When I woke up this morning it was with the conviction that knowing who H.G.P.
was not is perhaps less satisfying than knowing who he
was. I decided to pull on the other end of the thread, the Barclay end, and found the answer. Forget about Gérin, forget about France, forget about Dunhill. All are red herrings, all are irrelevant. The truth behind H.G.P. is inextricably tied up with the true story of the origin of what we now know as Barclay Rex. Unsurprising to those familiar with the curious blend of fact and fiction of which most origin stories are composed, the truth differs significantly from what is commonly believed. In brief it did not begin with the Nastri family, and it did not begin in 1910. And it's the early, and missing, part of the story we need to understand.
I believe the Barclay Pipe Shop was established in late 1918 or the first half of 1919; the earliest mentions of the shop I can find are in a travel magazine and a trade publication in the summer of 1919 and then appearances in numerous ads in 1920. Before that time other businesses occupied the soon-to-be Barclay address. The future founder of the business was working for the Wilke Pipe Shop in June of 1917 (this is clear from information on his WW1 draft registration) and as manager of the Tobacco Growers Society of the Antilles in 1918 (per that year's NYC Directory). Hence an approximate founding date of late 1918 or early 1919.
The name of the man we're talking about was Chaim G. Pesetzky, a Jewish immigrant from Minks, Belarus who first came to America in October of 1908. Fairly quickly he changed the Chaim to Herman, and not long after that the G became George; finally by the start of the 1920s Pesetzky had morphed into Perry. It was as Herman George Perry that he and his wife Lillian Waldinger Perry established the Barclay Pipe Shop with Herman acting as President and Treasurer and Lillian as Secretary; see listing below from the 1922 NYC Directory:
Knowing this background about
Herman
George
Perry (or
Pesetzky if you prefer) it doesn't take much acuity to guess where the H. G. P. trademark came from. It makes much more sense that the carver of these early H.G.P. pipes was the owner of the shop and would be looking to create and protect a brand through trademark registration; just as it makes little sense to take someone else's name, distort it, and use it as the basis of a trademark. Speaking for myself I find it fantastically unlikely that the founder of a shop selling proprietary H.G.P. pipes whose own initials were H.G.P. was using the trademark to reference someone else. It sounds suspiciously like the scholiasts who argued that the
Iliad wasn't composed by Homer but by another man of the same name.
Incidentally the focus of early Barclay ads on the utilization of "
neither paint nor varnish" on their pipes is clearly an echo (if not plagiarism) of Wilke's claim to fame. And on that subject I should mention in passing that Perry's later gig at the Tobacco Growers Society of the Antilles was not really a departure from his prior job; the President of the Society was Edwin Wilke.
A discussion of when the Barclay shop changed hands adds needless complexity to the simple question of H.G.P.'s identity so we'll save it for another day.
By the way, to state the obvious I'm addressing the origin of the H.G.P. brand; not who may have carved the pipes after Perry left the business, or how long Barclay sold H.G.P. pipes.
