C9 Harrison 5-Day Automatic

Introduced in 2014, the C9 Harrison 5-Day Automatic is the first Christopher Ward watch to feature the Calibre SH21, the mechanical movement developed entirely by the Synergies Horlogères manufacture in Biel, led by master watchmaker Johannes Jahnke, with which the brand had merged that very same year. It was a significant milestone for a British company: trade press at the time called it "arguably the most important development from a British watch brand in the last fifty years", being the first commercially viable mechanical movement produced by a UK brand in over half a century.

The collection's name, Harrison, pays tribute to John Harrison, the eighteenth-century British horologist who solved the problem of determining longitude at sea by inventing the marine chronometer: a historical reference consistent with the model's ambition to bring Britain back to the center of mechanical watchmaking innovation. Aesthetically the C9 Harrison presents a 43 mm case with a clean design, a wide dial framed by a slim bezel, and heat-blued steel hands, available in three colors (white, blue and anthracite) with an alligator leather strap or steel bracelet.

The heart of the model, however, remains its movement: the Calibre SH21 uses two barrels connected in series to guarantee a 120-hour, five-day power reserve, well above the average of competing automatic calibers such as the ETA/Valjoux 7750, and features hand finishing on the bridges and a tungsten rotor. The success of the C9 Harrison paved the way for an entire family of proprietary calibers — from Jumping Hour complications to, years later, the manual-winding CW-003 — that today represent one of Christopher Ward's strongest technical credentials.