Lot 173: the only watch nobody wanted

The spring bars are welded to the lugs. That is the detail, more than the dial or the bezel, that separates a military Submariner from a Submariner, and it is there because a strap letting go at forty metres is a different class of problem from a strap letting go in a car park. The hands are sword-shaped, broad enough to read through silt. The bezel is graduated across all sixty minutes instead of the civilian fifteen. The dial carries a circled T for tritium. Lot 173 at Phillips in Geneva on 9 May was a Rolex Ref. 5513/5517, circa 1975, and it was the only thing in the room nobody bought.

The Ministry of Defence never commissioned a new watch. It specified changes to one that already existed and Rolex made them. Hacking seconds. The fixed bars. A bezel that counts the whole hour. Roughly 1,250 went out between 1971 and 1979 across three references — the 5513 and the 5517, and the double-stamped 5513/5517 that collectors rank above either. Calibre 1520 inside, automatic, with twenty-six jewels. Thirty-nine millimetres across. This example is stamped 5513 between the lugs and 5517 underneath, which is the configuration the house calls the rarest.

The provenance is the part that should have carried it. The watch was issued to a Royal Navy clearance diver stationed at HMS Rooke in Gibraltar. It reached Phillips from the family of the man who wore it, with his dive logs and a letter from his grandson. Fresh to market, in the trade’s phrase, and for once the phrase is doing honest work.

Then a small thing, which we note because nobody else will. The lot details give the case back’s military stamps as 0552 for the Royal Navy and NATO stock number 923-7697, with a unit number of 682/77. The catalogue essay, further down the same page, gives the issue number as 695. Both numbers are the house’s. Neither is reconciled with the other, and a watch whose entire value rests on its engravings is a watch where that ought to be settled before the hammer.

Estimate CHF100,000 to CHF200,000. Bought in.

The other two hundred and twenty lots sold. Of the two hundred and nineteen carrying a numeric low estimate, not one went at or below it — not a single lot in the entire sale. The Journe Résonance, estimated at CHF450,000 to CHF900,000, made CHF4,875,500 with premium. A Louis Richard tourbillon estimated at CHF100,000 to CHF200,000, the same range as the Rolex, made CHF3,968,000.

So the estimates in this catalogue were not predictions. They were opening positions, and the room beat every one of them. The single lot where the number looked like a genuine attempt to value the object is the lot that went home unsold, which is either a coincidence or the most useful thing the sale published.

What did not sell was a watch with a ship and a job and a named owner, and a grandson who wrote a letter about him. What sold for four times its high estimate was a tourbillon nobody has ever worn to work.