Smiths
Brand History
Smiths is founded in London in 1851, when watchmaker Samuel Smith establishes S. Smith & Son, a watchmaking and jewelry business that within a few decades expands across several London locations. As early as 1898 the house boasts the title of official chronometer supplier to the British Admiralty, but it is in the early twentieth century that the company takes the turn that will make it famous: its entry into instrumentation for automobiles and aircraft, with the production of the first British odometer and speedometer. In 1914 the division S. Smith and Sons (Motor Accessories) Ltd is born, while in 1939 the group buys the Kayte Farm land near Cheltenham as a precaution in view of the war: by 1947 the plant will become the group's largest production site, with about 2,500 employees.
It is in this industrial context, closer to precision instrumentation than to haute horlogerie, that Smiths becomes one of the very few truly English watch manufacturers of the twentieth century, supplying both the civilian market ("De Luxe" wrist and pocket watches, often made entirely in England) and the British armed forces, with contracts culminating in the famous W10 field watch issued to the army between 1967 and 1970. The brand name also gains international fame linked to the 1953 British expedition to Everest: according to a tradition widely circulated among collectors — but not always documented with the same certainty as the far better-known Rolex watch worn during the same feat — some members of the expedition, including Edmund Hillary himself, are said to have also carried a Smiths watch.
Smiths watch production ends at the close of the 1970s, a victim of the quartz crisis and of competition from Swiss and Japanese watchmaking: sources generally agree on the cessation of activity between 1979 and 1980, while the industrial group Smiths Industries (later Smiths Group, from 2000) focuses definitively on aerospace, medical and instrumentation. The name remains dormant for about two decades, until Eddie Platts — who founded the company Timefactors, based in Sheffield, in 1996 — acquires the rights for watchmaking and relaunches Smiths as an independent brand, specializing in reissues and faithful reinterpretations of the historic models of the original catalog.
