Bryan Forbes wears a Smiths

Captain Martin Porthill is the League's marksman, cashiered for shooting suspected EOKA men in Cyprus and getting by, when Hyde's envelope arrives, as a nightclub pianist and gigolo to wealthy middle-aged women. Bryan Forbes wrote The League of Gentlemen (1960) through three drafts and kept Porthill for himself; he moved into directing the next year with Whistle Down the Wind, with The Stepford Wives to come in 1975. In Basil Dearden's film, Hyde's eight ex-officers study a London bank with military patience before they rob it.

The Smiths turns up during that studying. At 10:52 on the casing morning, two bank employees wheel a cart out of the elevator, Porthill and Mycroft watching from the floor, and Porthill checks the time on his watch. Which Smiths it is has never been established; the brand is the whole identification. It was an English brand with a particular standing in 1960: Smiths had made watches at its Cheltenham works since the end of the war, it had co-sponsored the 1953 Everest expedition, and the Smiths De Luxe that Edmund Hillary wore to the summit now sits in the Science Museum. Hyde, meanwhile, keeps the operation's time on a Jaeger-LeCoultre.