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Click here for complete *.pdf version of "Discovered: James Bond's Rolex," WatchTime (February 2009), by Dell Deaton |
James Bond, like his creator Ian Fleming, wore a Rolex Explorer I.
by Dell Deaton
Did
Ian Fleming, the creator of James Bond,
have a particular wristwatch in mind when writing the original 007
stories? Could it be that Fleming himself wore the first James Bond
timepiece?
Only one brand is specifically named as that secret agent’s watch in
Fleming’s original 14 Bond editions:
Rolex. The greatest detail comes in
his eleventh book,
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, published in
1963. Here we read of the “big luminous numerals” that Bond sees when
taking a lazy midnight glance at his chronometer, “a heavy Rolex Oyster
Perpetual on an expanding metal bracelet.” The watch is a Rolex Explorer
I.
And not just any Rolex Explorer I. My research convinces me that it was
Fleming’s own stainless-steel wristwatch, model 1016 with a black dial
on a 7206 bracelet, case number 596851. Fleming’s stepdaughter,
Fionn
Morgan, believes it is the first and only Rolex he ever owned. After her
stepfather passed away on August 12, 1964, the watch was locked in a
bank vault. There it stayed until the death of her mother — his widow,
Ann — in 1981. That was when, following almost 20 years in isolation, it
once again saw the light of day.
“Spookily, it was still going,” Morgan said to me last May, recalling
the day she first picked it up. “I am told that this happens with Oyster
Perpetuals; your hand sets them off.” To her the watch was intensely
personal, a family heirloom left by a man she loved as if her own
blood-relation father. So she did what many of us would do. She gave it
to her son-in-law, to wear daily as a touchstone with her past.
