Ancient history

How a corporal ordered a Rolex from a German prison camp to use in The Great Escape

In 2007 a Rolex Oyster 3525 chronograph and some letters were put up for auction, paying sixty-six thousand pounds for the whole. Six years later it was learned that another watch of the same make and model sold for sixty thousand pounds. In the first case, it was the one that Corporal Clive James Nutting had commissioned and the correspondence with the director of Rolex for its acquisition in 1943. In the second, its owner had been Lieutenant Gerald Imeson, who, apart from also belonging to the RAF and the watch guy, shared with the former being both prisoners in Stalag Luft III; Steve McQueen wore Imeson's Rolex in the movie The Great Escape .

Rolex was the first watch to climb the roof of the world, Everest, on the wrist of Tenzing Norgay; he was also a pioneer in descending to the greatest depth, the Mariana Trench, attached to the hull of Piccard's bathyscaphe. It is the official timekeeper of the Wimbledon Tennis Championships and the brand used, of course, by James Bond, since it has always been identified with quality elevated to the category of exquisiteness. But of the many anecdotes that can be told about these watches, perhaps the most surprising is that of the important role they played in the escape from the aforementioned Stalag Luft III during World War II.

If there is someone to whom it does not sound familiar, it is about the events narrated in the film The great escape (The great escape, John Sturges, 1963). On March 24, 1944, all the alarms of the aforementioned concentration camp sounded when the sentinels realized that seventy-six prisoners, all Allied pilots, were escaping right under their noses. To do this, they had dug three tunnels, two of which they left as a store for the earth while the other, which they baptized with the code name of Harry , measured no less than 102 meters and was equipped with electric light and even a ventilation system.

They had in their favor the fact that their guards gave them a relatively lax regime, since they belonged to the Luftwaffe and not to the SS. Despite everything, the tunnel fell short; Due to a calculation error, it barely exceeded the limit of the barbed wire and that is why the escapees were discovered. Over the following days, the Gestapo captured one after another those who managed to get out -except for three, who managed to get to safety- and shot fifty of them in retaliation.

What was Rolex's role in all of this? Go back to the beginning of the war, when RAF pilots used to buy RAF watches to replace the ones they received as standard equipment. They obviously wanted the best for their job and didn't mind assuming it would take a while to pay them off. The problem was that the Germans were also called by the quality of the Swiss brand, so when a British pilot was shot down and taken prisoner, his captors confiscated his watch.

This implied that the rightful owner not only lost his precious belonging but also would still have a lot of installments to pay for nothing, and since throughout four years of war there were many pilots in such a circumstance, the amount of seized Rolex watches added up to several Thousands. This peculiar situation reached the ears of the founder of the company, Hans Wilsdorf, who, making a show of empathy, decided to come up with a daring but elegant solution:he would replace all the confiscated watches free of charge and also delay the payment of the amount until the end of the conflict.

To do this, the affected officers only had to send a letter to Rolex through the Red Cross explaining the circumstances in which they had lost their watches and indicating where exactly they were held so that the replacements could be sent to them. Paradoxically, Wilsdorf was German by birth (from Bavaria), although he had settled in London in 1905 to found Wilsdorf &Davies, which as a result of the First World War he would move to Geneva due to the hostility in England against the Germans; something that also led him to change the name of the company, opting for The Rolex Watch Company, which sounded more neutral and international. It was he who, in 1944, personally took charge of that unprecedented initiative, which had an unexpected effect on the Allied prisoners.

And it is that, beyond the watchmaking issue itself, their morale rose considerably, since they understood that the businessman himself took it for granted that the war would end soon and with Germany's defeat. For the brand it was also unexpected publicity, since the news of the Wilsdorf initiative spread among the US troops arriving in Europe at that time and that served to open up a market in their country.

But let's go with the matter of Stalag Luft III. One of the pilots who wrote to Rolex asking for the replacement was, as we said, Clive James Nutting, a corporal in the Royal Corps of Signals captured at Dunkirk in 1940, who on March 10, 1943, ordered an Oyster 3525 chronograph. stainless steel; It was no small feat because the price of that model amounted to no less than one thousand two hundred pounds, although the corporal claimed that he could pay for it with the money he earned in the fields working as a shoemaker.

Exactly four months later the watch arrived accompanied by a letter from Wilsdorf in which he exempted him from paying it until the war was over, as he had promised, and also apologized for the delay in shipment, due to the many similar orders he had received. attend.

The owner of Rolex had apparently been impressed by the fact that a corporal would buy one of his more expensive models, when officers usually did, while lower-ranking pilots like Nutting used to order the... em> Speed ​​King , which was much cheaper because it was smaller in size. But Wilsforf was unaware of one small detail:a massive breakout from the camp was being organized, and Nutting was one of the masterminds of the plan.

In effect, it seems that the chronograph was designed to measure the times of the passage of guard patrols and the sweep of night searchlights. Also the rate at which the prisoners had to enter the tunnel so that it would not become congested. Seen the result, the Oyster 3525 effectively fulfilled its mission and if the escape did not go as well as expected it was due to the insufficient length of Harry , as we indicated before.

Nutting and Imeson survived the Gestapo crackdown and the war because they were not among the escapees; in fact, the first would be one of the advisers of the famous film and he died in 2001, hence the watch and the cards went up for auction. Before, as he had agreed, he requested that they send him the invoice for the watch; when he arrived it was much less than it cost:fifteen pounds twelve shillings sixpence, the same amount Imeson paid. The reason was due to a detail that no one had taken into account:the problem of taking foreign currency out of the country after the war, even when it was to make payments. Of course, Rolex was no longer affected financially because it had multiplied its prestige and sales.