Mom's jewelry box held a watch worth $80,000

A 1930s Patek Philippe wristwatch found tucked in a late mother's jewelry box has sold for £59,000, roughly $80,000, at a British auction in Penzance on Tuesday. Experts had valued it at £5,000. It went for almost twelve times that. The stainless steel Calatrava Reference 448 had spent decades inside the same Cornish family, bought long ago as a gift by a woman with a fondness for luxury. Her daughter recalled being told the watch was expensive. Nobody guessed by how much. "When I finally had the watch in my hands and was able to examine it properly, I knew we had something extremely rare," said Darren Ashley, senior valuer at Hansons Cornwall. Patek Philippe made very few steel watches in the period, which makes survivors coveted. Three family members watched the bidding in the room while others followed on laptops from work. The winning bid came from Hong Kong. After ninety years, it was still ticking.