Wright & Davies Ltd was a workshop based in Clerkenwell, London, that supplied watch cases, deployment buckles, and made-to-measure straps to Cartier's London operation. While English Art Works Ltd handled jewellery and decorative pieces, Wright & Davies occupied a distinct role as the case-making workshop responsible for the metal components of Cartier London's watches.
Clerkenwell had long been the centre of London's precision metalworking trades (clockmakers, watchmakers, and instrument makers were concentrated there from at least the eighteenth century), and Wright & Davies operated within that tradition. The workshop produced cases to Cartier's specifications, with the work carried out by skilled goldsmiths. Sam Mayo, the workshop head, is recorded as the craftsman most closely associated with this output.
The production process linked Wright & Davies directly to the Cartier London retail and watchmaking operation at 175 New Bond Street. Completed cases, straps, and buckles would be collected and transported from Clerkenwell to Bond Street, where Eric Denton and his team would complete the assembly. The Cartier Crash (one of the most celebrated of all Cartier London watches) had its case made at Wright & Davies, as did the Cartier Pebble watch, among the most distinctive and now rarest of the Cartier London designs, produced under Jean-Jacques Cartier in the early 1970s.
Cases made at Wright & Davies carry no separate workshop signature; the finished watch is signed as a Cartier piece.
Sources
- Francesca Cartier Brickell, The Cartiers (Ballantine Books, 2019), ch. 10 (“Cousins in Austerity, 1945–1956”) and ch. 11 (“The End of an Era, 1957–1974”)
- Hans Nadelhoffer, Cartier: Jewelers Extraordinary (Thames and Hudson, 1984; revised 2007), p. 253.
