A paragraph here last week on the subject of watch
scarcity has elicited some interesting information. The Board of Trade, it appears, is already doing exactly what I appealed to it to do— issuing licences for the importation of some hundreds of thousands of Swiss watches. The official figures show a remarkably high consumption of watches. Before the war we were importing from Switzerland alone over 8,000,000 a year. That is from a single country. It is admittedly a country much addicted to watchmaking, but there must have been a limited importation from America (how many people remember the old Waterbury?) and elsewhere, and quite a number of watches, of course, were British-made. What is more to the point, importation from Switzerland did not cease, except for a brief period, during the war, though it dropped heavily. For eighteen months before January, 1943, watches were coming in at the rate of 400,000 a year, and for the period since then at double that rate. As to the future, imports are limited by currency considerations—and that raises large questions.
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