Catch up

Oops, been a while...

Having looked at pretty much every West End watch that has come up on ebay for a year or more, I feel a bit more confident in stating some dating rules of thumb.

First off I think it's helpful to split them into three very rough eras: Pre-WWI, between WWI and WWII and post WWII. It's probably not coincidence that the eras coincide with wars. Pre WWI I think their target market was British colonial troops and officials serving abroad, particularly in India. After WWI I think it switched more to domestic consumers in the Empire (India being the biggest market again), and after WW2 (or probably more specifically Indian independence), away from India almost entirely (due to import restrictions I think) to focus on the middle east.

The three eras also seem to coincide with manufacturing changes (and probably reflect wider changes in the Swiss watch industry and beyond). Pre-WWI WE seem to have largely made their own movements and mostly pocket watches (I have seen some interesting looking wristwatches of this era coming up for sale in India, but am unsure of their veracity). Between the wars they started producing wrist watches and for this they switched to using other people's ebauches. They also started using ebauches on their pocket watches, presumably ceasing their own movement manufacture sometime in the late 1910s or early 20s. Most of the watches from this era seem to exclusively use Revue movements (signed West End) and, (this is entirely speculation), I would not be surprised to find that their manufacturing facilities were sold to Revue who were expanding at the time. About the late 1930s they seemed to to have switched to FHF ebauches and persisted with these until about the 1970's. After that they are inevitably ETA. I'm not particularly au fait with Swiss watch history but I suspect FHF were gobbled up by ETA around that time.

West End Watches only have serial numbers during the first two eras and in the second era they only appear on the case, not the movement. In the few accurately dated examples I've seen, the style of the watch seems earlier than the date would suggest. I suspect fashions in Indian households were perhaps a little behind those in the West.

There are two numbers that routinely appear on WE watches, though inconsistently. The serial number is a single number between 1 (presumably) and about 38 million. The case number is usually of the Format XXXX-XX or L-XXXX-XXXX. They almost always begin with a 4, 5 or 6 and are of little value in dating. There are several additional numbers that also appear occasionally and can be helpful with dating but they are very hit and miss

I have settled on a very rough rule of thumb for dating via the serial number than the first two digits of  the serial numbers above 1 million represents the year. ie 3456789 would be approximately 1934. I reiterate that this is VERY rough.

Below about 1 million you might be able to use the first digit in the same rule, ie 612345 would be 1906 but I would be less confident of this. Anything below about 1-200,000 is probably 19th century. Much fewer watches were produced then (and survive) so I think you must use other clues here.

There are always exceptions though, when I get some time I will cover the Longines episode and others.

Edit: I have just seen a watch that can be firmly dated to 1924 with a serial number beginning 38. This somewhat destroys my above theory...