#timetospare

“Awesome 2020″ a blog article by #JamieAllenBishop about the feeling of wealth with all this time to spare. 

Cigars and Watches

The old adage holds that men who are mechanical wristwatch, cufflink and fountain-pen men are also fond of supercall spirits, hand-rolled cigars and automobiles. And while polymath gents with an appreciation for the finer things might not covet, collect or even appreciate all these things, as a psychographic profile, it stands up pretty well.

Consider the right honorable Sir Winston Churchill: Havana cigar lover, Scotch whisky imbiber (Johnnie Walker Red), Cognac tippler (Hine) and Swiss watch collector. His holdings of the latter included a “hand-me-down” Breguet Rattrapante Minute Repeater pocket watch (a.k.a. the “Turnip”) originally commissioned by his grandfather John-Spencer Churchill, the seventh Duke of Marlborough; a Louis Cottie World Time pocket watch (which sold at Sotheby’s in 2005 for $630,000); a Day-Date “President” Rolex; and a Cuervos y Sobrinos wristwatch. What if there had been a watch in Churchill’s day that married his ardor for both cigars and timepieces. That would’ve given even the great statesman pause.

Since the 1980s, though, there have indeed been a number of cigar-inspired and collaboration watches, and technically even a handful earlier than that. Let’s explore the history.

Cigars and wristwatches have been sold side-by-side since 1932, the year tobacconist and haberdasher Alfred Dunhill Ltd. patented its first wristwatch. (Dunhill pocket watches debuted in 1903; watches and clocks set into cigar and pipe lighters followed soon after.) Alfred Dunhill, now a Richemont company, was far more a gentleman’s tobacconist up through the 2000s than the modern English men’s fashion house it has become over the last handful of years. And although they weren’t cigar-inspired timepieces per se, a man could get a pocket- or wristwatch while picking up a box of Montecristos or Romeo y Julietas. (There are still Dunhill cigars — Dominicans — made under license today, as well as the exceptional Dunhill flagship cigar shop at 1A St. James Street in London, with a lounge and cigar “keeps,” or climate-controlled lockers for one’s cigar collection and the odd bottle of brandy.)