Complicated Collectors: Sir David Salomons
“How can you make a watch, my dear boy?” His aunt, Jeanette Salomons, then under medical care in St. Leonards-on-Sea, wrote back to her nephew, David Lionel Salomons, in early March 1867, shortly before her death. He was 16, orphaned since his father Philip’s death earlier that year. His mother, Emma Abigail Montefiore, had died when he was eight. At the time, Salomons lived with his uncle, Sir David Salomons (1st Baronet), the Lord Mayor of London, at Great Cumberland Place, near Marble Arch, making frequent visits to a nearby watchmaker’s shop, where he learned to use a lathe and to file metal to tolerances measured in a fraction of an inch. Fifty years later, that teenage training would allow him to assemble the most comprehensive collection of Breguet watches in history. Broomhill Salomons inherited the expansive Broomhill estate in 1873 when he was 22. His uncle, the first Sir David Salomons, had died without children, and the baronetcy passed to his nephew along with the estate near Tunbridge Wells. The house stood on substantial grounds, and Salomons began altering it almost immediately. Broomhill from the south, a photograph by Sir David Lionel Salomons, 1868 (cropped). Album 19, Richard Levy Family Archive. Image – By permission of the Salomons Museum. He built workshops housing machine tools like lathes, drill presses, and milling equipment. Then came electrical apparatus. Then storage for chemicals and photographic equipment. By the 1890s, the workshop...
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