Threads of connection
Original pocket watch owned by William Charles Wentworth. Vaucluse House Collection, Historic Houses Trust of NSW. Photograph (c) Rob Little/RLDI.
Keeping time
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries watches were designed to carried on the person, attached to a waist hook, looped over a belt or as part of a chatelaine in the case of women, and dropped into the pocket of a waistcoat when worn by a man. They were usually cased in gold or silver, often engraved with the owner’s monogram, and sometimes a crest or inscription. The pocket watches in the collections of Sydney Living Museums range in date from a late eighteenth century watch that once belonged to Governor Lachlan Macquarie, to a watch presented to a police inspector on his retirement in 1935. By that time the pocket watch had become old-fashioned, superseded by the wristwatch.