The 'James Bond' Rolex watch: Exploring the Truth
What IS that on 007's wrist, exactly?
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This post first appeared on tenpastten.com in 1999.
Today watch dealers all over the world refer to all early Submariners without crown guards as James Bond models. Nicknames are ubiquitous in the watch trade. Created by dealers to quickly and easily identify watches under discussion, they have become a kind of horological slang for those in the know. Nicknames also help to give watches a personality or certain attractive associations - it can be appreciated that most male buyers are probably not going to mind the James Bond association.
Whilst some of the nicknames seem a little forced - designed more to give rather ordinary watches a certain flair - the Submariner's James Bond connection seems solid. We know that Bond wore a Submariner in the films Doctor No, Goldfinger and Thunderball, in which he sports what appear to be 6538 and 5510 models without crown guards. All well and good so far. However in On Her Majesty's Secret Service Bond wears a 5513 Submariner, and in a sequence in the cable-car engine room, atop the enemy’s lair, he is suddenly seen wearing a 6263 Cosmograph. In Live and Let Die Roger Moore wears a 5513 Submariner, complete with circular saw and magnetic bullet deflector, and by the time Timothy Dalton has stepped into Bond's shoes, he is seen wearing a sapphire crystal date Submariner, the 16610 model.
So what then, do we mean by a James Bond watch? It would be easy perhaps to say that it is any Submariner, but I think the facts are a little more unexpected. If one looks to the birthplace of our hero 007 - the Ian Fleming books - then one is in for a surprise, because there is not a single reference to Bond wearing a Submariner in any of them. However, there are fleeting descriptions of his watch, and these coupled with Fleming's own choice of wristwatch, have convinced me that the James Bond watch is in fact not a Submariner, but an Explorer.
It is well known that Fleming assigned to his literary creation many of his own tastes in food, clothing, and grooming products. It all helped to blur the divide between the author and the character, and certainly helped add an air of glamour to Fleming's own life that was perhaps not as accurate as he might have liked. In the late 1950s there was some ambiguity about what Fleming did in the Second World War, and by deliberately attributing certain details of his own life to his fictional hero, Fleming gave his readers a sense that much of the mystery and derring-do made so dashing by Bond was also true of him.
Fleming was a keen snorkeller and swimmer, and his chosen watch was an Explorer. Why then, when everything else he held in high regard was assigned to his literary character, would he have given him a different watch? The first book in which Fleming describes a watch is Live and Let Die, published in 1953. In it, Fleming describes the watch dial and luminous numerals. In 1953 the Submariner was just being created and it did not have luminous numerals, but the Explorer was a newly launched watch, and its dial had luminous numerals.
In On Her Majesty's Secret Service, published in 1963, Fleming has Bond using his watch as a knuckle duster to punch a villain, at which point the lens shatters. This breakage would likely occur if using an Explorer, which has thin lens (although I can't recommend testing it with your own valued Explorer). But the Submariner's thick lens would probably remain intact despite hard contact with the villain's steely chin.
You may ask, What does all this matter? And the answer is, of course, not a fig. But from now on you might like to take your pick. If you're a fan of the celluloid Bond, then continue to feel good about wearing a Submariner - but if you are a fan of the original Bond in Fleming's books, then wear your Explorer with pride. That is, of course, assuming you are lucky enough to have both!