Better watch out for the curse

T’S KNOWNas the world’s most beautiful watch – a £15 million (R261m) masterpiece. But the 1933 Patek Philippe is said to be blighted by a deadly curse.

The so-called holy grail of timepieces brought a litany of bad luck for multi-millionaire US banker Henry Graves Jr throughout the years he owned it.

Now the curse appears to have struck again. Hours before an undisclosed buyer bought it at auction in Geneva for a record 23 million Swiss francs (R265m), time had run out for the man who put it up anonymously for sale.

The seller was revealed to be Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani, one of the world’s richest men. He died mysteriously at his London home on Sunday.

The watch’s provenance and “curse” was chronicled on Sunday in the Daily Mail.

In 1925, Graves secretly approached Patek Philippe to make him the planet’s “most complicated watch” with two faces and 24 complications or extra settings.

Seven months after Graves took possession, his best friend died, then his son George was killed in a car crash, the second of his sons to die this way.

One day aboard his luxury yacht with his daughter Gwendolen, he stared morosely at the watch and declared: “Such things bring nothing but trouble.” – Daily Mail

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