I have a soft spot for the Rolex Eaton watch
made for the Eaton departmental store in Canada. The Eaton departments store in
Canada was a legendary retailer for over most of the 20th Century but
eventually went into bankruptcy in 1999, after 130 years in business. One of
the lasting legacy of their history is the Quarter Century Club watches made by
Rolex for their long service awards. The watches are rare in the fact that it
is perhaps the only a few instances were Rolex allowed their watches to be
rebranded with another companies name and certainly the only one in the post
war era. These were amongst the only ROLEX watches produced and allowed by
ROLEX to appear without the name ROLEX on the dial. This watch also retains the
original ROLEX winding crown
Rolex Quarter Century Club
This Rolex Quarter Century club was a hard earned watch as one has to work for
Eaton department store for a period of 25 years in order to be officially
presented with this watch as a token of apprectaion for long service. The 1/4
century club starts from the 1900s to till the 1970s as it started with the
Pocket watches, to Rolex Prince, hand wind till the final automatic movement.
These watches were presented to employees of Canada's T. Eaton department store
who has served twenty-five-year with the company. It comes in different varieties depending on
when the watch was given away. There are a few models from early Pocket
watches, to Prince series ref Ref 1490 in the 1930s, ref 2927 in the 1950s, to
a manual winding model ref 6022, 6222, 6422, in the 1950s and this automatic
model ref 1011 from 1960s, 5031 from the 1970s. For the ladies, there is ref
4554.
Most of these comes in solid
gold Prince watch model (Ref 1490, 2927), or Hand wind gold (Ref 6022, 6222, 6422) and automatic model
(Ref 1011, 5031). It has taken me over 32 years to collect only 4 of such
watches.
Just when everyone thought that the Eaton watches are in the Prince and round handwind and automatic watches, I was lucky to be able to find one in stainless steel model plus in the format of the "Rolex bubbleback". The watch also comes with the provenance certificate. As such, for vintage Rolex watch collecting, never says never as Rolex has produced all kind of varieties!
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