Fears is not a name that shouts. Founded in Bristol in 1846 by Edwin Fear, it ran for 130 years before closing in 1976, and stayed shut until 2016, when Edwin's great-great-great-grandson Nicholas Bowman-Scargill restarted it. For most of the decade since, it has made elegant, mostly time-only watches with modest mechanics inside. For the tenth anniversary of the revival, and ahead of Geneva Watch Days, the company has done something it never has before. The Brunswick 39 Perpetual Calendar is its first high complication.
The Brunswick, complicated
The Brunswick is the most recognisable modern Fears, built around a cushion-shaped case, and it takes its name from Brunswick Square in Bristol, where the company kept its export warehouse from 1920 to 1942. The perpetual calendar keeps that shape at a well-judged 39mm by 37mm, with a 45.4mm lug-to-lug and, at 9.4mm, the thinnest case in the collection. It is steel, brushed with polished bevels, with an onion crown, a concave bezel and a matching concave open caseback, and the calendar correctors sit discreetly on the case flanks. Water resistance is 50 metres, which is more than a dress watch of this kind usually bothers with.
A dial that does the work
Most of the attention has gone to the dial. It is frosted and coated in pure silver, in a warm tone Fears calls Silver Mink. The calendar sub-dials carry circular grooves and a bespoke set of curved numerals and letters, drawn in-house to follow each sub-dial's curve. The applied hour indices are quad-bevelled, diamond-polished and coated in black gold to match the hands, and the moon phase uses a black lacquer disc inset with two silver moons finished by hand. The layout is the classic perpetual arrangement, with day, date, month and leap year, plus the moon phase. It reads clearly, which is not always true of a dial carrying this much information.
Under the module
The mechanics explain the familiar layout. The Brunswick 39 runs a Sellita SW300 automatic base, a widely used clone of the ETA 2892, with a modified Dubois Depraz perpetual calendar module on top, as Monochrome details. Fears does not disguise this. The base is hand-finished with frosted bridges and plates, polished bevels and a dark rhodium treatment, and it is wound by a custom 18k gold rotor. It beats at 28,800 vibrations per hour and holds 47 hours. Whether a five-figure price sits comfortably on an industrial base with a specialist module is the obvious question, and the watch's answer is the finishing and the dial, not the calibre's pedigree.
The numbers
The Brunswick 39 Perpetual Calendar joins the new Eminence Collection alongside the Fears Garrick, on a brown ostrich strap with a blue Alcantara lining, with a SwissKubik winder included. It is a non-limited numbered edition, priced at GBP 26,950 including tax at home and CHF 24,500 or USD 28,500 before tax for export, with a bespoke platinum version through the Fears Custom Division. Details are at fearswatches.com.
There is something appropriate about a small British house entering complications this way, buying in the calendar mechanism, finishing it properly and spending most of its effort where the owner actually looks. It is not the route a manufacture would take, and Fears does not pretend otherwise. What it offers instead is a perpetual calendar that looks unmistakably like a Fears, from a company that has now been telling the time, on and off, for 180 years.
