"A memento to show people are free to go anywhere they want"

My dad was not too enthusiastic about watches, I have provided him with quality quartz watches, but his dad, my grandfather was a railway engineer, and he was really into machines and also watches.

Got home after two and a half years as POW from the Soviet Union, he started low at the railway while finished his school and became an engineer. He bought his gold Pobeda hand winding watch then, and that was given to me. If he would have lived somewhere else, that watch could be an IWC Ingenieur, but in Hungary those days there was no chance for getting anything from the West.

Now I live in the UK, working as a Quality Engineer, and with my several Swiss and German automatics there sits an old hand wound Russian Pobeda, as a memento to show people are free to go anywhere they want, and do whatever they want, the sky is the limit. I wish that chance would have been given to my grandfather’s generation back then.