Peter O'Toole wears an unidentified watch

In one of the production stills from David Lean's Lawrence of Arabia (1962), Peter O'Toole lies prone at the crest of a sand ridge in British khaki, a pale-dialed white-metal watch on his wrist. The watch everyone associates with Lawrence is an Omega, and the association is earned, but it belongs to the real man rather than the film. T.E. Lawrence wore a 46-millimetre solid-silver military chronograph with a single pusher at six o'clock, made in 1912 and serviced in 1933 under T.E. Shaw, one of the aliases he enlisted under; the Omega Museum bought it at the Antiquorum auction in Geneva in November 2000 for 86,000 Swiss francs. The production made no attempt to reproduce it.

What it strapped on O'Toole instead took collectors years to pin down. A watch fan posted screenshots in October 2020 asking for an identification and got guesses, jokes, and a pointer to the museum piece. The better evidence was a black-and-white production photograph of the prop: a plain round case on a wide, scuffed leather strap, with a washed-out dial and an oversized crown. "Definitely not a WW1 chronograph," said the collector who dug it up. The answer arrived in January 2023, when a reader on an Omega collectors' forum studied the prop photo and recognized the layout: two small apertures on the dial, and a slide button on the left flank of the case, opposite the crown. That combination marks an alarm watch built on the Baumgartner caliber 90, a movement that appeared under a string of small brand names, Basis and Sheffield among them. Which name was on this particular dial has never been established, and no one in either discussion could say who chose it for the production.

The watch most often linked to O'Toole and this film never appears in it. After he finished the shoot, an Arab sheikh presented him with an 18-carat gold Audemars Piguet perpetual calendar in recognition of his performance, and the watch later surfaced at auction.