The Smiths De Luxe “Everest” is the British wristwatch Sir Edmund Hillary wore on the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953. The surviving piece, made in 1953 in Cheltenham by Smiths English Clocks Ltd, has a stainless steel waterproof case made by the Dennison Watch Case Co., with the case back marked “Aquatite” and “Denisteel”. The silvered dial carries luminous Arabic numerals, a subsidiary seconds dial at six o’clock and the signature “Smiths De Luxe” below twelve, under a glass crystal. Inside is a 15-jewel hand-wound lever movement. Before the expedition, Smiths prepared the watch with a special lubricant to cope with very low temperatures. It matters as a rare case of a British-made watch at the centre of one of the defining adventures of the century.

The 1953 British expedition, led by Colonel John Hunt, also carried Rolex watches, and which watch was worn at the summit has been debated ever since. Wikipedia’s history of the Smiths group states that the only watch worn to the summit was a Smiths, while many accounts credit Tenzing Norgay with wearing a Rolex. According to the Science Museum Group, Hillary wore the De Luxe during his summit climb, reported that it had performed well, and presented it the same year to the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. It is now on loan from the Clockmakers to the Science Museum in London, displayed in the Clockmakers’ Museum gallery as object L2015-3409. De Luxe models with a similar specification, hand-wound with sub-seconds and Dennison Aquatite cases, were sold to the public in the early 1950s, and collectors still find examples dated 1951 and 1954.

In the collector community the Smiths De Luxe is regarded as an undervalued piece of watch history, especially next to the early Rolex Explorers linked to the same expedition, which sell for far higher prices. Enthusiasts on WatchProSite praise the plain, honest build of 1950s De Luxe models, while warning that many listings claim an “Everest” connection without matching the expedition specification, and that true examples are becoming harder to find and more expensive. The Everest watch itself is a single historic piece, now owned by the Worshipful Company of Clockmakers. The model is not in production: Smiths saw its clock and watch revenue shrink considerably by the late 1970s, and its Anglo-Celtic Watch Co. factory closed in 1980.