A woman was left devastated after learning that a shop has lost three historic pocket watches belonging to her late father that it was repairing. Tricia Knight visited The Watch Hospital, in Grimsby, shortly before Christmas to have repairs done on three pocket watches that belonged to her father, grandfather and great-grandfather, as well as a gold fob chain with pictures of her great grandfather and his sister.
All of the items had belonged to her late father, and the watches were each engraved with her maiden name of Campbell. She had intended to include them in a memory box to pass down through generations of her family..
But each time Tricia returned to the store to collect the items, she was told that there would be a delay. On Sunday, March 12, she found that the premises were closed, with a note stating that the business had gone into liquidation.
The business has since been taken over by the Timpson, which has been trying to locate the watches along with the liquidators and others.
Tricia told GrimsbyLive: "(My husband and I) kept popping back and the shop worker kept saying he was having trouble getting the glass for them, so we kept going back and forth and this happened until after Christmas. My husband went and the worker told him he'd fixed one, but was still waiting for the bits for the other two. I wish my husband had taken that watch there and then but he didn't – he wanted to collect them all together.
"The man said to pop back in at the end of the month, and January went, February went, and we kept popping back every couple of weeks. I felt like a stalker. Then one day I said, 'I've had enough, let's go pick them up', but when we got there, there was a sign on the shutters with the liquidators' email address, which said they'd gone into liquidation."
Tricia said she sent an email to the liquidators and was told that her concerns would be passed on to the director of The Watch Hospital. "I was told that the director would get in touch with us, but she never did," she said.
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Following the takeover, an employee at the store told Grimsby Live that the majority of employees were able to retain their jobs. Tricia then contacted Timpson, but was told that they could not find "any trace" of the missing items, after liaising with the head office of The Watch Hospital in Wakefield, where customers' items were thought to have been taken.
"I was so upset that I burst into tears," Tricia said. "It's like you've got nowhere to go. You know it was picked up, you know it went to the head office, but it never got to Timpson. It's so upsetting. It's sentimental value.
"I've got nothing left of my dad now. He didn't have any money to leave me."
Scott Shaw, Head of the creditor services division at liquidator Clough Corporate Solutions, told Grimsby Live that the investigation into locating Patricia's missing items was "ongoing".
He said: "Our investigations are still ongoing and we're still in discussions with the former director and Timpson regarding the items. We have passed this information on to the customer and we are doing everything we can to locate the items."
