In history it’s always thus: the Shield pays court to the Crown. The king commands, and the knights shoulder their shields and ride into battle. And in the world of watches, the brand with a shield as its logo—Tudor—stood in the shadow of its kingly parent company, Rolex.

Though Tudor has flourished under current leadership, pursuing sponsorships that grant the brand a separate identity—such as Tudor’s relationship with motorcycle racing—in its earliest decades the brand’s products bore a striking resemblance to those produced by Rolex.

Tudors were Rolexes in all but name, with the same waterproof Oyster cases and similar styling. However, in order to keep costs down, Tudor used generic Swiss movements made by ETA rather than their own in-house calibres. What resulted were watches that were more affordable than Rolexes to the consumer, but still uniformly tough and reliable.

Tudor pursued a kind of rough-and-ready attitude early on, showing construction workers and miners with Tudor watches strapped to their wrists—and the ads found verisimilitude in real life when members of the British North Greenland Expedition wore Tudors in 1952.

But for all their durability, certain examples made by Tudor during the early 1950s have a refinement equal to anything made by the Crown.

Like Rolex, Tudor experimented with different dial textures and colors. Of particular note are the honeycomb or “waffle” dials like the one featured on this watch, a Reference 7929. A remnant from the days when this type of decoration was done by hand, it gives the watch a touch of elegance that’s undeniably attractive; furthermore, given how difficult this type of dial is to refinish, it’s often a mark of a dial’s authenticity.

With a compact but sturdy 35mm case, the Reference 7929 has enough flair of its own to stand alone, but has all the quality one would come to expect from watches produced by Rolex—no matter the name on the dial.