I recall as recently as the mid 1990s that watch buyers would remove military issue markings from the back of a watch or indeed prefer to buy military issued pieces with the markings already removed. Hindsight is a great thing of course and there must be many people who regret having undertaken this surgery. The market for military watches and indeed collectability of the same has mushroomed over the last decade; particularly, post war to late 1970s issued pieces are a finite resource simply because they are not manufactured nor indeed issued any more and of course in the case of certain models they were manufactured and issued in very limited numbers. Thus, original, ‘unsterilised’ military watches from the period referred to above are in great demand and prices are continuing to rise. I am referring mainly to British issue examples and long gone are the days of being able to purchase whole trays of what are now desirable watches at ‘bargain’ prices. I personally recall seeing in the catalogue of a UK based military surplus supplier Lemania chronographs for £295.00, Smiths W10s for £100, Cyma WWWs for much less.
A decade on and even early quartz equipped watches are now fetching prices in the healthy £100s – viz the Seiko 7A28 chronograph. The rarity of certain pieces makes them extremely ‘hot’ on the collector market, into this category firmly fall the IWC Mark XI and Omega 6B/542. In the case of the latter, this watch was purchased by the British Ministry of Defence once only – in 1953. Numbers were of the order of 5900 pieces in total for the one contract making this one of the rarest and certainly most desirable British military watches ever produced.
Two versions exist of the Omega 53 as it has become known, identified primarily by different dials: the ‘thin arrow’ and the ‘fat arrow’. The arrow in this case refers to the Broad Arrow on the watch dial, denoting British Government property. The Omega 53 originally used Radium within the luminous compound on the watch dial and this version sported a thin arrow above the six; the Ministry of Defence redialled many watches to employ Tritium as a safer alternative – these watches bear a fat arrow above the six on the dial and the appropriate circle T below the manufacturer’s name.
The rarity of this and other British military watches means that being very collectible, wearing such a watch as an everyday timepiece may be detrimental to its value given the risks of water ingestion, further damage and so on. They cannot be classed as ‘wear it and forget it’ items which until recently has left something of a void for those people who like the military connection, style and the vintage feel of such pieces and who would choose to wear one on a daily basis. Yes, there are current or recent issue quartz pieces available but these do not satisfy the vintage specifications to which I am alluding.
Certainly, the proliferation of military style watches would suggest the desirability of same and many manufacturers large and small are to a greater or lesser degree mimicking various military designs. Even Omega themselves have revisited the Omega 53 and used this example in producing and promoting the Dynamic range of the latter half of the 1990s. When I personally saw this watch and the use of images of the Omega 53 in the advertising I was a little nonplussed at how the company could have missed such a golden opportunity by making the was so visually different from the original. Whilst arguably attractive in its own right, the Dynamic was a long way from the 53 visually with the closest connection seeming to be the minute track and markers. Financial muscle does not necessarily translate to sense and for whatever reason the Dynamic didn’t appear to be a commercial success and was deleted within a relatively short period.
Smaller concerns have also taken up the challenge of producing what are now referred to as homage watches. Indeed, I have reviewed such myself in the form of the PRS-1 Speedbird. The Speedbird was perhaps one of the first ‘real’ homage watches that really did come close to achieving that ‘sepia toned’ feeling which I discussed in the review of it. Since then (2001), one or two small and specialist concerns have attacked the homage market using expertise and attention to detail/taste that the likes of Omega and others seem to lack. What has until now not been achieved is the combining of military homage with the ability to legally use a ‘real’ military name on the dial. September 2004 saw this change with the introduction of the Precista PRS-53 from Timefactors.
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Overview
Omega, IWC, Jaeger Le Coultre, Cyma, Timor , Smiths, Newmark and Precista are amongst many previous suppliers to the British Ministry of Defence. Some are more widely known than others but all have at one time or other produced timepieces that met the various standards laid down by Ministry of Defence requirements (Defstans).
Precista was a brand which was owned by UK watch wholesaler Southerns (there had been previous owners). It would seem that Precista military timepieces were supplied for a relatively limited period of time, perhaps as short as 18-20 years. Certainly, W10 and 6BB (RAF) general service watches were issued in 1982 onwards and diver watches in the late 1980s through to 1993 utilising different case styles. Previously to this was the asymmetric case manual wind chronograph bearing the Precista name and this would date to the early to mid 1970s. By the end of the 1990s, Southerns had ceased trading and the Precista brand slipped into disuse. Thus Precista ceased to be, leaving a military pedigree; original Precista issued watches are now sought after due to their relative scarcity.
Brand names have regularly been bought up (particularly by Swiss manufacturers) and resurrected in some way or other. Unfortunately, in some cases the resulting products bear no connection at all to the original. An extreme illustration of this might be the recent resurrection of the Ball Watch Company – famous in the United States for producing superb quality ‘Railroad Approved’ pocket watches and wristwatches. The ‘new’ Ball watches draw heavily on the reputation and history of the old for advertising but the products (whilst technically novel) are anachronistic in the context of the brand and ‘history’ being applied to them.
In what I consider to be a truly shrewd move, Eddie Platts of Timefactors in the UK managed to acquire the Precista brand in 2003. Here was an opportunity to apply a real military name to military style/spec/homage watches or indeed to earn disdain from the watch buying community for illogical brand application.
The first new generation Precista appeared in September 2004 in the form of the Precista PRS-53. In this case, the ‘53′ is referring to the intention to capture the spirit and ‘feel’ of the Omega 53 which is now so collectable. Is it just the spirit and feel of the Omega itself that the PRS-53 is trying to capture one may ask or is there more to it?
Here we have a watch that is styled after a piece supplied to the Royal Air Force during the year that saw the end of the Korean war, the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II and the conquest of Everest. During the same year in October, a Royal Air Force Canberra won the Christchurch Centenary Air Race flying from the UK to New Zealand (11792 miles) in 23 hours and 50 minutes. This was of course during the year of the one-off issue of the Omega 53. Were the crew wearing examples of this watch I wonder?
I would suggest that the Precista captures the spirit of those times in terms of just how ‘old fashioned’ it is specification wise. This is a manual wind watch with a dial design dating back over 50 years equipped with an acrylic crystal. Furthermore it is proportioned appropriately for watches of the time. Undoubtedly, it looks extremely similar to the Omega though not an exact ‘copy’. Thus, if one were looking for all the modern conveniences possible in a wristwatch then the Precista is not going to fit the bill. If however like me one enjoys the manual input required daily, the classic design of a simple lugged case, the fact that this watch will scratch/age and the crystal more so then this may be the watch for you! In an age of ‘wear it and forget it’ wristwatches the Precista does indeed take us back in time somewhat. Note that this watch is available in an automatic version for those who prefer not to have to manually wind once a day. Due to the dial design which was specified by the British authorities of the day, it is of course extremely easy to tell the time with this watch – undoubtedly of great importance for military applications.
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