CWC

CWC, short for Cabot Watch Company, was founded in 1972 by Ray Mellor, a former officer in the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War and for years the head of UK operations for brands such as Certina, Zenith and Hamilton. When Hamilton decided to shut down its British division, Mellor founded CWC with a clear goal: to keep supplying watches to the British Ministry of Defence (MoD), effectively taking over the military contracts left vacant. The company's name is a tribute to the explorer John Cabot, suggesting — in Mellor's own words — the start of "a new exploration into uncharted waters".

Over the course of the 1970s CWC became the supplier of general-service mechanical watches for the British Army, Royal Air Force and Royal Navy. 1980 marked a turning point: the company introduced the first quartz watch ever issued to the British armed forces and, in the same year, also won the contract for the Royal Navy's diving watch, taking over from the far more expensive Rolex Submariner and Omega Seamaster used until then. From this point on, CWC became the go-to supplier of wristwatches for all the main branches of the British armed forces, including special units such as the Special Boat Service.

In 1996 ownership of the company passed to Silvermans Ltd, a historic London military-equipment retailer active since 1946, which continued the business while keeping watch production in Switzerland. To this day CWC explicitly claims it was never conceived as a fashion or luxury brand, but as a supplier of instruments designed for function, ruggedness and reliability in real operational conditions — a thread of continuity running through more than fifty years of military supply contracts.