which Smith served as a watchmaking ambassador on the invitation of the British Prime Minister. The Great Britain's dial — an engine-turned Union Jack, fabricated on the lathe inherited from Daniels — was deliberately offset from centre so that the engine-turning pattern could speak for itself rather than the national symbol.

Today Roger W. Smith Ltd. operates from a facility in Sulby on the Isle of Man, producing 10–15 watches per year across five production series, each requiring up to 2,000 hours of hand work and a waiting list measured in years. 185 watches have been created in total as of Smith's most recent public statement. The Daniels Method — the comprehensive approach to making a watch entirely from raw materials in a single workshop, mastering 32 of the 34 skills requisite in the process, without repetitive or automatic tools — governs every aspect of production. Smith is the only watchmaker in the world who follows this method in full. His team of apprentices is trained in the same complete programme, and the workshop's educational function is considered as important as its production function: Smith mentors with an explicit commitment to ensuring the Daniels Method survives him.

The five production series are: the Series 1 (time-only, 38/40mm, inspired by The Great Britain, simplicity as philosophy, engine-turned dial, in-house hands); the Series 2 (power reserve complication, the foundational wristwatch, launched 2006, also available as the Open Dial version from 2010 — designed to showcase the under-dial work normally visible only to the watchmaker: frosted and gilded plates, black-polished bevelled steel, the meticulous under-dial construction); the Series 3 (retrograde calendar at 12 o'clock, symmetrical dial, also available as an Open Dial from 2023); the Series 4 (41mm, his 100th watch in 2020, instantaneous triple calendar with the travelling date aperture, and moon phase with signature purple-blue night sky, silver moons, and riveted gold stars); and the Series 5 (the Mark 2 Open Dial version of the Series 2, celebrating the movement as three-dimensional sculpture, bevelled edges and black-polished surfaces framed by frosted gilded plates with blued Roman numeral hour markers). A limited tourbillon collection with flying tourbillon and co-axial escapement has also been produced.

Smith was awarded the OBE in the Queen's Birthday Honours 2018 for services to British watchmaking. The Musée International d'Horlogerie in La Chaux-de-Fonds awarded him the Craftsmanship-Creation prize — often described as the Nobel Prize of watchmaking — for his lifelong commitment to the art and tradition of craft horology and his role as an ambassador for the independent British watchmaking tradition. The 2015 documentary The Watchmaker's Apprentice, directed after what began as a short television profile, captures the relationship between Smith and Daniels. He has stated his own ambition with characteristic directness: 'I like to think that we are operating at the level the British watch industry would have reached had its Golden Age never been interrupted.'