The First Watch

The first watch, and the one that started it all, is also the watch I wear daily...

It's a Sillidar wristwatch, (nicely serviced by Ryte Time watches) with no features more fancy than a sub-second dial. It just tells the time. It cost me about £15 on ebay.

Serial number: 3390261

It has engraved (actually more scratched) on the back, above the serial number: J.G.L 31-5-1945 (a couple of weeks after VE Day). Inside the caseback is stamped "W6225B" (and of course "EVERBRIGHT STEEL BACK"). The movement is sign with the W inside a 6 pointed star inside a double circle. Somewhat surprisingly for a watch this age there are no servicing marks.

At first glance this would seem to date it quite accurately, but some of the features make me think it's perhaps a quite a bit earlier than this.

First of all the inscription is really rough and appears just scratched in. If you'd just bought a brand new (fairly pricey) watch you would at least pay a little extra to get the jeweler to engrave it properly, not scratch it in with a nail when you got home.

Second, it doesn't have Incabloc shock protection. One of West End's claims to fame is that they were the first company to put Incabloc into mass production, and this happened in the late 1930's. The Sillidar was (I think) one of their higher end models and you would have thought more likely to get the better features sooner.

Thirdly: there is no jewel count marked on the dial. It's 15 jewels (or less, I've not taken it apart). A watch of 1945 vintage should have had at least 17 jewels.

Lastly, it has a proper enamel dial. From what I can find these had almost died out by WWII, being too time consuming to produce. However somewhat bizarrely, if you look carefully at the pictures above, you can see that the sub-second dial has been ground out (a common practice to give enough clearance above the second hand) over an existing sub second dial that was apparently slightly off centre. Given this I began to think it was probably an assemblage of some kind and the dial did not belong to this movement, with the sub seconds added afterwards. However on reflection that doesn't make much sense either: it's clearly a West End dial on a West End movement of about the same age, and the figures on the sub-second dial are baked into the enamel with everything else so it was clearly done deliberately at production time. Weird. Perhaps they were using up old dials that were meant to go on slightly different calibres? Perhaps it's a one off? What we really need are more examples...

Anyway, my educated guess then is around about late 1920s - early 30s. However, I'm not very confident in this, hence this whole project!

Update 15/8/2012 - I notice this is the only watch I've seen to have a suffix on it's "case number". I wonder if "B" is B quality. Might explain the sub-second dial.