'Extremely rare' watch saved from skip fetches £40k

An "extremely rare" watch that was saved from being thrown in a skip has fetched £40,000 at auction.

The Paul Ditisheim deck watch sold for more than five times its estimate when it went under the hammer at Mallams Auctioneers in Oxford.

Its sale, which saw bids from across the globe, comes years after it was saved from being thrown into a skip by the former owner's father.

Duncan Lloyd, who oversaw the auction, said the watch sale had been a "fantastic result" after it was "thankfully" rescued.

"It was a real joy to have this rare and beautiful Paul Ditisheim deck watch in the Mallams Oxford sale room, and an even greater relief that it was saved," he added.

The timepiece is a white metal, open-face, keyless lever deck watch with twin outer cases.

It has a dial signed Paul Ditisheim, La Chaux-de-Fonds, Grand Prix Paris 1900, with Roman numeral times and blued steel hands.

Mallams explained that Paul Ditisheim had been a highly respected Swiss horologist and inventor in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

He had been born into a wealthy family of industrialists working in the watch industry in Switzerland in 1868.

In 1892, he founded his own company - Solvil et Titus - which became "renowned for developing extremely accurate chronometers", the auction house said.

Ditisheim won awards for his watch making, before selling his company 20 years before his death in Geneva in 1945.