Provenance: This watch was formerly in the collection of the late Cecil Clutton, renowned as a connoisseur of watches, automobiles and early church organs. His literary output on horology was profuse: author of "Watches" with George Daniels, co-author of Britten's 8th edition, author of innumerable articles for Antiquarian Horology, of which he was a founder member, Member of the Royal Society of Arts and Master of the Clockmakers' Company. Perhaps less well known is a slim volume that he published entitled Collector's Collection, in which he discussed in detail the 33 watches that comprised his final collection; "Sam" Clutton never bought a watch without a reason, and only sold when he acquired a more pertinent example. This particular watch, item 2 in his book, clearly provided him with much food for thought, and there can be no more elegant way to explain its history than to reproduce sections from his own text. "The number ostensibly is 986 but several features about the watch make this number suspect and indeed it is not correct. While 986 would be a fairly early number for a Tompion it is certainly not early enough to correspond with the very early characteristics of this watch, including the open and bold piercing of the cock; no mask; and the slightly irregular border of the cock-foot. All this indicates a date about 1680 and generally the movement corresponds closely with Tompion no. 65 illustrated in the standard work on Tompion by R. W. Symonds, figs. 249-251; which Symonds dates about 1680. What clearly happened to the watch is that in 1717, four years after Tompion's death, it came into the hands of a smart dealer. At that lime the demand would be, not for an early Tompion, but for the most up-to-date one available. This watch in fact is no. 86, so he did his best by pre-fixing a 9. Unfortunately for him, Tompion had a dot each sicle of the 86 but an unsuspecting customer would be unlikely to notice this; or the fact that the 9 is cut through the gilding of the plate. Even more unlikely was the unsuspecting customer to find out that the number 86 remains unaltered on the plate under the dial. Originally (like Tompion no. 65 and my John Wise) the dial would have a floral patterned centre to the dial; but this would also have given away the early date of the watch, so the dealer made a new centre with "Tompion" and "London" engraved on cartouches in the ordinary later style. Unfortunately, the gold is rather more yellow in colour than the gold of the (original) chapter ring; nor is the engraving quite up to Tompion's standards. To complete his deception, the dealer supplied a new gold pair-case with a stirrup pendant, hall-marked 1717. The case-maker's mark is WI; not one employed by Tompion. Engraved on the back is a rather unconvincing coronet and the letter M in an intertwined curvilinear shape. None of this palpable deception detracts much from the considerable intrinsic interest of the watch. The balance spring has only two turns and thus may well be original".