The wartime watches made for Britain's fighting men — and the story of how one of them ended up on the wrist of James Bond.
By David Mason.
British Airborne Pathfinders synchronise their watches at RAF Harwell on the night of 5 June 1944, as they prepare to depart for Normandy. An Armstrong Whitworth Albemarle waits behind them.
Credit: Pictorial Press
James Bond has a new watch. Naturally, it is more than eighty years old, slightly battered and has a crack in the glass.
It appears without ceremony in Chapter 27 of Charlie Higson's new Bond novel, King Zero. The chapter is called, rather wonderfully, “Luxury and Violence.”
Bond is 35 years old. He wakes shortly before seven in the morning and looks towards the bedside cabinet. Sitting there is a Vertex Cal 59 W.W.W., an original military wristwatch dating from the Second World War.
An original Vertex Cal 59 W.W.W. alongside Charlie Higson’s new James Bond novel, King Zero.
Credit: Vertex Watches
This is no product-placement bauble, freshly removed from its presentation box. Higson's Vertex has lived a life.
More importantly, it has a provenance.
Bond inherited the watch from a great-uncle who served with the British 6th Airborne Division, the men charged with securing the eastern flank of the Normandy invasion on D-Day. Higson connects him specifically with one of the most celebrated actions of 6 June 1944:
Pegasus Bridge.
And suddenly Bond's battered old watch becomes considerably more interesting.
THE FIRST MEN IN
The 6th Airborne Division was an unusual formation. Some of its men would arrive in Normandy beneath parachutes; others aboard gliders.
The task of taking two strategically vital bridges was entrusted to its glider-borne infantry.
Shortly before eleven o'clock on the night of 5 June 1944, six Airspeed Horsa gliders were towed into the darkness from RAF Tarrant Rushton in Dorset.
A Horsa glider carrying troops of the 6th Airlanding Brigade is towed aloft by an Armstrong Whitworth Albemarle.
Credit: Edward Roth
Inside were men of the 2nd (Airborne) Battalion, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, part of the 6th Airlanding Brigade of the 6th Airborne Division. The assault force consisted principally of Major John Howard's D Company, reinforced by two platoons from B Company and detachments of Royal Engineers.
Their orders were simple to describe and extraordinarily difficult to execute.
Two bridges in Normandy had to be captured intact.
One crossed the Caen Canal at Bénouville. The other crossed the River Orne at Ranville. Together they represented vital gateways to the eastern flank of the invasion beaches. If the Germans held them, the crossings could be used to launch counter-attacks against the troops coming ashore. If they were destroyed, the British airborne troops landing east of the waterways risked being cut off.
Howard's men therefore had to arrive first.
Shortly after midnight on 6 June, the first Horsa came out of the darkness and crash-landed remarkably close to the canal bridge. Two more followed in quick succession.
Horsa gliders of the 6th Airborne Division on Drop Zone ‘N’ near Ranville, Normandy, 6 June 1944.
Credit: Edward Roth
The soldiers spilled from the wooden gliders and attacked.
Within minutes, the canal bridge was in British hands; the operation also secured the River Orne crossing. Five of the six gliders had landed close to their objectives — an extraordinary feat of night flying and navigation.
The main assault troops had not yet reached the Normandy beaches.
The Bénouville crossing would soon acquire another name.
Pegasus Bridge.
British transport crosses the Caen Canal Bridge at Bénouville three days after D-Day. The Horsa gliders that carried the assault force into Normandy can still be seen in the field beyond.
Credit: Edward Roth
THE WINGED HORSE
Even Pegasus came with a story.
Britain's newly formed airborne forces needed an identity, and their commander, Frederick “Boy” Browning, commissioned the artist Major Edward Seago to create an emblem.
Seago produced Bellerophon, spear in hand, astride the mythical winged horse Pegasus.
The distinctive Pegasus formation sign worn by Britain’s airborne forces — Bellerophon, spear in hand, astride the mythical winged horse.
Credit: Maurice Savage
There was a literary connection. Browning's wife was Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca, who is credited with suggesting the classical subject.
Browning himself was quite a character: Grenadier Guards officer, Olympic bobsledder and one of the principal architects of Britain's airborne forces.
The pale-blue Pegasus against its maroon background became one of the most recognisable British military insignia of the war.
Winston Churchill with Major-General Frederick “Boy” Browning at RAF Ringway, near Manchester, 16 April 1942. The Pegasus formation sign of Britain’s fledgling airborne forces can be seen on Browning’s sleeve.
Credit: Pictorial Press
And there is another connection.
Du Maurier belonged to the remarkable circle of actors, artists and writers entertained after the war by Noël Coward at White Cliffs, his house at St Margaret's Bay on the Kent coast.
Another visitor was Ian Fleming.
Fleming loved White Cliffs so much that in 1951 he took over the property from Coward, using it as a weekend retreat during the years in which James Bond was created. The surrounding Kent landscape subsequently found its way into Moonraker.
Regular readers may remember that The Transatlantic Journal has been there before, in Following 007 to the British seaside.
Daphne du Maurier with her husband, Lieutenant-General Sir Frederick “Boy” Browning, in 1952. Du Maurier and Ian Fleming were both part of Noël Coward’s remarkable circle at White Cliffs, his home at St Margaret’s Bay on the Kent coast.
Credit: Tom Blau / Superstock
It was a small world.
And somewhere within the fictional version of that wartime world, Charlie Higson asks us to imagine Bond's great-uncle.
But what was on his wrist?
WATCH, WRIST, WATERPROOF
By the Second World War, accurate timekeeping had become an essential piece of military equipment.
The British authorities wanted a wristwatch that was not decorative but functional: robust, legible, accurate and capable of surviving active service.
The resulting W.W.W. specification produced one of the great pieces of twentieth-century functional design.
Black dial. White Arabic numerals. Luminous hands and hour markers. A railway minute track. Small seconds at six o'clock. A robust hand-wound movement. A waterproof case.
And, stamped on the dial and case, the British Government's unmistakable Broad Arrow.
The British Government Broad Arrow and military issue markings stamped into the caseback of a W.W.W. wristwatch.
Credit: Vintage Watch Specialist
W.W.W. stood for Watch, Wrist, Waterproof — although “Wristlet” also appears in accounts of the specification.
Twelve manufacturers supplied watches to the War Office specification:
Buren. Cyma. Eterna. Grana. IWC. Jaeger-LeCoultre. Lemania. Longines. Omega. Record. Timor. Vertex.
Collectors would later give them a rather better name.
The Dirty Dozen.
The name wasn't a wartime designation. It was borrowed subsequently from Aldrich's film and stuck.
Robert Ryan and Charles Bronson in Robert Aldrich’s The Dirty Dozen (1967).
Credit: Photo 12 / Archives du 7e Art Collection
The watches are fascinating precisely because they are simultaneously the same and different. Each manufacturer was working to a common requirement, but interpreted it through its own movements, cases, hands and manufacturing capabilities.
And collecting all twelve has subsequently become one of the great quests of military-watch collecting.
Twelve manufacturers, one military specification: IWC, Longines, Jaeger-LeCoultre, Omega, Grana, Cyma, Buren, Lemania, Eterna, Timor, Vertex and Record.
Credit: Watches of Knightsbridge
But one name in the above photograph occupies an unusual position in our story.
Vertex.
CLAUDE LYONS
Vertex was founded in London by Claude Lyons.
Claude Lyons, who established the watch business that would become Vertex in London in 1912.
Credit: Vertex Watches
Born in 1885, Lyons entered the watch trade at 17. In 1912, according to the company's history, he borrowed £1,000 from his father-in-law and established his own business, specialising initially in Swiss movements re-cased in Britain.
By 1916 Vertex Watches Ltd had operations in both Hatton Garden and La Chaux-de-Fonds in Switzerland. The company records its first British military commission during the First World War.
A period Vertex Watch Co. letterhead showing the company's London offices at Diamond House, Hatton Garden, and its Swiss factory in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
Credit: Vertex Watches
Then war came again.
In 1940, enemy action destroyed the company's Hatton Garden factory and showrooms.
A year later Claude's son-in-law, Henry Lazarus, by then a captain in the British Army, was approached to assist with military watch procurement because of his knowledge of the Swiss watch industry.
Vertex records that it received the military watch specification in 1943, with production of the Cal 59 W.W.W. following during the final years of the war.
An original Vertex technical drawing for the Cal 59 W.W.W. military wristwatch, complete with dimensions and War Office markings.
Credit: Vertex Watches
Around 15,000 examples were produced.
Vertex was the British name among the twelve W.W.W. suppliers, although the watches themselves drew upon Swiss manufacturing — an appropriately Anglo-Swiss arrangement for a company with one foot in Hatton Garden and another in La Chaux-de-Fonds.
And then the war ended.
LOST AND FOUND
Wars end. Fashions change. Companies disappear.
Vertex survived the war and continued producing watches through the post-war decades.
Then came quartz.
Like numerous traditional mechanical watch companies, Vertex struggled with the upheaval that transformed the industry during the 1970s. In 1972, the company closed.
The Vertex sign in Hatton Garden. In 1972, the quartz crisis and the expiry of the company's London lease brought six decades of watchmaking to a close.
Credit: Vertex Watches
The name might easily have become another entry in the enormous graveyard of once-respected watchmakers.
Except that the Lyons family story was not quite finished.
Decades later, Claude Lyons's great-grandson, Don Cochrane, was given an old Vertex Cal 59 W.W.W. by his mother.
Don Cochrane, great-grandson of Vertex founder Claude Lyons and a lifelong Bond enthusiast. And, we should perhaps declare, a long-standing Anthony Sinclair customer. Naturally.
Credit: Vertex Watches
It proved to be rather more than an old watch.
“It's the watch my mother gave me that inspired me to look deeper into Vertex history.”
Following that thread led Cochrane back through the history of the company his great-grandfather had founded — to Hatton Garden and La Chaux-de-Fonds, to its wartime service, and ultimately to the Cal 59's place among the Dirty Dozen.
What began as an exploration of his family's past eventually became a plan for its future.
More than four decades after the original company closed, Vertex returned to London under Claude Lyons's great-grandson, Don Cochrane. Its home today is at 15 Shepherd Market, Mayfair.
Credit: Vertex Watches
Cochrane revived the company in 2015, and when the first new Vertex for more than four decades appeared the following year, its inspiration was obvious.
The M100 looked backwards to go forwards.
Its ancestor was the Cal 59.
The Vertex M100A, directly descended from the wartime Cal 59 W.W.W. that inspired Don Cochrane to revive his great-grandfather's company.
Credit: Vertex Watches
Then, almost a decade later, came another surprise.
Cochrane had no idea that Charlie Higson had selected a Vertex for James Bond.
“I had no idea Charlie Higson had chosen to make his Bond a Vertex wearer until I was contacted out-of-the-blue by the publishers.”
For someone who grew up with the Bond films before falling in love with Fleming's original novels in his twenties, it was quite a moment.
“For Vertex to become part of that legend by sitting on Bond's wrist in King Zero is beyond anything I could have imagined when we set out to bring Vertex back.”
A WATCH WITH A PAST
Watches and James Bond have been companions almost from the beginning.
Sean Connery as James Bond in Dr. No (1962). Watches and 007 have been companions ever since.
Credit: Prisma by Dukas / RDB
The watches have changed with the times, as has Bond himself. They have become more technically sophisticated, more valuable and, inevitably, more closely entwined with the machinery of modern luxury branding.
Charlie Higson has done something rather more interesting.
He has gone backwards.
His Bond does not choose the Vertex from a boutique. He does not receive it from Q Branch. Nobody hands it to him at a launch party.
He inherits it.
That distinction matters.
Daniel Craig as James Bond in No Time to Die (2021), in an Omega advertisement for the Seamaster Diver 300M worn by 007 in the film. By now, Bond's wristwatch had become an integral part of the machinery of luxury branding.
Credit: adsR
The Cal 59 was created in an era when the wristwatch was a tool. Its black dial was black because it needed to be read quickly. Its hands and numerals were luminous because soldiers needed to tell the time in darkness. Its case was designed to withstand conditions considerably more demanding than those imagined by the modern luxury-goods industry.
The scratches weren't part of the design.
They came later.
So did the crack in Bond's glass.
An original wartime Vertex Cal 59 W.W.W., still bearing the marks of its long life.
Credit: Vertex Watches
And that may be the most attractive thing about Higson's choice.
A new watch can tell you the time.
An old watch can tell you a story.