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In Search of the First Shell. A small pipe acquired at the
The documentary history of the
Shell’s beginnings is essentially limited to patent applications – there are no
catalog page or advertisement birth announcements. Those applications show that the preliminary
English patent application was filed on October 13, 1917 with completed
application papers filed a half year later on April 12, 1918 followed by the
English patent grant on October 14, 1918 just before the November 11 cease fire
ending the Great War. The American
patent application was prepared and filed before the English grant, on
September 19 and October 14 of 1918 respectively and the
The numeric date code system did
not begin until 1922 but occasionally one will find Shells that can be
comfortably said to pre date 1922, specifically those stamped DUNHILL’S “SHELL” over MADE IN ENGLAND followed either by (i)
But what about before circa 1919. While it has been contended otherwise, I am comfortably certain there were such prior Shells. First, protected by the initial patent application there would be no legal reason for impounding the new pipes at the Dunhill factory until the actual English patent grant in October 1918; and second, if we are to give any currency to the oft reported favorable acceptance of the new Shells by the Allied officers at the front lines we must necessarily allow that they were sent over and enjoyed for reasonable time before the November end of the war. Further, while I very much doubt that Alfred Dunhill, an aggressive merchant well familiar with the English patent process, would have allowed the first Shells to be release before a preliminary patent application was on file, I am likewise comfortable that he would not have allowed any one to delay his turning his new pipes to profit by dilly dallying around with that preliminary application. So my surmise is that sale of the first Shells began in late October 1917.
That said, the question remains,
how do we identify those first Shells and what did the
nomenclature on those first Shells look like.
I think the pipe that came my way in
For reasons I will explain I date both these pipes to the latter half of 1918. First and perhaps the most important note that for both these pipes, rather then a smooth ‘stamping area’ being sanded down flush with the shell briar as has been consistently the case since 1919, on these two pipes the smooth stamping areas are cut into the briar, ‘notched in’ so to speak. I suspect that this notched in stamping area goes back to the very first Shells and may well be the calling card of that first year, i.e. October, 1917 – October, 1918.
Turning to the nomenclature of my
St. Louis pipe, it seems clear to me that this pipe must date to
September/October 1918 when the US Patent application was being prepared and
filed, for the nomenclature refers to that application: U.S.A. PAT / APPLD
FOR but differs considerably from that later and consistently found: PAT. MAR.9.15 / PAT.APP FOR. Similarly the DUNHILL.LONDON
/ “SHELL BRIAR” stamping is unique
as the uniform stamping through the mid 1930s is DUNHILL’S “SHELL” MADE IN
ENGLAND or DUNHILL’S “SHELL BRIAR”
on one or two lines and never in any other known case a non possessive DUNHILL
or a LONDON (indeed this is the only Shell I know of from any time stamped with
LONDON). Likewise evidencing that this
stamp must have been both early and short lived is that it lacks a then
While one can be less certain, I
read the second pipe as being intended for the domestic English market and
similarly dating to circa October 1918 when the English Shell patent was
granted. Obviously the stamping was a
failure and the “X” indicates the
pipe was sold off as a ‘second’, but it appears to me that before the
obliteration the top line of the stamping read DUNHILL’S “SHELL BRIAR” and that the bottom line was intended to
read PATENT Nos
5816/12.119708/17 (the English inner tube and shell patents respectively) before
it was discovered that there was no way that that could be crammed into such a
small space. Such a discovery must have
occurred shortly after the English Shell patent grant on
Taking these two pipes together
and viewing them as most probably evolving from prior stampings and that in
turn the first Shell stampings evolved from how the Bruyere
was stamped, I think we can begin to
speculate about how those first Dunhill Shells sent to the front lines in
France in late 1917 and 1918 were stamped.
I think “SHELL BRIAR” must have been there and that it was preceded
either by DUNHILL’S or perhaps DUNHILL .
Or putting this all together it
is my speculation that between October 1917 and October 1918 Dunhill in fact
sold Shell finish pipes and that they were stamped on a unique ‘notched in’
smooth surface either: DUNHILL’S “SHELL BRIAR” over
Unfortunately I will probably
have to wait until next years
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