There are only two singing bird boxes – a pair – recorded with the name of ‘Henry Borrell’ inscribed, presumably as retailer.Tantalisingly little is known about Henry Borrell’s early life and his arrival in London, although his later years as a respected and prolific clockmaker specialising in clocks for the Chinese and particularly for the Ottoman markets are well recorded. He was born in 1757 in Couvet, province of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, as Jean Henri Borel, son of Daniel Henri and Madeleine Judith Henriod, facts confirmed by a parliamentary Act of Naturalisation of 1805. In 1791 he was living in the parish of St Dunstan-in-the-West, Fleet Street, when he married Kitty Howe of the same parish, with whom he was to have five children. By 1794 he was in business as a clockmaker at Aldersgate Buildings, apparently moving the following year to Wilderness Row, Clerkenwell, at the heart of the watch- and clockmaking district, where he remained until his death in 1840. Giving Borrell time to grow up and be trained as a clockmaker, presumably at first in Switzerland, leaves some fifteen to twenty years of his active professional life before 1794 unaccounted for, presumably when he was working on behalf of somebody else. It has been suggested that he is the ‘Borel’, no first name given, who was living and working at Bartlett’s Buildings, Holborn, with Henri Maillardet, Jaquet-Droz & Leschot’s London representative, in 1785. There were other Borel/Borrells in London at the time, but the suggestion makes a lot of sense given the apparently unique pair of singing bird boxes which have Jaquet-Droz & Leschot/Frisard movements but which bear his name as retailer. Only the names of Frisard and Maillardet also appear in this way, which would suggest that Borrell must have been a very close associate of the firm. If this was the case, he was probably given the boxes by Maillardet as there is no evidence of Jaquet-Droz & Leschot supplying any directly to him. The maker’s mark R crowned incuse appears in a number of variations on a group of snuffboxes that date from the last decade of the eighteenth century.

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