The Mary Rose's Watery Grave and Resurrection

 

The Mary Rose as depicted in the Anthony Roll, a survey of all of King Henry VII's ships, after her 1636 reconstruction with her distinct carrack profile of high castles fore and aft. Although the number of guns and gun ports is not entirely accurate, the picture is overall a good illustration of the ship.

In 1536 the Mary Rose already had 26 years of service which made her old for a heavy warship in an era when worms, barnacles, and dry rot took a toll on hulls, keels, and decking in addition to the great hazards of foundering in heavy weather, running aground, or being sunk or captured in combat.  But she was the core of English King Henry VIII’s small personal navy and for many of her years his heaviest ship laden with a huge complement of cannon.  She had survived combat, mostly against the French in the naval adventures that the Tudor monarch was able to undertake against his much more formidable Continental enemies.

But she had been in idle reserve for years when she was hauled to dry dock almost completely rebuilt that year with a treasury newly swollen by the King’s seizure and closure of the monasteries. Records of her original conformation and of the reconstruction are sketchy but naval historians and archeologists believe she was probably re-planked with fresh heavy oak from the hull to the decks.  In the process at least one additional deck was added giving her a total of four, the distinctive high fore and aft castles of a carrack raised even more.  She was one of the first war ships outfitted with a new innovation—gun ports—that added two more levels of artillery platforms to the open deck.  In the new form she carried between 78 and 91 guns, although some were light deck swivel guns meant for anti-personnel use.  That was an enormous wallop, although the in-line battle formations that made the use of broadsides so deadly had not yet been developed.  She would have to try to deploy those guns in virtual free-for-all close quarter melees.  In the process of this her tonnage increased about 500 to between 700 and 900 and her complement of crew, soldiers, and gunners swollen considerably.

Henry must have been pleased.  He made Mary Rose the flagship of his navy and set her off in service of his dream of restoring England to major power status.

At the turn of the 16th Century, England, having lost all but a toehold of its French holdings and having been embroiled for years in the dynastic War of the Roses was reduced to being a peripheral European power.  Mighty France was in the ascendency, Spain was newly unified and began to fatten from the plunder of gold and silver from the New World, and its Hapsburg dynasty also had control of the seafaring Low Countries. 

The English were far from the world dominant sea power they would become.  Henry VII, founder of the Tudor dynasty at the end of the War of the Roses was able to maintain only a small personal navy—five or six reasonably heavy ships.  In time of war merchant vessels were hastily and sometimes unsuitably adapted as war ships and small fleets light galleys—the staple of naval warfare since Roman times were slapped together.  Most fighting would be done within sight of shore—often in support of raids, invasions, and land campaigns. 

Open water fleet confrontations were rare, but with the rapid development of global empires would become more important.  Most open ocean combat was commerce raiding and conducted by privateers.

Henry VIII as we are not used to seeing him--a just crowned 20-year-old King who took special interest in the construction of new warships.

At the end of his reign Henry VII had a very small personal navy and only two sizable warships.  Circumstantial evidence indicates that he ordered the construction of the Mary Rose and a slightly smaller companion Peter Pomegranate to join his carracks Regent and Sovereign. Because the old growth giant oaks necessary for the two new ships had to be gathered from forest remnants across England, construction was not begun until just after young Henry VIII, then just 20 years old, assumed the throne.

The ambitious young monarch with big plans evidently took a personal interest in the construction.  He also probably selected her name, either for his favorite sister Mary and the Tudor Rose or for the Virgin Mary as symbolized by a rose.  Perhaps the name even had a double meaning.

Her keel was laid in Portsmouth in 1510 and she was launched in July 1511 and then towed to London and fitted with rigging and decking and supplied with armaments.  No known plans or pictures from life are known from this period and there is some controversy as to her exact conformation, but she drew about 500 tons.  The shape of the hull was a tumblehome form and reflected the use of the ship as a platform for heavy guns. Above the waterline, the hull gradually narrowed to compensate for the weight of the guns and to make boarding more difficult. 

The open deck between the fore and aft castles was meant to accommodate not only artillery, but scores of yeomen longbowmen who could rain death into the rigging and onto the decks of opposing warships.  There would also need to be room for compliments of bruisers capable of wielding cutlasses in boarding parties.   These troops—and additional soldiers if she was on an invasion or raiding mission usually outnumbered the sailing crew and gunners. 

When Mary Rose set sail on her first combat cruise in 1512 she carried 206 sailors; 120 gunners; 22 sailing officers, surgeons, pursers, quartermasters, and the like; and 411 soldiers of all types.  That was a mighty crowded ship.

That year Henry VIII made an alliance with the Spain against the French after his marriage to Catherine of Aragon for the War of the League of Cambrai.  Her first action was as Admiral Sir Edward Howard’s flagship in action against a combined French and Breton fleet in the English Channel.  In action in support of a landing of Spanish troops further south, Howard’s fleet captured 12 Breton ships and conducted landings and raids along the Breton coast.  Her first action was a victory.

The Cordelière and Regent locked in a mutual death grip after a powder magazine explosion on the French ship set both ablaze from a contemporary illustration to a French poem about the battle.

Later that year she got to use her heavy guns against a superior fleet for the first time at the Battle of Saint-Mathieu off the coast of Brest.  Mary Rose reportedly led the charge into a large French/Breton fleet which was disorganized.  In a confused melee fight the English got the upper hand.  The battle is best remembered because the Breton flagship Cordelière and was boarded by the Regent, a newer English ship drawing 1,000 tons.  In the confusing fight the powder magazine of the Cordelière blew up setting fire to the Regent and sinking her.  Only about 180 and of the English ship’s crew and a handful of Bretons survived.  The High Admiral of France and the Steward of the town of Morlaix were among the hundreds killed.  Admiral Howard burned 27 French ships, captured another five and landed forces near Brest to raid and take prisoners.   More damage might have been done but Channel storms caused the English fleet to return to England for repairs.

The war dragged on another two years.  In 1512 Admiral Howard was killed after leading a boarding party against a pesky galley and the fleet returned to England in disarray.  By 1514 the war ended with a new peace between the old rivals and the marriage of Henry’s sister Mary to French King Louis XII.

Mary Rose other English carracks were taken out of ordinary and spruced up to escort Henry VIII to his rendezvous with the French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520.  From the 1540 painting The Embarkation of Henry VIII at Dover.

With the outbreak of peace Mary Rose and most other English war ships were laid up in ordinary—docked with a skeleton crew of a dozen or so and minimally maintained until 1522 with one short exception—she and other reserve ships were called into service and decorated lavishly to escort Henry to France for his meeting with new French King Francis I at the Field of the Cloth of Gold in June 1520. Their menacing magnificence was meant as a warning to the French king.

Peace could never last too long between the old rivals.  In 1522 Henry allied himself with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V and the Papal States for a war on the Mediterranean power Venice and France.  England planned an invasion of France while French armies, the Austrians and Papal states slugged it out in Italy.  Mary Rose escorted an invasion fleet which captured the Breton port of Morlaix.  She returned to England without serious naval combat.  Most of the rest of the war was conducted on land in France, with the English managing to briefly threaten Paris.  The Scots joined the war on the French side and Mary Rose spent most of the rest of the war patrolling the Channel to deter French counter-raids and harass the Scots.

Meanwhile the French were defeated in Italy at the Battle of Pavia where Francis was captured by armies personally led by Charles V.  in 1525.  That ended Charles’s interest in the war and Henry was forced to withdraw empty handed from France.

Mary Rose returned to ordinary and kept in reserve until 1545.  It was during this period that she was “made new” along with most of the other capital ships of the small Navy under the stewardship of the King’s favorite at the time, Thomas Cromwell.  Despite the enlargement and reconstruction, she returned to ordinary for another nine years after work was completed.

Henry VIII complex marriage arrangements made the former pious Defender of the Faith abandon Catholicism and awkwardly back into Protestantism.  His divorce from Catherine of Aragon who could not produce a male heir precipitated the change.  It also cut him off from his former alliance with Spain.  His very profitable—for him—seizure of the monasteries earned the further wrath of another former ally, the Pope.  Henry and England were diplomatically marginalized and the likely target for a Catholic crusade led by mighty France.

Once again Henry accepted an alliance with Charles V and agreed to cooperate on invasions of France from opposite directions.  Mary Rose was called to escort the invasion force that managed to capture Boulogne at great cost in September 1544.  But Charles made a separate peace with France and left his ally high, dry, and dangerously exposed.  The French were able to concentrate their power against the English.

Galleys swarmed carracks who couldn't bring their broadsides to bear against the fast, maneuverable gunboats. 

In July a huge force under the command of Admiral Claude d’Annebault set sail for England from Havre de Grâce with 128 ships including a large number of nimble Mediterranean galleys and an army of 30,000 or so.  The English could muster only 80 ships, most of them hastily converted merchantmen and about 18,000 troops.  After a brief attempt at a counter raid, the English retreated to Portsmouth.  The French advanced into the strait that separates the Isle of Wight from the mainland. They landed troops on the Isle and advanced on Portsmouth where the English capital ships were becalmed and unable to maneuver.

Henry VIII dined on board Great Harry, the flagship of Admiral John Dudley on the evening of July 18 and then retired to land to watch the battle unfold.  The French attacked with their galleys aiming to swarm and destroy the helpless warships.  The English had only a dozen galleys of their own, which they sent out on a virtual suicide mission to stop the attack.  Then, almost miraculously, the wind suddenly rose.  Led by the venerable Mary Rose, flagship of Vice Admiral George Carew, the English charged the attacking galleys scattering them.  They were driving to the French capital ships when Mary Rose in the van suddenly foundered and sank taking over 400 of her crew and soldiers to their deaths.

Mary Rose heels over and founders in this 19th Century painting of the disaster.

The French thought that their galleys had managed to get close enough to sink her, but there is no evidence of that.  No one knows exactly how she came to suddenly disastrously take water.  The leading theory is that the inexperienced gun crews—there were hardly any other kind after all of the years of peace— left the lowest tier of gun ports open after a salvo allowing them to be swamped with water as she heeled over in a mild wind to make a turn. Henry watched unbelieving from shore.

Despite the loss, the English charge disrupted and scattered the French fleet.  Meanwhile multiple landings on the Isle of Wight were repulsed in bitter fighting.  They took especially heavy casualties in an assault on the newly built fortress at Bonchurch which was defended by local militia.

His invasion in disarray and his own flagship leaking heavily and in danger of sinking out from under him, Admiral d’Annebault abandoned his attack and sailed back to France.  England had almost miraculously been saved.

The mysterious fate of the gallant Mary Rose quickly became the stuff of legend and of ballads. 

Her loss and the close call encouraged Henry VIII to modernize his navy.  While still in the King’s Service the fleet was reorganized into the Navy Royal and expanded to 58 vessels by the time of Henry’s death in 1547.  His immediate successors, the boy king Edward VI and Queen Mary let the fleet deteriorate again to a mere coastal defense force.  Elizabeth I is usually credited with the determination to make England a world dominate naval power, but she had to rely on privateers and pirates like John Hawkins and Francis Drake to beat back the next great invasion threat—the Spanish Armada.  It was not until Restoration of Charles II in 1660 that the modern Royal Navy was officially created.

The dive team that discovered Mary Rose--Lt. Comander Alan Bax at center.

As for Mary Rose, she lay unmolested below the straight for centuries until her wreckage was discovered in 1971 after years of searching by teams led by historian, journalist, and amateur diver Alexander McKee and a group led by Lieutenant-Commander Alan Bax of the Royal Navy, sponsored by the Committee for Nautical Archaeology in London.  The two teams were originally fierce rivals with different theories of how she was lost and where exactly she might lay, but eventually combined efforts. She was found buried in silt 1.9 miles south of the entrance to Portsmouth harbor at a depth of just 36 feet at low tide.

The location had to be kept a secret because under British law at the time she could be freely plundered by looters and treasure hunters.  As a thin legal fiction, the discovery teams leased the seabed from Portsmouth harbor to afford questionable protection.  In 1973 Parliament finally passed the Protection of Wrecks Act and the Mary Rose was declared to be of national historic interest and enjoyed full legal protection from any disturbance by commercial salvage teams.  Even then there were years of lingering litigation and “personal items” retrieved from the wreck like chests, clothing remnants, cooking utensils, and some tools were claimed as fair game by salvagers and were in danger of being seized and auctioned off if raised from the wreck. 

It took years for a Mary Rose Committee with representatives from the National Maritime Museum, the Royal Navy, the BBC, and local Portsmouth organizations to raise money, mostly from private donors, to begin serious attempts to save and raise the ship.  The Committee became a registered charity in 1974, the same year it got official Royal patronage from Prince Charles, who made dives to the site. 

By 1978 initial excavation was complete revealing a remarkably intact hull.  Now that the hull was exposed, preservationists had to act quickly before biological decay and the scouring of the currents destroyed the wreckage. 

The cost of raising her would be enormous so a new organization, The Mary Rose Trust was created to raise funds and oversee the operations.  In 1979 the salvage vessel Sleipner was purchased for the operation and diving grew to 50-man teams working nine months a year with scores of additional volunteer divers.  From 1979 to 1982 over 22,000 diving hours were spent on the site, amounting to 11.8 man-years.

Raising Mary Rose.

On the morning of October 11, 1982 just before foul weather would delay the project another year and after years of technological challenges, fits and starts, and sometimes dissention on the team, the operation to raise the wreck finally began.  A special frame built to encase and stabilize the wreck was slowly jacked up on four legs straddling the wreck site to pull her off the seabed. The massive crane of the barge Tog Mor was lifted the frame and hull on to the specially designed cradle which was padded with water-filled bags.  Then with Prince Charles, BBC crew, and scores of excited witnesses the final lift began with the wreck breaking water at 9:02.  Despite one leg of the frame buckling and a corner of the frame slipping nearly 3 feet, the hull was lifted successfully out with minimal damage. 

The hull was brought to the Portsmouth Historic Dockyard by where Admiral Horatio Nelson’s flagship Victory was preserved.  Decades of meticulous preservation work was completed in carefully climate-controlled environments, much of the time with the wreck and work observable to the public behind glass.  Special care also had to be taken with hundreds of artifacts from the wreck which went on display in the nearby Mary Rose Museum. 

Viewing Mary Rose behind glass at the new Mary Rose Museum in Portsmouth.

The new Mary Rose Museum was designed by architects Wilkinson Eyre, Perkins+Wil and carefully built over and around not only the wreck but the historic dry dock at a cost of £35 million.  It opened to the public on May 31, 2013.  More than 80 million visitors have already toured the facility and in 2017 year it was voted the most popular tourist attraction in Europe.

Preservation of the hull is nearly complete.  It is slowly being dried under careful conditions.  But right now visitors can see the resurrected Mary Rose.

Inventing the Process—The Watch Maker and Interchangeable Parts

 

                        Industrial pioneer Aaron Lufkin Dennison. 

Ordinarily the relocation of a factory from one town to another would hardly be the fodder for all but the most arcane and specialized of almanac-like features.  But on this date in 1854 Aaron Lufkin Dennison moved his four year old watch making business to new facilities in Waltham, Massachusetts, setting the stage for a revolution in industrial production first known as the American System of Watch Manufacturing.  The principles of precision made interchangeable parts, use of specialty machine tools, and consistent calibration measured by highly accurate instruments were soon applied to other industries ushering in a new phase of the Industrial Revolution that created the machines that increasingly shaped daily life.

It was not an easy or smooth road.  Dennison was afflicted with set back after set back—failed early designs and processes, bankruptcies, board intrigues, faithless partners, and financial panics.  The new plant in Waltham slipped from his hands in bankruptcy in just three years, and he was unceremoniously fired as machine shop superintendent in 1861.  He went on to found a number of new businesses to see his dreams crushed time and time again.

 

Dennison's first factory building.

Meanwhile the factory, known as the Boston Watch Company in 1855 went through ownership changes and name changes, finally becoming known as the Waltham Watch Company in 1907 and famous for its railroad chronometers and quality pocket watches.  The company’s direct descendent, the Waltham Aircraft Clock Corporation manufactures that specialty product in Alabama.  Firms that purchased marketing rights to the Waltham name along with some inventory and goodwill and since merged are now known as the Waltham Watch Co. (Delaware) and market imported watches.  A former Swiss subsidiary is now known as Waltham International SA, and markets luxury Swiss made watches to Japan and other international markets.

Dennison was born on March 6, 1812 in Freeport, Maine.  His father was a shoemaker, the lowliest of the skilled trades who taught music on the side.  The family moved to Brunswick when he was a boy.  He got the minimal schooling of a boy of his class—reading, writing, and simple ciphering.  He may have supplemented this with reading from books borrowed from neighbors. 

He spent much of his childhood and youth at various jobs to help the family.  He carried hod for a bricklayer, cut wood, and was a herdsman.  By his teenage years he was accomplished enough at his letters and arithmetic to clerk at a local store before joining his father in his cobbler’s shop.  Dennison displayed his first interest in improving production techniques by suggesting his father pre-cut pieces to make shoes by the batch rather than start-to-finish one at a time.

At age 18, rather than formally apprentice to his father, Dennison bound himself to James Cary, a local clock maker.  During his apprenticeship he apparently devised some sort of machine for cutting gear wheels.  The exact nature of the machine is unknown but was probably a modification of an existing wheel cutter that allowed him to press a few layers of metal at the same time, creating identical gears with each impression.  Again, the idea was to provide parts in batches for future assembly.  Cary so admired his apprentice’s skill and ingenuity that he offered Dennison a partnership at age 21.

But Dennison knew he had to learn more or be stuck in a provincial shop.  He headed to Boston to work for and study with the best American watch repairers.  He volunteered to work for three months at jeweler Currier & Trott without pay and then was hired by them.  By 1834 at age 22, he felt confident enough to open his own repair shop.  But he gave that up only two years later when he was offered the chance to work under Boston’s most sophisticated master watch maker, Tubal Howe of Jones, Low & Ball where he could learn the techniques of the best Swiss and British craftsmen. 

He stayed with Howe until 1839 when he left for New York City where he spent several months with a colony of Swiss watchmakers.  Returning to Boston he once again set up his own shop offering not only repair services but also selling watches, tools, and repair equipment.  During this period he perfected the Denton Combine Gage “upon which all the different parts of a watch could be accurately measured.”  This later became the Standard Gage of the industry and was just the first in the specialty instruments he devised.

Meanwhile Aaron established a second business with his younger brother Eliphalet Whorf Dennison, his former partner in his old Boston repair shop.  Together they went into a specialty business manufacturing paper boxes for jewelry stores.  The enterprise, filling an unmet niche, was a success.  But after a few years Aaron withdrew from the company to pursue his dream of manufacturing his own watches, leaving the firm in Eliphalet’s hands.  It continued to prosper as the Dennison Manufacturing Company and still exists today as Avery Dennison Corporation a manufacturer of pressure sensitive adhesive products which recently sold its well-known envelope, business stationary, and school supply lines which continue to be marketed under the name Avery.

Thing must have been looking pretty good for the 28 year old Aaron in 1840.  After years of dedicating himself single-mindedly to business he married Charlotte Ware Foster who was connected to the Ware family of distinguished Unitarian clergy.  Together they would have five children.

While continuing to operate his businesses, Dennison dreamed of going into watch manufacture.  He developed a plan over the 1840’s based on his old notion of producing parts in batches. 

He was specifically inspired by the success of the Federal Armory at Springfield, Massachusetts in manufacturing muskets for the Army using interchangeable parts.  This made rapid production possible in times of need, greatly reduced the cost of each firearm, and facilitated repair in the field using standardized parts.  Dennison was not the only entrepreneur impressed with the system.  Samuel Colt applied it to his pistols in the mid 1830’s and contributed the innovation of assembly line production—assembly of parts in succession with semi-skilled workmen each performing a specific task and sending the work to the next worker on the production bench for the next step.  Others were adapting Springfield and Colt innovations in other fields including Cyrus McCormack for his reapers.

But the manufacture of watches, some of the most complex machines of their time requiring scores of small parts that had to be produced with precision, required whole new demands compared to the few and large parts with relatively high tolerances of muskets, pistols, and farm equipment.  Dennison planned it out in his head.  By 1845 he worked out a detailed plan and constructed a scale model of a production facility.  All he needed now was a backer.

 

                                Edward Howard turned out to be a faithless partner.

It took until 1849 to secure the support and partnership of Edward Howard of the manufacturing firm of Howard & Davis and Howard’s father in law Samuel Curtis.  While the partners erected a new factory next to the existing Howard & Davis building in Roxbury for the new firm of Dennison, Howard & Davis, Aaron went to London to buy what parts could not yet be manufactured in the States.  He also hired English journeyman watchmakers and studied the critical process of gilding brass parts.  When he returned he completed the design and construction of specialized machines for his production process.

But there were major problems.  The new machines were not yet perfected, he had trouble duplicating the gilding process, and the first watches produced, an eight day watch with a single mainspring barrel, did not keep time accurately enough to be successfully marketed.  Dennison needed a more skillful machinist to perfect his ideas and in 1852 he found one in Charles Moseley.  He also brought on master watchmaker N. P. Stratton who designed a new 30-hour watch and perfected the gilding process while Mosely rebuilt the machines.  The resulting watch was marketed successfully.

 

The movement of an early Howard, Davis & Dennison Boston Watch Company pocket watch. 

In fact sales were so strong that in 1855 the company moved to its expanded facilities in Waltham and adopted the new name of the Boston Watch Company.  Dennison oversaw production as the plant superintendent while Howard and a Board of Directors managed the business affairs.

Prospects looked as a good as the brisk sales of the new watch, which was superior to anything but jeweler crafted one-of-a-kind watches then available from an American manufacturer.  Then the devastating Panic of 1857—regarded as the first world-wide depression devastated sales and dried up the capital needed to ride out the storm.  The Boston Watch Company was forced into bankruptcy.

Most of the machinery and watch inventory, and some of the skilled workers, were taken back to Roxbury by Edward Howard, who established the Howard Watch Company. The buildings and large machinery were sold at auction to Royal E. Robbins who restarted watch manufacture under the name of Tracy Baker & Company.  Dennison was retained in the reduced capacity of superintendent of the machine division.  His relationship with Robbins, however, was tense.  Robbins felt Dennison “meddled” in other divisions of the factory.  Dennison felt Robbins was losing track of his vision. 

In 1861, just as the Civil War was about to greatly increase the market for watches among officers who needed to be able to coordinate battlefield movements and the exploding demands of war time industrial production,  Robbins unceremoniously fired Dennison.

 

The American Watch Company works at Waltham in the 1870's. 

In the post-war period, Tracy Baker & Co. would change hands again and become the American Waltham Watch Company and finally simply the Waltham Watch Company, for many years the largest American producer of time pieces. 

It took until 1864 for Dennison to find A. O. Bigelow as a backer for a new firm.  Together they formed the Tremont Watch Company.  This time the plan was a little different.  The Civil War had dramatically driven up wages for skilled workmen in the North.  Dennison figured out that the most famous and skilled watch makers in the world in Switzerland made significantly less than their American counterparts.  In an early example of offshore outsourcing, Swiss journeymen would manufacture to specification fine parts like escapements and wheel trains while larger parts including barrel plates, cases, faces, etc. would be made in the States where the watches would be assembled. 

Dennison and his family went to Zurich to make the arrangements.  While he was gone, the Tremont board, without consulting him, decided to move the factory to Melrose to produce a cheaper model watch entirely in their factory.  The company was reorganized as the Melrose Watch Company. Dennison resigned in protest.  He was essentially stranded in Europe. He remained in Switzerland trying to set up a new arrangement with an American manufacturer without success.  As Dennison expected Melrose failed by 1870.

In 1871 he relocated to England where he tried to manufacture watches from parts made in Zurich and plates from Tremont.  Using capital raised by this venture he helped organize the Anglo-American Watch Company in Birmingham in 1874.  He and his English partners bought up the parts stock and some of the machinery of Melrose, shipped it to England and began producing watches there for the first time on the American System of Watchmaking.   In 1874 the company changed its name to the English Watch Manufacturing Company.  It turned out the reputation of American production in England at this time was similar to the post-World War II reputation of goods Made in Japan harming sales.  Dennison left the company about the same time.

 

At long last Dennison found success manufacturing an innovative watch case in Birmingham, England. 

Dennison had a second business in Birmingham manufacturing watch cases, for which the main client was, ironically, the Waltham Watch Company, the descendent of the firm he had created.  With the addition of a partner the firm became Dennison, Wiggly & Company in 1874.  Dennison remained in England managing this, at last, successful, firm until he died on January 8, 1895 at age 83.  His son Franklin became managing partner.  The name was changed to the Dennison Watch Case Company in 1905 and continued to provide its products to the industry until 1965.

Dennison died with neither the fame nor the enormous wealth of other significant American industrial innovators and businessmen.  The creator of the American System, which transformed manufacture and production in profound ways far beyond the watch industry, spent almost 40 years in a kind of exile.