Welcome to Dialed In, Esquire's weekly column bringing you horological happenings and the most essential news from the watch world since March 2020.
No story about the style of James Bond would be complete without mention of his most celebrated accessories: his wristwatches, which still rate as the most covetable and accessible bits of his kit. This week, Watchfinder & Co., the pre-owned watch hub that was founded in 2002 and acquired by luxury watch group Richemont in 2018, is taking advantage of all the excitement surrounding Daniel Craig’s much delayed last hurrah as Bond in No Time To Die. Live on the Watchfinder site now are a selection of single and iconic Rolex and Omega watch models worn by various Bonds over the past five decades and available for you to buy right off the page. Blink and you’ll miss them.
In the Ian Fleming novels, only one watch brand is ever mentioned. You guessed it; it’s Rolex, first introduced in 1963, in On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Coincidentally, that’s the same year that Fleming took personal delivery of the newly minted Explorer Ref 1016. Rough tough and functional, it is easy to see why it might have appealed to him.
Bond’s own Rolex is described in OHMSS as “a heavy Rolex Oyster Perpetual on an expanding metal bracelet,” government issue no doubt, a necessary but unglamorous tool in the arsenal of the paid assassin. Typically for Bond, who treats all his gear as disposable, he breaks it later in OHMSS while socking a henchman in the jaw. But it had clearly made enough of an impression on him—or perhaps Fleming himself—to warrant a replacement. “Another Rolex?” wrote Fleming. “Probably. They were on the heavy side but they worked. And at least you could see the time in the dark with those big phosphorus numerals.”
The first official Bond watch in the movies, and surely the most iconic, was the Submariner “big crown” ref. 6538. Don’t be looking for one of these in the Watchfinder range, however. 6538s in good nick regularly top $100,000 and often much more. They are rarely on the open market. Once the film franchise established itself, Rolex embarked on a mutually fruitful relationship with Bond that, while not entirely exclusive, would run all the way to the late 1980s.
Roger Moore wore a ref. 5513 Submariner in Live and Let Die (1973), a very similar, though much earlier, reference to the 114060 in Watchfinder’s current capsule of one-off pre-owned Bond watches. For balance—it was the '70s—Moore also wore a Pulsar LED watch, then all the rage and the precursor of the quartz revolution that nearly put the entire mechanical watch industry out of business. Moore’s Bond certainly got a bit kinky for digital, wearing an LCD Seiko 0674 LC in The Spy Who Loved Me (1977). It featured a tiny printer, which a fellow spy used to send him messages. Nifty. Fleming would doubtless have loved it. More Seikos followed in Moore’s later outings. It remains a period regarded by some Bond watch purists as a wobbly phase.
When Timothy Dalton took over the role as the fourth Bond with The Living Daylights (1987), things finally got serious again. Another highlight in Watchfinder’s collection is the Rolex Submariner 16610 that Dalton wore in his second and last outing in License to Kill (1989). But it was also the last outing of Rolex on Bond’s wrist, for when Bond returned in Goldeneye (1995), Pierce Brosnan had taken on the role with a mission to breathe life into an already 30-plus-year-old franchise. And not one element of Bond’s character was left unquestioned, including his watch, for the first time an Omega.
The brand and Bond embarked on what remains the longest movie franchise partnership. It’s still running today and it has produced many highly collectible takes on its Seamaster diver, including Brosnan’s Seamaster 300m (a quartz-driven version), which is in the range from Watchfinder. Our favorite on the site however is in fact the most recent: the titanium Seamaster 300m worn by Daniel Craig in his last movie and launched in 2020 to coincide with the original premiere date of No Time To Die. What’s next, you may well ask? Time will tell.
