Sean Connery wears a Rolex Submariner

In a publicity still for Thunderball, Sean Connery stands at the wheel of a Bahamas speedboat in swim trunks, a diving mask pushed up over his hair, one hand on the windscreen frame. On that wrist is a steel watch on a dark strap. Connery plays James Bond, sent to the islands to recover two atomic bombs that SPECTRE has hijacked from a NATO bomber and sunk off the coast. Bond spends much of the film in the water.

The watch is a Rolex Submariner, reference 6538, the one collectors call the Big Crown for the oversized 8mm crown it wears without guards. It is a working dive watch: a 38mm steel case, a rotating bezel, an automatic Calibre 1030, and a dial rated to 200 metres, 660 feet. Rolex made it from 1954. The reason the same reference turns up across Connery's early Bond films is not that the studio bought one. By the account collectors repeat, producer Albert Broccoli took the Submariner off his own wrist for Dr. No and handed it to Connery, and it stayed on through Thunderball.

Thunderball gives Bond a second watch built for exactly that work, a Breitling Top Time that Q has fitted with a Geiger counter to sweep the sea floor for the warheads. That one is the gadget. The Submariner is the watch Bond keeps on for everything else, a borrowed diver doing the plain job the gadget cannot, which is telling him the time. Bond's other watch in these films was not the production's either: in the suit scenes he wore a gold Gruen widely taken to be Connery's own, a dress piece his formal wardrobe was tailored to clear.