I've been a fool!
I woke up in the night with a sudden realisation that in the early '50s Rolexes were fitted with "ladder"or "bamboo" style bracelets. These are visually almost identical to a Bonklip but made by the Swiss company Gay Freres, who made bracelets for Rolex and other watch companies. (Rolex eventually bought them out. Inevitably.)
https://www.hodinkee.com/articles/ro...l-perspectives
Good overview here:
http://corvuswatch.blogspot.com/2011...lip-watch.html
I have an early '50s Gay Freres ladder / bamboo and a British-made Bonlkip of about the same date and they are almost identical. (I could take and post some pics but frankly the ones in the links here are better.)
So when we see Norgay with a Bonklip it means (to my mind) that he is wearing a Rolex with the standard GF bracelet; we know that the watches supplied to the team -- both Smiths and Rolex -- were fitted with leather straps so Norgay's seems to me to be a Rolex from outside of the issued set.
However, Norgay's watch looks to be stainless steel (presumably an OP bubbleback of one reference or another) rather than that gold DateJust (which seems to have come on a gold rivet expanding bracelet -- ref. 6635 or 6636). So it doesn't look like he's wearing the watch he was given for his participation in the earlier Swiss expedition.
Still, I'm pretty sure that what looks like a Bonklip is in fact the Swiss copy made by Gay Freres and fitted to Rolexes until about 1953 or 4 (when the rivet bracelets were introduced). The watch also looks like a chunky bubbleback by the way it hangs.
But I want you to think on this:
I woke up in the night with a sudden realisation about the design and manufacture of early 1950s watch bracelets.
I need help.