I put in a bid on it, but got outbid. Between the crunched stem and the blurry photographs, I didn't feel like aggressively going after it. As it happens, I have a Niblick, so no big loss for me. There probably isn't a rarer production model in the Barling line. The Niblick only appears sporadically, starting in 1917, for a few years during the 1920's and again in the late 1930's when it was dropped from the line and which is when this pipe was produced. We don't know if the earlier Niblicks were also sandblasts, and this one is the first one I've seen offered on eBay in the past 11 years. If you're a completist, then owning one would be worth the money. I got mine as a gift from a member here and it's in much better condition than the pipe that just sold. Good smoker too.
There's always been a mystery about when Barling started offering sandblasts. During the War years they used the basic "Barling's Make" stamp. The "fossil" appellation didn't begin to be stamped on Barling's sandblasts until after the war and they didn't include "sandblasts" in the product line until 1943. The tantalizing question is whether the 1917 Niblicks were also sandblasts, which might answer the speculation among some Barling collectors that Dunhill stole the idea of producing the shell from Barling, then patented the idea to kill off any competition. So far, no really early Barling sandblasts have turned up. But the existence of these 1930's era Niblicks have at least pushed the date that Barling started producing sandblasts back from the early 1940's to the late 1930's.
