James Bond Watches Blog

Although Donovan "Red" Grant did wear a Girard-Perregaux watch in the novel "From Russia with Love," it never became a James Bond wristwatch

Some myths die hard.

They go down kicking and screaming, in fact.

For perhaps as many as fifty years, maybe more — too many watch writers insisted that Girard-Perregaux was a James Bond watch.

But it never was.

And I busted that myth here on this James Bond Watches Blog two years ago this month. See “The Girard-Perregaux wristwatch that James Bond did not wear,” February 14, 2010.

Confusion stemmed from reference to villain Red Grant’s “bulky gold wristwatch on a well-used brown crocodile strap,” described by Ian Fleming on the first chapter of From Russia with Love (Jonathan Cape, 1957).

“It was a Girard-Perregaux model designed for people who like gadgets, and it had a sweep second-hand and two little windows in the face to tell the day of the month, and the month, and the phase of the moon.”

Fast forward into climax and denouement of the novel: Bond’s own watch destroyed by Grant, Bond kills Grant, Bond takes watch of Grant’s dead wrist and wears it as his own from there on out.

Trouble with such simplistic wristwatches of James Bond stories is that they miss what happened in between continue reading…

Heuer 980-series Night Dive watch ad, placed just a few years before it would become a James Bond watch in "The Living Daylights"

This advertisement is from the August 1983 issue of Skin Diver magazine.

Among watch models featured, we see the reference 980.031 PVD Night Diver from what was then the Heuer Time & Electronics Corporation.

Actor Timothy Dalton wore that model as James Bond in the Eon Productions 007 movie, The Living Daylights, 1987.

Technical specifications include details on the phosphorescent glow-dial (after just 10 seconds of exposure to light, the entire dial was said to glow for an average of 10 minutes).

Beyond that, tritium markers on the hands markers at 12, 6, and 9 o’clock positions glowed “even without previous activation.”

A total of 6 color and size variations are shown here, beyond which, alternatives were “available with non-phosphorescent dials.”

In addition to providing historical information on reference numbers and certain specifications, advertisements such as this make great collector pieces in their own rights. I know some people who focus on individual watches, but go deep with them — building out what they own to include original packaging, instructions, ads such as this, and collateral material.

Often at nicely accessible prices.

My name is Dell Deaton, and I sign my name to what I write about James Bond watches

For better than a decade of utilizing the Internet now, it’s been my contention that the ultimate issue was never access to nor amount of information.

We’ve been literally drowning in information since long before the world wide web went mainstream.

Long before Al Ries and Jack Trout observed this as a problem in their 1981 work, Positioning.

The real issue is and has always been about accountability.

Which is the best answer to your question? What’s the best source? And with that, why?

Some time back, in the days of Prodigy and CompuServe, I guess, someone came up with the fanciful notion of participants using “handles” in lieu of their real names. Cute. Maybe even appropriate, in that way that leisure suits were considered appropriate — in their time.

From there it became the norm on forums of all sorts. Official and independent. And since professional journalists (or, at a minimum, stockholders and executive managers responsible for directing professional journalism) so little understood the difference in value proposition between message and medium, it’s no wonder so many of them have followed like lemmings.

Catastrophically abandoning responsible and valuable letters-to-the-editor policies that required signatures, with verification. Desperately grasping for continued relevance, these former ink-on-paper types fell for the premise that sheer volume equated to value.

Credibility be damned.

Ironically, continue reading…