Hi Greydawn,
Congratulations on these lovely pipes. The Special Bulldog is indeed just that, beautiful.
In doing research on the Barling connection to other brands I don't believe that there were many Barling made Bewlays. Barling bowls were handmade while other Bewlays, with the exception of a few Charatans, were machine made. Barling and Charatan handmade pipes sold under the Bewlay name were rejected, they failed some criterion so that they couldn’t be branded. In either case the briar used to make them was of superior quality and the Cutting and drilling phases of production were done by master craftsmen.
Once the Bewlay is identified as a handmade bowl make a determination on whether it’s a Barling or Charatan based on their manufacturing characteristics. I’ll try to illustrate this point.
Top view:
The walls of your pipe are proportionately thicker than those on most machine made. Machine made pipes have exceptionally flat rims and sharper edges than your pipe has. To my eye, this is clearly the rim of a handmade bowl.
Side view:
The heel is (fairly) heavily rounded. This can't (shouldn't) be done with machine made bowls because they lack sufficient briar to do so (tolerance). The shank is short in relation to the size of the bowl characteristic of a cut-down handmade bowl and not machine made where the pipe would have been sandblasted or rusticated without further shaping or reduction.
Note the longer shank on the Fossil bulldog compared to the Special. They are intended to be the same shape but once determined that the bowl would be sandblasted the shank was left intact (it may not have been a candidate for shortening in any case). The Fossil shank is the intended length, the Special shank length is still sufficient (and beautiful) but was reduced.
Without the pipe in hand positive identification is impossible but based on shape it could have been made by either company however it lacks the grain signature characteristic of Charatan.
Since the pipe is not bigger than your bulldogs and it shows no attempt to have been cut based on grain (mixed) I'd tend to believe that this was a cut-down made by Barling.
Great gift! Enjoy them.
