Lyon & Turnbull auction house moves into vintage watch market

Lyon & Turnbull, the oldest auction house in Scotland, will hold its inaugural dedicated watch sale in November this year, at its London showroom. It will be the first sale overseen by its newly appointed head of watches Charles Tearle, who joined the company in March.

Tearle, who is the first to hold such a role at the auction house, which was founded in 1826, has previously worked at Bonhams, Sotheby’s and watch specialist Antiquorum. And his arrival signals the Scottish house’s ambition to carve out a place in the vintage watch market and go toe-to-toe with the biggest names in the business.

“We anticipate being very competitive in a very short time,” says Tearle. “Probably, two or three years is realistic, to establish yourself, being competitive [against] the market leaders. We know what the competition turns over, we know roughly what the UK turns over, and I think holding a significant portion of that would be a success.”

According to data provided by auction tracking analyst EveryWatch, the UK market for watches at auction was worth $46mn in 2023 — a figure it says has already been surpassed in the first eight months of 2024. Globally, sharp declines in the trading values of certain watches has led to claims of a marketwide decline, but the reality is more nuanced.

The Bloomberg Subdial index, an analytics platform that tracks 50 of the most commonly traded vintage and pre-owned watches, mostly models from Rolex and Patek Philippe, is currently down 26 per cent since its peak in September 2022. However, data from EveryWatch shows that, for sales across all houses in New York and Geneva this summer, results were up 9.9 per cent and 4.2 per cent year-on-year respectively, with an 8.2 per cent fall for the equivalent sales in Hong Kong.

Tearle, who had most recently been working as a private watch dealer, says he was lured back into auctions by Lyon & Turnbull’s smaller, more personable set-up, and believes the current economic climate offers more potential for success.

“I’d vowed, after my days at Sotheby’s, I’d never return to the corporate world. But this is much more family orientated; still very driven, still getting great results, but much more cohesive than the dog-eat-dog world of these really big companies.”

“If anything, it’s a better time [to enter the watch market],” he continues. “I remember the 1992 recession, then the 2008-09 recession. Both times, prior to the downturn, everyone was a watch dealer, and it’s been the same recently. You can’t walk down the street without bumping into a watch expert.

“When the market is rising that fast, it’s very easy simply to buy and sell without knowing too much about what you’re doing because everything is going up so much in value anyway.

“This stabilisation of prices separates the people that are doing this because they love it, from the people that are doing this because it’s easy.”

Tearle says that, under his guidance, Lyon & Turnbull will focus more on “real vintage” rather than the more volatile modern watches, whose steep price rises contributed to the frothy market of the pandemic era.

This stabilisation of prices separates the people doing this because they love it, from the people doing this because it’s easy

“We have a phenomenal enamelled Ilbery pocket watch, made in about 1820 for the Chinese market,” he says. “We have a 1970s Cartier Paris tank, a really nice 1930s Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso, some Submariners, all the way through to 1970s Patek Philippe bracelet watches. It’s quite a varied collection.”

In the past two years, the world’s leading auction houses have made headlines as often for their embroilment in controversy and scandal as for their record-setting prices. In 2023, it emerged that Omega employees had colluded to raise the price of a vintage Omega Speedmaster, which the brand itself purchased from Phillips; later the same year, the charity auction Only Watch was forced to postpone following allegations of a lack of transparency over its financial affairs [it later published audited accounts which it said demonstrated full compliance with the law].

In November 2023, Christie’s was sued by collector Mohammed Zaman over its handling of the sale of his collection, later reaching a settlement, and, in May 2024, it was hit by a cyber attack, in which the data of 500,000 customers was allegedly compromised.

“The cyber attack aspect of things should worry absolutely everybody — for any company to get targeted in that way is horrific,” says Tearle. “When you start trying to cover things up and it gets discovered, the backlash is inevitable. It’s a very small world. Everyone talks, and everyone knows there’s a huge number of people out there specialising in trying to find mistakes.”

Despite his three decades of experience in the vintage watch world, Tearle says his arrival at Lyon & Turnbull has little to do with importing a network of wealthy clients or consignors. Instead, he says, he brings with him a passion for unearthing new information, and an instinct for being in the right place at the right time.

“The majority of my clients are in America. I left the UK in 2001 and only came back again for a year, in 2005. There wasn’t this aspect of ‘We’ll just delve into your little black book and then we can build a collection out of that.’ The expectation is just simply to be able to hit the ground running.

“I’ve been doing it for 34 years and it’s largely luck, frankly. You can launch a department on one watch now. Obviously, this is where luck comes into it, in that you have to be the one to secure that watch.”

During his time in the US, Tearle almost had his “one watch”, when he met James Cox, the one-time boyfriend of actor Paul Newman’s daughter Nell. Cox had a Rolex Daytona given to him by Newman that sold in 2017 for a record $17.8mn.

“I was the one that found the Paul Newman back in the day; I spent eight years advising James Cox about the sale, and then he gave it to someone else [to sell] because his lawyer recommended him to. I stopped chasing grails after that. But the one I would really like to try and find is the Sean Connery 6538.”

He is talking about the Rolex Submariner worn by Connery in Dr No. “I think it’s probably already in the wind, sold at a flea market at some point for nothing, but that is one that I would love to find. That would be an absolute grail.”