

We Talked to Bremont Watches Founder Nick English About Aviation and Luxury Wristwear

Bremont Watches founder Nick English told us about luxury wrist-wear and aviation.

Nick English is a true English gentleman. He's adventurous, debonair, and charming in a way that makes it feel like he just sprang fully formed from an adventure novel. He comes from an aviation family, and his luxury watch company Bremont just premiered their Wright Flyer model with each watch containing a small swath of the original material used in the Wright brothers original flyer. Bremont also recently launched a special collection in conjunction with the upcoming film, Kingsman: The Secret Service, which comes out this Friday, February 13. Esquire caught up with Nick in Dayton, Ohio, last month to talk watches, flight, fatherhood, and much more.

Rose gold BWC/01 Wright Flyer watch (price on request) by Bremont, bremont.com; Stainless steel BWC/01 Wright Flyer watch (price on request) by Bremont, bremont.com.

On What Makes Automatic Watches So Remarkable:

Watches are just another object, a desirable object, true. You can have £100 decent quartz watch, which will tell the time better than a $3,000,000 one-of-a-kind Patek. One's quartz, one's mechanical. But it's not about that. There's something about the mechanical watch. 86,400 seconds in a day... and what you're trying to do is produce something which is accurate to 2 or 3 seconds plus or minus a day. Look at the most accurate mechanical devices on the planet, and what you're doing is you're going biking with it, you're going swimming with it, you're going rock climbing with it. All these different things with your watch, and you're smashing it around, and the little thing is resilient. Telling the time. I think it's amazing.

On The Kingsman:

It's like James Bond mixed with Kickass. It's sort of a combo, but it's very, very funny. Very good. It's like a comic book in a way, which makes it pretty amusing. They've done a very, very good job.

Black stainless steel Kingsman ALT1-B automatic chronograph watch ($7,530) by Bremont, mrporter.com; Rose gold Kingsman ALT1-B automatic chronograph watch ($24,430) by Bremont, mrporter.com.

On His Dad: 

We grew up with our father, who was an aeronautic engineer, passionate about making things, and aviation, and a really very, very humble lovely chap, who because of his sort of interest in all things mechanical. He used to spend the whole time in the workshop making things. Anything your father does you aspire to do as well, we used to spend a lot of time with him making all these things.

On Flying:

Dad spent a lot of time doing air trade flying, which Giles and I were quite heavily, so all these sort of big air shows, when we were literally too small to see outside of the airplane. It was a whole other world for us. And as we grew up, and we got slightly older, we started doing it ourselves in our late-teens early twenties. We ended up flying a few of these airshows and practicing for them with him. He's a guy who gave us a lot of responsibility. Giles and I used to fly off a map of and a wristwatch and head off down cross the channel, France, Spain in this 1940s airplane.

On his Dad Dying In a Plane Crash That He Was In Too:

It was 1995 when I was flying with Dad. I hadn't flown with him for a while. Something went terribly wrong with the aircraft, he died, and I broke 30 bones.   I think it's all about worst-case scenarios, with anything mechanical, you wonder about the implications of anything stopping. Your watch stops, you take it to get service, if your car stops you pulling off side the road. Your airplane stops, your engine stops... there are certain repercussions. There are times when you might not be so lucky. That happened to my brother last year, you know, he was flying the 1930 Gipsy Moth, the engine failed, he crash landed, and he broke his back in three places.

On What It's Like to Survive a Plane Crash:

You don't quite remember. I know that sounds weird. The aftermath is quite horrible. The beginning you don't really think about. The middle your mind cannot remember. I remember taking off, I remember being in the field, I remember talking to people when I was in the field. I remember that. I don't remember spinning upside down, heading toward the ground. I think your brain has an amazing ability to cut out what's going to happen—you have a sort of override. I think there's—and it happens so quickly—you've got 30 seconds or a minute of true terror, which you cannot repeat—and the rest is—your brain is very clever, the way it does that at least the way it did it for me.

On how they got the Bremont Name:

We ran out of fuel actually. We were going down to help some friends out that had run out of money, they were both flying together and they both thought the other one was carrying a wallet. So typical. So they both didn't bring their wallets, these twin brothers. So we were flying down there, and we were going to take them some money so they could at least have a decent meal. Down to northern France, the weather got worse and worse and worse and worse—that's a lesson of flying: Never fly when it's roughish weather, especially in old airplanes, which have no instrumentation. And we got lower and lower and lower, until we were literally flying over chimney tops. We couldn't go backwards because we'd crossed the halfway mark; we didn't have fuel to get back. And then we couldn't find where we're going. In the days before GPS where you had a map and a compass and watch, and that was it: We crash-landed on this hill. This guy came out to help us, and pushed the airplane in his barn. Really sweet guy. He reminded us of our father really. He had engine parts, clock parts. He flew himself in the past. He was even wearing his Father's watch, too, and it reminded us of our Dad. He was just a really, really sweet guy. And it meant a huge amount, and we became friends. And his name is Anton Bremont. So rather than name it "English Watches," we thought "Can we change the name of the brand?" It seemed like an appropriate and lovely thing to do. So we did that.

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