Jeremy Irvine wears a Sekonda

Partway through The Woman in Black 2: Angel of Death, the watch turns up on Harry Burnstow's wrist as he edges through a basement, and it is gone almost before you can place it. Jeremy Irvine plays Burnstow, a Royal Air Force flying officer stationed at an airfield nearby, a man haunted by a crash he alone walked away from. The film is set in 1941, as the Blitz empties London of its children. Two teachers take a group of them out to Eel Marsh House, the rotten estate from the first film, forty years on, and their arrival stirs the Woman in Black.

The watch is a Sekonda on a brown leather strap. Sekonda is a British high-street brand, inexpensive and unflashy, and on Harry's wrist it goes all but unnoticed. Propstore, which sells screen-used props, has offered this exact watch as his hero piece, scuffed and scratched from filming and packaged with a certificate of authenticity, for 195 pounds, a little over 250 dollars. By the dealer's account it is worn throughout the film and shows most clearly in that basement.

Sekonda did not exist in 1941. It was founded in 1966 to sell Soviet watches in Britain, re-badged movements from the Moscow and Petrodvorets factories that undercut anything Swiss. It later became the best-selling watch brand in the country. So a wartime RAF officer wears a name that postdates his war by twenty-five years, one that began by selling Russia's watches to the British.