Posted by Andrew Craig-Bennett on December 12, 2008 at 11:05:07 user ACB.
In Reply to: Re: Captain John's Chronometer and Barometer posted by Peter Ceresole on December 11, 2008 at 03:38:18:
"It doesn't seem to me that there is any reference that settles this one way or the other. My preference is based simply on the probability that a boy's first watch, in 1930, would most likely be a wristwatch.
"This is one of those things that depends on the nature of the times, how people lived their everyday lives. Obvious in 1930, but incredibly difficult to pin down from this distance. The past really is another country, and it's not surprising that AR didn't go into that kind of detail."
Quite so, but that is why I am arguing the converse - that a boy's first watch, in 1930, would probably have been a pocket watch.
Wrist watches were still fashionable (and correspondingly expensive) novelties. After all, small boys were still (WH) going to bed with a candle and small boys and girls (WH again) were washing in a washstand with hot water brought up in a jug from the kitchen.
One does not need to hang a wristwatch on a hook in order to consult it at night - one leaves it on one's wrist - but the lost world of the pocket watch included watch stands on which one placed the watch at night on one's bedside table - the rate of a watch is affected by its position, unless it be an amazingly good one (the Admiralty arranged for the Kew Observatory to test deck watches in six positions before issuing them for service). To hang the watch vertically would have been a sensible thing for John to do, part of the watch lore that went with acquiring it.
I am I suppose guilty of generating a Beckfoot Plumbing thread, but it is the sort of thing that interests small boys - and I am reading the books to an inquisitive small boy!