During the 1930's-40's, when Rolex still had an agreement with Gruen not to sell Aegler-based watches in North America, the Rolex Watch Company was doing some interesting branding experimentation in Canada. All the watches sold in Canada during this time had a "Rolex Caliber 59" movement, which is actually just a finished Fontainemelon FHF30 movement.
The watches were almost all 30-32mm, and despite there only being a handful of references (3478 and 3121f were the most common, along with 3136, 3351f, etc.) there were countless names used. Brands used included Rolex, Tudor,
Neptune,
Aqua/
Solar Aqua/
Lund & Blockley Aqua, and Oyster.
This post is about the models released under the Oyster brand. Note that the model names don't exactly correlate to a reference; they seemingly put whatever dials into whatever cases they felt like.
The 21 brand names I came across are: Marconi, Rolco, Unicorn, Essex, Explorer, Lincoln, Edison, Grenfell, Centregraph, Lipton, Lady Dudley, Junior Sport, Raleigh, Commander, Recorda, Chester, Regent, Shipmate, Pioneer, Extra Prima, and simply Oyster.
Princeton Oyster and
Oyster Birks etc. I believe are co-signed by retailers; those aren't model names. "Extra prima" is also arguably not a model name and is akin to, say, "Super Precision" branding but I'll count it.
The most confusing to me are the Marconi, Rolco, and Unicorn--all 3 of those names were used as brand names by RWC as well. Is it an Oyster Marconi or a Marconi Oyster?
Anyway,
click here for the imgur album or scroll for pics of all these models:
Plain Oyster:
Oyster Extra Prima:
Oyster Marconi:
Oyster Rolco:
Oyster Unicorn:
Oyster Explorer:
Oyster Essex:
Oyster Lady Dudley:
Oyster Pioneer:
Oyster Shipmate:
Oyster Regent:
Oyster Chester:
Oyster Recorda:
Oyster Commander:
Oyster Raleigh:
Oyster Junior Sport:
Oyster Lipton:
Oyster Centregraph:
Oyster Grenfell:
Oyster Edison:
Oyster Lincoln:
If I've overlooked any Oyster watches please let me know.
