Timor’s name will forever be remembered as one of the Dirty Dozen watchmakers that made battlefield timepieces for the British military in World War II.
In fact, Timor made two watches for the troops.
The first was issued to servicemen as they returned to civilian life after the First World War, and was designed to the military issued WWW specs.
The second, to specifications known as the Army Trade Pattern (ATP), is the version that we now know as a Dirty Dozen watch and was issued to the military during World War II.
Timor began life over a century ago as a Swiss watchmaker.
After the war it turned to making more fashionable watches, which were popular in Britain in the sixties, but ran into trouble with the quartz crisis, almost disappearing completely, before re-emerging decades later as a business based in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne in 2015.
With the current retro trend showing no sign of slowing, Timor is trading on its historic wartime pieces with recreations of both the ATP and WWW watches.
The Heritage Field WWW was first out of the blocks, a faithful reissue priced at £940 for a 36mm steel watch housing either an automatic Sellita SW260 or, perhaps more faithfully, a hand-wound SW216 movement.
This month Timor has returned to its post-WWI piece, the ATP, in the form of the Heritage Field ATP
Towards the end of the Great War, the British War Office decided to develop the first general-purpose wristwatch for the Army.
These would replace the various pocket watches, and homemade trench watches most soldiers were using.
Timor has created a modern day reissue faithful to the ATP design in a limited edition of 50 automatics and 50 hand-would watches.
The 36.5mm brushed steel watches have cream printed dials with beige Superluminova.
They are proudly labeled as waterproof (to 50 metres) on the dial, just above a small seconds at 6 o’clock.
Timor is pricing the modern Heritage Field ATP at £1,100.
