Don't miss the next drop
J.M TO R.V.M 1959. Four lines cut by hand into the steel back, and the best part of this watch was added by an owner rather than by Girard-Perregaux. Two initials on one side of that TO, three on the other, the same letter closing both. We cannot say who they were, only that they shared that last initial and that one of them decided the other had earned a watch. Whatever the occasion was, it fixed a date to this one. By 1959 this Girard-Perregaux Gyromatic was already on a wrist.
Girard-Perregaux nearly did not survive to be given away. The firm was failing by the late 1920s, and in 1928 a German-born watchmaker named Otto Graef bought control of it. Graef had come to La Chaux-de-Fonds as a young man and built a brand of his own there, MIMO, and for the next two decades the two names ran side by side under one family. He died in 1948. It was the third generation of Graefs who made the decision that matters here: through the 1950s they folded MIMO into Girard-Perregaux and let their own house name go, betting that the older and harder-to-spell one was worth more.
This watch comes out of that changeover. Gyromatic was the badge Girard-Perregaux put on its automatics, and the caliber 47 behind this caseback is an early one to carry it, seventeen jewels turning under a full rotor signed in script. The roller-clutch winding system that later made the Gyromatic name famous arrived with a different caliber. This one wears the name and winds by more ordinary means, and we would rather say so than let the dial imply otherwise. A Washington jeweler’s ad from November 1954 put a gold-filled Gyromatic at $82.50 and the fourteen-karat model at $100, federal tax included, every one of them seventeen jewels.
The rotor also carries the word UNADJUSTED, which deserves a straight reading. It marks this as a standard-grade movement rather than a certified chronometer, and we are not going to dress it up as one. Girard-Perregaux chased high frequency and chronometer honors later, in a different decade and a different watch. This is the one that just went to work, and it was still working when it changed hands in 1959.
The case runs 33mm across and 41mm lug to lug, a 14k gold cap worked over a stainless steel body and back. That is its own construction, a solid gold shell fitted over steel, not gold filled and not plated, with the steel left visible along the flanks. Long faceted lugs throw light in hard lines. The white dial carries the GP monogram above the full signature, GYROMATIC below center, applied faceted batons and an applied 12, a fine dotted minute track, gold dauphine hands and a sweep seconds. The crown is signed. The gold wears the fine hairlines of a lifetime of shirt cuffs, and we left every one.
Serviced in-house at OTTUHR and backed by our 2-year mechanical warranty, fitted to a forest green Italian suede strap that flatters the warm gold in a way black never would. Whoever R.V.M was, they had it first. The engraving is the one thing on this watch we could not service, and the one thing we would never want to.
