Three-tier mahogany deck box with a brass insert holding the watch under a screwed brass bezel. The silver open-face case is hallmarked for Birmingham 1897-98 and is stamped with the sponsor’s mark ‘C.H’. The watch has a gilt winding crown and brass push-piece for hand setting at one o’clock. The two-piece, centre seconds dial has a white enamel face, black roman numerals, Arabic five minute figures, and is signed below XII: ‘KULLBERG / LONDON / 7428 / ↑ ‘’. It has polished blued steel spade and poker hands with a fine pointer blued steel seconds hand with a counter poised tail. It has a fine, gilt-brass going barrel half-plate movement with three turned pillars fixed with polished and blued steel screws. The top of the half plate is engraved: ‘Victor Kullberg London / ↑ / No.7428’. It also has an Earnshaw type spring detent escapement with compensation balance and blued steel spiral balance spring, with overcoil, mounted on a Bonniksen-type fifty-two minute karrusel carriage. Jewelled to the centre wheel.

The watch was first supplied to Kullberg’s as a semi-completed (no escapement), ready-cased watch from Bahn Bonniksen in Coventry. It had evidently been started in about 1897, when the case was made, and was sent to Kullberg in May 1903. Finishing work began in 1904 but stopped a year later and was only started again briefly in 1909. The Admiralty ordered the watch in February 1913 and it was delivered in March. The watch was in Navy service through until 1945 and remained in the MoD workshops until loan to the NMM in 1972.

Victor Kullberg (1824-90) was born in Visby on the Island of Gotland, Sweden. He was trained by the Swedish chronometer maker Victor Soderburg in Stockholm in 1840 and emigrated to London in 1851, having moved to his permanent address at 105 Liverpool Road, N1, by 1870. During his lifetime Kullberg gained many medals and awards for his chronometers and enjoyed a truly international reputation. As well as supplying many foreign governments, he regularly submitted chronometers for the Annual Trials at Greenwich Observatory, gaining first place in 1864 with a chronometer fitted with his newly invented ‘flat rim’ balance. His inventions included several designs of compensation balance and improvements to keyless winding for pocket watches. He also designed the automatic gas-governor for controlling the temperature of the chronometer testing ovens at the Observatory. More than 500 chronometers by Kullberg were supplied to the Royal Navy alone and he can be said to have been one of the 19th century’s finest chronometer makers. On Kullberg’s death in 1890 the firm was taken over by George and Peter Wennerstrom, themselves succeeded by Sanfrid Lundquist who had joined the firm in 1894 and who moved the firm to Cranford in Middlesex in 1938, trading under the name of Victor Kullberg until his death in 1947).