Speake-Marin Watches — a Watchmaker Without its Namesake? Part One

The central figure and focus of this piece hasn't had a name change. The brand name Speake-Marin is simply no longer owned by its eponymous founder.

The story began in the spring of 2002, when an unknown cabinotier by the name of Peter Speake arrived at the trade fair in Basel. One of the pieces he brought with him was a tourbillon pocket watch he created called the Foundation Watch. All of the brand's wristwatches actually adhered to a similar design in the early days, and some still draw on the design features of this period. Peter Speake was born in England in 1968.

He embarked on a career path to become a watchmaker as a student at London's Hackney Technical College in 1985. Two years later, and he had already went on to study at the WOSTEP school of watchmaking in Neuchâtel, where he would later return in 1991 to take a course on horological complications.

At different stages in his career, Peter Speake worked in aftersales services in Oxford where he repaired Omega and Rolex watches and as the Piaget Watchmaker in London's New Bond Street, but his fondest memories are of the seven years he spent developing a restoration workshop at Somlo Antiques located in the famous Piccadilly Arcade.

Peter Speake established the antique watch restoration department at Somlo Antiques where he gained a deep understanding of timepieces created by the great British horologists. This has a formative influence on him as a watchmaker and would ultimately determine the style of the Speake-Marin brand as we know it.

Speake relocated to Switzerland in 1996 and began working in a department of Renaud & Papi specializing in complicated watch mechanics (Audemars Piguet Renaud & Papi following AP's acquisition of a controlling stake), where he clearly put the wealth of experience he'd built up restoring ticking antiques to use.

Peter Speake recalled the transition to Renaud & Papi in an interview: "The move to R&P required more adjustment than I had anticipated.. [...] My pride took a beating during those first few  months." "For the next four years I dealt mostly with timing and tourbillons. During my last year I had been involved with the development of new complications".

Speake left Renaud et Papi in 2000 to set up his own company called the Watch Workshop together with his wife Daniela Marin. It was an independent workshop which provided services for the assembly of complicated movements, the development of designs for new watches, and project management to create full-fledged clockwork masterpieces from A to Z. Speake tried to find enough time in between orders to dedicate to making his own signature tourbillon pocket watch.

The watch was unusual in terms of how it was constructed. Speake took the wheels and pinions along with some other components from two outstanding pocket watches created by C. H. Meylan in the early 20th century which had never been used before and constructed a symmetrical system to drive a tourbillon  cage with impressively large dimensions.

This was an original way of reducing wear on the movement's wheels and making the tourbillon function more stably. No other watchmaker had ever implemented this type of construction before Speake. The gear drive was spread over two sides, where two identical gear trains from twin barrels ran to transmit power from the balance through to the pinion driving the cage.

This was an original way of reducing wear on the movement's wheels and making the tourbillon function more stably. No other watchmaker had ever implemented this type of construction before Speake. Elements of the Foundation Watch's design were changed more than once in the process of developing and adjusting the movement: the shape of the tourbillon cage, the outlines of bridges, the shape of the hands and case.

The Foundation Watch turned out to be an unconventional and attractive timepiece. It could even said to have looked archaic at the turn of the new millennium, when the majority of complicated timepieces were either ultra-thin or adhered to a futuristic style. That being the case, Peter Speake didn't base his timepiece on any specific vintage pocket models.

He took an alternative approach which aimed to recreate their spirit and did a wonderful job. The watch dial was made from solid silver which was hand-engraved for decoration with an ornate floral pattern in addition to all the inscriptions and markers. The dial and style of the deliberately heavy-looking “spade-and-whip” hands fashioned from blued steel conjured associations with English grandfather clocks from the first half of the 17th century.

It was quite a surprising solution considering the prevailing preferences in the early 2000s, when tastes gravitated towards the vintage watches made between the 1930s and 1960s. At the same time, it was a very long-sighted choice — Speake's work clearly made him stand out from the rest of the crowd. Peter Speake settled on the double-barrelled name of Speake-Marin for his business, included their wife's maiden name also.

At the same time when Speake was working on his Foundation Watch he also developed the design for his first wristwatch introduced in the same year of 2002 and based on the design of the pocket watch. There was another detail in the Foundation Watch which would become one of the brand's a long-running signature design elements.

The design for the cage bridge was inspired by a traditional watchmaker's topping tool (or rounding-up tool) operated by hand or foot to alter the profile of the teeth on wheels. From the very outset, Speake regarded it as an invention of important significance and used its shape in other designs including a “topping tool” rotor.

Speake named his first collection Piccadilly in memory of the years he devoted to restoring antique timepieces at the Somlo Antiques workshop in Piccadilly. The earliest pieces are notable for their caseback, where the name of the brand and collection "Speake-Marin Piccadilly" was hand-engraved. 

No significant changes have been made to the Piccadilly design over the past years. The Speake-Marin watches had the same imposing case with its tidy drum-like shape and straight, downward-tilted lugs where cylindrical details of the screws to hold the strap are clearly accentuated, a chunky conical winding crown, narrow bezel and the “spade-and-whip” hands like the ones used in the Foundation Watch.

These markings on the caseback of Speake-Marin watches were later machine-engraved, which don't look quite as impressive. The dials of early Piccadilly models clearly adhere to a conservative version of the Foundation Watch's style.

The dials are structured in four layers: an encircling peripheral minute scale, a wide ring with engraved Breguet-type numerals for the hours, the inscriptions "Speake-Marin" and "Switzerland" in the upper half, and a carefully hand-engraved center.

Speake would later depart from the style of the original design, after all, who would have expected him to adhere to the same style for decades? Dials appeared engraved with floral designs, guilloché patterns, enamel, and decorative motifs.

However, the case design, hands and winding crown remained unchanged. Speake's modified version of the Eta 2824 automatic movement served as the engine driving early Piccadilly models. The watchmaker modified the base movement almost beyond recognition, which you can appreciate by taking a quick look at its reverse side.

The following elements were created from scratch: the automatic winding mechanism with a large bridge arching over the entire movement, the "mystery" rotor in the shape of a traditional watchmaker's topping tool and a heftier 18-karat gold weight hidden under the wide rim. The reworked movement was named FW2012 and engraved on the automatic winding mechanism's bridge.

The first serious innovation both in terms of design and mechanics was the Piccadilly Serpent Calendar first released in 2004. It was the first watch in the collection to be equipped with a date display and an imposing central serpentine  hand. Traditional white enamel dials with deep-blue markings to match the tone of the blued-steel hands were chosen for these Speake-Marin watches.

Another watch which appeared in the same year was the rather inventive Shimoda model which told the time with one hand and a diamond mounted on the “seconds hand” shaft. The diamond rotated once per minute but was unable to accurately indicate the seconds and only served to indicate that the movement hadn't stopped working. The year 2005 saw the release of far more complicated models.

First came the Piccadilly Minute Repeater which used a Christophe Claret movement with a minute repeater, tourbillon and perpetual calendar. This was the first model where Speake replaced the signature “spade-and-whip” hands with Breguet-style blued-steel hands, as the perpetual calendar with its numerous displays required more accurate indications.

The Piccadilly Quantième Perpétuel watch released in both fully and partially skeletonized dial versions was equipped with a complicated perpetual calendar function traditionally accompanied by a moon-phase display. The calendar mechanism was built on the brand's same trademark FW2012 base movement.

The year 2005 was also when Speake successfully developed his first wristwatch tourbillon. The base movement was a caliber from a factory called Swiss Time Technology (STT, known as Progress Watch up until 2003). The watchmaker made a couple of different versions of it in one go — one was intended for the Harry Winston brand's Excenter Tourbillon watch, while the second was for the Speake-Marin collection's Vintage Tourbillon watch.

The watchmaker followed a similar strategy in 2006, when two versions of the same "motor" were developed for the Harry Winston Ocean Project Z3 and Speake-Marin's own Vintage Tourbillon MARK II.