NATO watch straps – The ExhaustNotes Blog

By Joe Berk

You know, you’d think the folks who produce James Bond movies would have their act (pardon the pun) together, but evidently that’s not so. I’ve already written about the iconic early James Bond movie flyer that shows Sean Connery standing provocatively with what appears to be a very menacing handgun. It wasn’t. It turns out that what old Bond, James Bond posed with was a .177-caliber pellet pistol (a BB gun, to use a looser term), and that was because they forgot to bring the real gun for the photo shoot. The photographer, a target shooter, just happened to have his BB gun in the trunk of his car. I wrote about my identical pellet pistol a few years ago.

But all’s fair in love, war, and spy movies, and when I get a chance to watch a Bond movie (no matter how many times I’ve seen it), I’m in. That’s what happened the other day when I was channel surfing and Goldfinger popped up. I started the movie and in the opening scenes I noticed something I had previously missed. When Bond is doing his Navy Seal routine, getting ready to blow up a waterfront drug lab disguised as an oil tank, I caught a glimpse of his watch.

A poor image, taken from my TV screen with my iPhone.

I stopped the movie and went back a bit to get a better look at the watch. Wow, it was a Rolex dive watch (another topic we’ve covered here on ExNotes), and wow again, it had a military style band. The image quality you see above is awful, partly due to it being an evening scene and partly due to the above image being a cell phone capture of my television screen. It’s too bluish, I know. But that watch strap…wow! Was it a coincidence? I had just received an email from a company called BluShark offering an identical watch strap!

I went to Google and searched for a better image of the Goldfinger scene. Sure enough, I found it:

Note the watch strap’s colors (or should I say colours?) and poor fit on the Rolex Submariner.

Several thoughts emerged:

- - I’m not and never have been a military watch strap fan.
  - The above notwithstanding, I liked the colors in the Bond strap.
  - I have a Casio Marlin, which is kind of a poor man’s Rolex, and those Bond watch strap colors looked good against a black dive watch.
  - The watch strap in the Goldfinger scene didn’t fit the watch at all. It was a couple of sizes too narrow compared the Rolex’s lug width.

My Casio Marlin and its original watch strap. I’ve owned this watch for close to 20 years. It’s the best watch buy on the planet.

So I went back to the BluShark email. Buy two and get one free. They sent me a code for another 10% off my first order. Free shipping. How could I say no? I knew what I would order, too. I wanted two of the Bond watch straps in the appropriate size, one for my Casio and another identical one for good buddy Paul’s new Casio (he bought a Marlin, too; he’s always giving me free stuff, and it was time for me to reciprocate). And I wanted another military style strap in OD green for my Citizen Eco-Drive chronograph, a watch I’ve owned and enjoyed wearing for 30 years. The Citizen originally came with an OD green cloth strap, and a similar military strap for it would be perfect.

A few days later the BluShark bands arrived. Wow. It took only minutes to fit my two to their respective watches, and as you can see from the photo atop this blog, the Casio looks great.

That had me wondering: What is the significance of the colors on the Bond watch strap, and in Goldfinger, why did the strap fit his Rolex so poorly?

As to the fit (and as much as you can trust anything you read on the Internet), Sean Connery didn’t own a Rolex. Albert Broccoli, the producer, did, and he leant his watch to Connery. But it didn’t fit Connery’s wrist. A crew member had the watch strap you see in Goldfinger, so it was quickly swapped onto Bond’s watch, and voilà, the Bond watch strap was born. Like I said near the beginning of this blog, you’d think a Bond movie prop department would be better organized, but there you have it.

As to the colors, well, that story is all over the map, too. The one I like is that the colors in the Bond strap are the British military intelligence regimental colors (red, green, and black). That leads to the next logical question: Do spies wear colors to advertise their spy backgrounds? I think the answer is probably no, but it makes for an interesting explanation and an intriguing story. I found more on this poking around a bit, including a blazer patch for members of the British Intelligence Corps (you know, just in case Boris and Natasha needed to confirm their suspicions).

This is all interesting stuff and it makes for interesting conversation. If you’d like to see more about BluShark and their straps, you can do so here.

That Citizen Eco-Drive I mentioned above? I’m wearing it now and I love it. Here’s what it looks like: