Restoring an Heirloom Vintage Sagara Watch

I met my fiancée during a couple of years I spent living and working in Sydney, Australia – a cool 10,500 miles or so away from London.

Luckily for me, she agreed to come with me when I moved back to the UK! After we moved, she and I had visited Australia together, and she had visited by herself a couple of other times as well, and so she had seen her family pretty much at least once a year for the first few years we were here.

Then in 2020 when the pandemic hit, it cancelled a visit from her parents planned for April that year, and as world travel became inordinately difficult, visits between Australia and the UK were no longer an option.

One evening a couple of years later in 2022, we were having dinner and it occurred to us that the timing for her was perfect, and as the regulations were starting to relax, that it could once again be possible for her to visit her family. And so, in October of 2022, she did just that, whilst I had to unfortunately remain at home.

Towards the end of this visit, her parents gifted her a watch that had belonged to her Grandfather on her Dad’s side, who had sadly passed away long before she was even born.

Little did we know that this was about to take us on an 18 month journey in restoring an heirloom watch!

She brought the watch back to the UK with her, and after thinking long and hard about restoring an heirloom watch, decided that she wanted to explore getting the watch ticking once again: such a beautiful thought that this watch could transcend the gap between their lives, and the same watch that had ticked on her Grandfather’s wrist so many years before, might tick on her own wrist some half a century later.

Sagara, Ralco, and Movado

The watch as it was gifted to my fiancée is shown above, we think from around the 1940s.

On the dial, the brand signed is that of Sagara. There isn’t a great deal of information online about Sagara, however what we did learn is that it is a wordmark of a brand named Ralco SA, founded in La-Choux-de-Fonds in the 1920s. And as it transpires, Ralco watches were in fact manufactured by Movado, a now American brand which was founded in Switzerland in 1881.

Ralco was so named as the first three letters represented three members of the Ditesheim family who owned Movado – Roger, Armand and Lucien.

I found mention on a forum post of a US Federal Trademark application for the Wordmark of Ralco, and confirmed via the US Patent and Trademark Office website – the original US application for the Trademark of Ralco was filed on 11^th October 1941 by Movado Watch Agency Inc based in New York, which was ultimately registered on 17^th March 1942 (US registration number 394067 for anyone interested!) and expired on 10^th January 1986.

There is no listing of Sagara as a brand on the USPTO website.

Anyway, these timings all correlate with what we knew about my fiancée’s Grandfather – that he was in the Maltese Merchant Navy during the 1940s/1950s, and that the watch was likely purchased in South Africa, before emigrating with his wife, my fiancée’s Grandmother, to Australia in the 1950s.

Over the course of a few months, we spent a lot of time trying to learn more, and we even took the watch to Geneva having arranged to speak with a senior person at one of the top auction houses to try and learn more, as well as asking watchmakers in and around the Geneva and people who dealt more broadly with vintage watches, but to no avail.

Beyond the link between Sagara, Ralco and Movado, we just couldn’t seem to ascertain anything further no matter where we went or who we spoke to.

We decided that anything more detailed about Sagara was going to have to remain as a little bit of a mystery.

Restoring an Heirloom Watch means finding the right Watch Restorer

We spent quite a lot of time looking through various watchmakers. Fortunately, there are plenty of them in and around London, however on the reverse side of that, it meant we found it very difficult to choose. After all, how do you pick from such a huge number of people, and be able to trust them with something so precious as restoring an heirloom watch? We found it a real challenge, and never really managed to find somebody who felt right.

That is until mid-2023.

I had interviewed a watchmaker and restorer named Rebecca Struthers for this website not long before her book “Hands of Time – A Watchmaker’s History of Time” was published, and after speaking with her was excited to read her book. And as I did, there was a certain chapter where the stars seemed to align.

Chapter 10 of the book, Man and Machine, starts to tell the story of Pilot Officer Francis Edward Frayn, one of those rescued from the beaches of Dunkirk in World War II. The watch belonging to Francis, via his son, had found its way to the workbench of Rebecca Struthers. This watch was a Movado watch…

…in my head, I immediately recalled the link between Movado, Ralco and Sagara…

… Struthers described how, unusually, the name Movado appeared to have been diligently scratched out except for the V, and that given the story of the watch, she felt compelled to leave the name on the dial as it were, describing her main objective as “to get the watch itself back up and running so that Francis’s descendants can continue to wear it and remember its story”.

This was all too perfect, exactly what we had been looking for, and I excitedly passed the book to my fiancée to read it for herself. She looked at me a few minutes later and smiled.

We knew immediately.

A few email exchanges later, and the watch was sent to Rebecca and Craig Struthers’ workshop to be checked over. In addition to the cleaning, it needed a new-old-stock winding crown as the original had worn through, a case restoration to re-gild the case, a new mainspring and the non-original minute hand was suggested to be replaced with one more in keeping with the original hour hand. This also included cleaning and refitting the original crystal, and a careful cleaning of the dial itself, too.

My fiancée also opted to swap out the gold bracelet it was on for a new leather strap to complete the look, and make the watch something she would be able to wear herself as her Grandfather’s wrists were significantly larger than her own!

Everything was set, and then all we had to do, was wait.

The day we had been waiting for

About 8 months later, and 18 months after the watch had been first gifted to my fiancée, I received an email from Rebecca, and it was the one we had been waiting for. The watch was ready! She had even been kind enough to attach some photos to the email, including the little movement.

The watch looked utterly magnificent, and the photos themselves were enough to bring a tear or several to my fiancée’s eyes.

After some final tests, a package soon arrived at our door and I reckon within about 5 and a half seconds of opening the package, the watch was back on my fiancée’s wrist.

The same watch which once ticked on the wrist of her Grandfather, whom she had never met, was now ticking on hers.

And the best part? It arrived before we get married later this year, so her Grandfather can even be a part of our wedding day, too. For us, that link to the past is both the most powerful and beautiful thing that a watch can be.

A huge thank you to Rebecca and Craig Struthers for being a part of this journey in restoring an heirloom watch to its glory days, we’re both eternally grateful to you for the care and respect you have shown throughout. To learn more about Rebecca Struthers and Struthers Watchmakers, please visit StruthersWatchmakers.co.uk or follow @StruthersWatchmakers, @Rebecca_Struthers, and @Craig_Struthers on Instagram.

If you have any questions, please get in touch via our Contact page, or via our Instagram.

 

You might also be interested in:

• Vintage and modern watches – the pros and cons
• In Conversation with Dr Rebecca Struthers
• Recommended Reading: ‘Hands of Time – A Watchmaker’s History of Time’ by Rebecca Struthers
• Watch Stationery and Gift Ideas
• Watch Books, Watch Boxes and more at the Watch Affinity Shop on Amazon (commissions earned)

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