What's plane on the Squadron Leader tin? History of the blend?

A post in another thread got us started on this. One poster suggested either the Sopwith Camel or the SPAD VIII.
It's not the greatest drawing on the tin. Struts and under carriage look a lot like a Camel; vertical stabilizer and placement of upper wing look more like a SPAD.
But I think it's actually a stylized Hawker Fury.
Take a look at this VINTAGE TIN . Note the reference to the Hawker.
And look at these images of a Hawker Fury and note the streamlined cowling.
Anyone know for certain?
Also, anyone know if the blend actually has any provenance back to the RFC?

RFC is the Royal Flying Corps, the progenitor of the RAF (Royal Air Force).
Those are RFC rondelles on the wings, and "squadron leader" is an officer in the RFC (well, RAF, too) roughly equivalent to a major.

My email to Samuel Gawith Company:

Gentlemen:
A discussion regarding Squadron Leader has arisen at an online pipe-smoking forum I frequent.
The questions of the day: What is the RFC fighter depicted on the tin? Does the blend have any provenance back to the RFC?
I suspect the airplane is a somewhat stylized Hawker Fury, notable for its streamlined engine cowling. But I haven’t any idea of the history of the blend and whether it arose from any association with the RFC during the Great War or at another time. (Compare, for example, to the stories –evidently not apocryphal – that one hears associated with another favorite of mine, Presbyterian Mixture, and its association with a particular minister.)
Thank you in advance for your attention, I look forward to your responses, which I will share with the group at http://pipesmagazine.com/ . Thank you also for making Squadron Leader, one of my very favorite pipe tobaccos.

Click to expand...

I'll let everyone know what I hear.

@simnettpratt:
Sympathies, posthumously, to your uncle.
The Somme was one of the greatest, most costly military blunders in history. Prior to the advance on the first day, the British dropped more than one and half million (MILLION) shells on the German lines with two specific goals: 1. Cut up the barbed wire laid down to slow down infantry and make them vulnerable to machine gun fire. 2. Destroy the German dugouts that contained the MGs.
Well, the shelling didn't cut the bred wire at all -- it only made it more tangled and difficult to negotiate, while creating a landscape so pockmarked that it was nearly impossible to cross at any speed. And the vast majority of the MGs were too deep for the types of shells being used, so the German cross fire was more or less undiminished. On the first day, Tommy went over the top in nice, neat lines that WALKED slowly across the open ground to avoid over-running their own artillery, which was supposed to advance before them.
The result was that the Germans -- who placed their machine guns obliquily so as to rake the British formations -- were able to saturate the beaten ground with MG fire. The advancing troops suffered 60K casualties; 20K or so killed.
The intransigence and inflexibility of the British Army leadership -- bouyed and insulated by a caste system that prevented new ideas from being heard, let alone understood -- was responsible not just for the 600,000 (!) casualties at the Somme in about four months. (But hey, hey did gain all of about six miles in some parts of the line.)
That same caste structure and military culture lead directly to countless deaths in the RFC in that war -- and in the RAF 20 years later -- when pilots in both wars were constrained to outmoded, pointless, ineffective flying tactics that favored neat formations over initiative and aggression. The RFC NEVER figured it out in WWI. The RAF came to its senses in WWII after being run out of France, then very nearly losing the Battle of Britain.
If you want good reading on the air war in both generations, just about any of the fiction of Derek Robinson is an enjoyable way to get the education. His novels are wonderful and he is scrupulous about the facts.

I do know the difference between a caste system and a class system and used the word I did quite advisedly. :wink:
Ah, your grand-dad -- all the more difficult.
As for the Battle of Britain, you folks did win it, thank goodness, but people at the time -- and now I think -- have no notion of what a near run thing it was. I've argued two factors were crucial and the lack of either would have spelled a different end:
First, RADAR was key to the British ability to direct its ever-diminishing air defenses where they were needed most. The system was rudimentary, and the secrecy imposed on it -- most RAF pilots didn't actually know how air control was deciding where to send them -- limited its effectiveness somewhat. But without it, the dwindling supplies of Spitfires and Hurricanes would have been spread too thin.
Second was the German's mistake of concentrating from the start on civilian targets. A concentrated attack on England's southern airfields would have destroyed even more aircraft, and soon denied those fields to what aircraft remained. Even with RADAR directing them, Spits and Hurris would have had to operate from too far north to be able to make much impact -- and Spits were not an aircraft suitable to loitering for long. Had the Germans worked more deliberately on attriting those airfields, they could then have bombed more intensely and at will.
The British character certainly was not much inclined toward any sort of surrender (well, Chamberlain notwithstanding :wink: ) but if the Germans had truly destroyed the Brits ability to control their own airspace, then an invasion would have been sustainable.
As it was, the Germans succeeded only in pissing off the English who then had broad home support for their own version of Total War (cf: RAF's indiscriminate night bombing that resulted in about 90% "collateral damage"; Dresden with about 25K civilian casualties).