It’s a wristy business
Andrew Roberts on the ultimate male status symbol British gentlemen do not wear jewellery. A small unobtrusive gold family signet ring on the little finger of the left hand, perhaps, and gold cufflinks, but otherwise any personal ostentation is considered flash, foreign or naff. Except for watches.
The best way for a Briton to show his sense of taste and style is through his choice of watch. It’s the ultimate chic male status symbol, like an Aston Martin Volante or ‘midnight’ Canaletto, except that you can carry it on your wrist, the top just visible from below your perfectly turned French cuff. We are all slaves to the iron dictates of what Kipling dubbed ‘the unforgiving minute’, so watches are practically impossible to live without unless one is a farmer, hermit or hippy. But that does not explain the beguiling aesthetic of the different brands.
There is the sporty Rolex Submariner beloved of James Bond and supposedly worn by divers and skiers, a rugged watch that has its dressy counterpart in the Datejust. Dressier still is the Cartier American Tank, the only watch which really counts more as a gem than a chronometer. (Arguments abound as to how the word ‘Tank’ originated to describe this watch.) Then there is the fantastically complicated Patek Philippe, which prides itself on being a potential heirloom, more like a family trust than a means for telling the time. (Of the 15 most expensive watches ever sold at auction, 14 have been Patek Philippes.) Other brand names ooze a combination of (usually Swiss) reliability and sophistication. Among those that have turned grown men into helpless watch-junkies are GirardPerregaux, A. Lange & Söhne, Vacheron Constantin and Longines. Breitling’s aviator formula has proved hugely successful. Buy our watch, it whispers to our subconscious, and you too could be a fighter pilot who thinks nothing of landing a Hawker Harrier on the pitching flight deck of an aircraft carrier under heavy missile attack in high seas. The greatest watchmaker who ever lived, Abraham-Louis Breguet (1747–1823), sold timepieces to both Napoleon and Wellington. (It wasn’t the only thing the two men had in common; they also both had Josephina Grassini and Marguerite Weimer as mistresses, though not concurrently.) For the then vast sum of 300 guineas, Breguet made Wellington a watch that ‘on touching a spring at any time, struck the hour and the minutes’.
Today this is done by certain Patek Philippe watches, which boast minuterepeaters that can chime the time in the dark, and ‘perpetual moonphase’ operations, which can tell the difference between calendar and lunar months and even identifies leap years for you. It is breathtaking that so much technology can fit into something that is run with moving parts rather than a microchip.
All this particularly appeals to men, who make up over 90 per cent of the world’s top watch-collectors. ‘Vintage watches exercise a particular fascination for males,’ says Tom Bolt, director of watchguru.com (07917 864444), Britain’s leading vintage watch dealership. ‘There’s clearly something about the male psyche that makes certain men want to own more and better watches, until with some people it becomes almost an obsession.’ An obsession with impressive benefits, since vintage high-quality wristwatches have proved an astonishingly good investment over the past two decades. Rolex ‘Paul Newman’ Daytonas that cost £10,000 only six years ago, for example, will sell for four times that today.
If you were to find the ‘lost’ Harrison Mariner watch, only one of which was believed ever to have been made, you could sell it for around £2 million, and Rolex SplitSecond Chronographs from the 1950s are worth about half that, while a white-gold version of the Patek Philippe World Time watch from the 1960s would fetch about £750,000. Even on much more modest scale, a Rolex Submariner from the 1950s can be worth up to £40,000. (A modern version costs £2,500.) There are some splendid watches from the 1920s and 1930s, but it was the postwar decades that produced the finest wristwatches. By the late 1970s mass production was cutting too many corners — dials were being produced by machine rather than by hand; printing had taken the place of engraving, etc. — and a sense of true luxury was lost in pursuit of higher margins.
That is why the cognoscenti pursue rarity. The industry is slowly winning back its reputation for painstaking attention to detail. Spear-heading this renaissance is the Dunhill SP30, with its rotating bezel and flick-out chronograph button, which retails at £3,250.
So what do I wear? On a skiing holiday in Zermatt 12 years ago, my father bought me a Longines Grande Classique to celebrate my engagement, and it is still the thinnest, lightest and most elegant watch I’ve ever seen. And in the spirit of that highly successful Patek Philippe advertising campaign, one day I’d like to give it to my son.
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