Jesus Christ and General Jackson! At that price I’d cheerfully cough up a couple of Guinea Grains and throw in one of my kidneys to boot.
Incidentally, little known fact: Barling actually trademarked Guinea Grain in 1922, but if one has survived that predates the model’s relaunch ~1953 I’ve...
I also procured a bespoke Villeroy & Boch bone china dinner set of the same pattern; perhaps a place setting of those instead? Or even just a dessert plate?
Congratulations on a nice score! The Everyman is especially interesting since it’s uncommon to find specimens that can be confidently dated as very early production (the model was launched in 1925 to commemorate the putative centenary of the Comoy family’s entry into pipe making).
My guess is the latter. It’s a not very subtle suggestion that this is the perfect gift to send your father/brother/son/husband who’s serving in the military.
I believe A&W also sold pipes stamped AWOL (“Absent Without Leave”) and D (“Deserter”), but these were much less popular as Christmas...
I’ve looked at this a great deal and an analysis of the relationship between quality and price yields a scatter plot with an R² of almost zero. Interestingly enough if you plot price against price the correlation is virtually perfect.
The very few mentions of H&H I was able to find (the above advertisement and two listings in the London phone books) all date from 1926-1927, suggesting that H&H, at least under that name, was a shortlived enterprise