You’ll have to excuse the photographs today. Conditions were poor.

I like all Conway Stewarts – well, except those defective objects that were produced in the last, sad years of the company – but I like those from the twenties and early thirties best, especially those with the flange lever and the fixed clip.

This is a Conway Stewart Universal 472. Anyone who takes an interest in Conway Stewarts will be aware of the usual Universal pen, the 479. This one is altogether less common. Donahaye is vague about it and Stephen Hull doesn’t mention it at all. It resembles the 479 quite closely but has gold-filled trim instead of chrome. In terms of date, it’s impossible to say exactly, but it’s likely to be around 1930.

These pens are more than just superficially different from the later ones.  The feed is thicker and the nib curves around it more.

This example shows little sign of being eighty years old. The machine-chased pattern and barrel imprints are sharp, and the gold trim is very good. The end of the cap is a little faded. Perhaps it got wet or was exposed to the sun. In general, though, it’s a pen in great condition and it has a nice flexible nib, unusually for a Conway Stewart.

The cartouche is filled with the name E.H. Lockington – and I mean filled! The letters are large and they’ve been highlighted in white. E. H. Lockington wanted to be sure everyone knew this was his or her pen! Opinions vary about personalisations. Most dislike them, others (including me) see a value in them. Some will go to the extent of having them removed. There are two methods of doing that: heat or abrasion. Neither is for the faint of heart. Myself, I always leave them alone. They’re part of what the pen is. It’s not exactly history; I don’t know who E. H. Lockington was, and even if I did, it’s unlikely that there would be any record of the sequence of events from the pen’s first purchase until now. So pens don’t have a history, unless you consider the inferences that you might make from every scratch and scuff on a pen’s surface. From what I read in the pen boards, there are those who do consider that history. Most historians will disagree. However, judging by the excellent condition of the pen, old E. H. was proud of it and looked after it well. It would be a sad thing to break his/her association with it after all this time, so the personalisation stays where it is.

As I’ve said elsewhere, I don’t really have the collecting gene. Despite handling so many, I don’t actually own a lot of pens. Now and again, though, I come across a pen that I admire so much that I can’t bear to part with it. This is one such pen.

It seems only fair and right that Conway Stewart’s prestige range – the Duro – should be as confusing as the less expensive pens. There are pens with Duro nibs that aren’t imprinted as Duros, and there are Duro pens that don’t have Duro nibs. To be fair, these latter are among the earliest Duros, and they have CS6 nibs which are pretty much indistinguishable from Duro nibs.

Not all Duro nibs are made equal, either. Most commonly seen is the Duro 40, but I’ve also seen Duro 20s and Duro 26s, and yet others that are Duros without any number. Most are long-tined, but high-shouldered and even oblique Duros exist.

What seems to have happened is that Conway Stewart dropped the name “Duro” for their most prestigious pens sometime in the early forties, and thereafter those pens, including the 55, 45 and 47 – all bearing Duro nibs – became “The Conway Stewart”. The 55 is by far the most common of these and I’ve written about it before.

Today I have a much less common 45. It has a single cap ring instead of the the 55’s three, but it is still a large imposing pen, designed to impress. It had a comparatively short run, from 1943 to 1946, and it was then superseded by the more opulent 55.

The Duro 40 is a large and impressive nib. Like most Duros, it’s rigid. Sometimes you’ll hear that the hard-as-a-nail Duros were produced to satisfy a need for a nib that would make an impression through several carbons, but that seems an unlikely explanation. The Duro is rigid because it was made from a thicker blank. There are other, less expensive ways to make stiff nibs, and the ones that would have been used to penetrate carbons were among the cheapest, like the Scribe range. No, the Duro, like Swan’s Eternal, is about status and conspicuous consumption. It was made to be noticed, and perhaps envied.

Funny how bling brings out the worst in us!

I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make sense of the Conway Stewart numbering system. I’m aware that this is a futile exercise; there’s neither sense nor logic to numbers they assigned to their pens. Other collectors have warned me that this will end in tears. I can’t let it go, though. I keep trying, in the hope that one day all will become clear.

Surely if two pens have almost the same number they must have a close relationship? I’m thinking of the 85 and 85L, two pens that the company created in the mid fifties to exploit the new range of colours and patterns they had developed. They come in black, too, and here they are:

At first glance they do appear quite similar. The 85L is a little longer and thereby gives the impression of being slimmer. One might be the big brother of the other, but almost instantly one notices the broader cap band of the 85L.

Then the eye drifts to the top of the cap and it becomes clear that they are entirely different. The 85 has a simple washer-clip held by a metal stud, whereas the 85L has a cowl over the clip, all held in place by a black plastic stud. In fact, in the medium cap band, cowl clip and black plastic stud, the 85L resembles the 84, not the 85!

There may be a sensible explanation. These pens – with the odd exception – share the same colour range. The 84 came first in 1952. The 85 was introduced in 1956, perhaps as a cheaper version of the 84, with its simpler design and narrow cap band. It only remained in production for a year, however, which suggests that sales may have been poorer than expected. Conway Stewart decided, it seems, that it was not a less expensive pen that the market required. Exactly the opposite: it was a larger, more expensive pen that was needed to fill that slot – hence the 85L.

So the 85 was a mistake, really, and the 85L is actually big brother to the 84.

Or that’s my story, anyway.

Following on from yesterday, Tradera, the Swedish auction site, has had the offending link to this blog removed. Kudos to them!

Sometimes this must seem like a Mabie Todd blog. Partly, that’s because of my own fondness for their products. Also, Swans, Blackbirds and Jackdaws are favoured by my customers, so I buy a lot of them. That doesn’t mean that I’m not fond of other pens – I am – and Conway Stewart is near the head of the list of other pens I like.

As I’ve said elsewhere, obliques and full flexes are much less commonly found among Conway Stewarts than Swans, but line variation isn’t everything. Conway Stewart’s slogan for many years was “The pen with the wonderful nib” and that’s true. If you like a firm nib or a soft semi-flex, look no further. Conway Stewart put a lot of effort into ensuring that when the nib was applied to paper, the customer would be satisfied. All these years later, their pre-war and post-war pens are among the very best writers there are.

I restored five this week. All black and nothing particularly outstanding among them, though there’s a single-band 386 among them which isn’t often seen. Most importantly, they’re all great writers.

The late fifties to the early sixties was the period of Conway Stewart’s greatest post-war success, and the choice they offered buyers then was positively bewildering. Unless the buyer went with a model in mind, it would take some time to work through the various colours, patterns, trim levels, sizes and shapes.

This model, the long and slender 73, is an exceptionally beautiful pen with opulent gold trim and a black stud to finish off the cap. It’s not particularly common today, and with its quite large No4 nib it was probably one of the more expensive pens. It sometimes turns up in a set with the No23 pencil.

Those that I have seen have either been black or hatched in burgundy, green or blue, like this example.

Though it’s largely lost to us now, the relationship between the various Conway Stewart models must have been obvious to the company at the time. Now we’re left to grasp at straws. For instance, the No 23 pencil was also paired in sets with the No36 pen. It has similar trim to the 73 with its narrow/medium/narrow cap bands. It’s about a centimetre shorter than the 73 and it’s noticeably thicker. In fact, the 73 looks like a stretched 36. Did the company make the 73 to be a more elegant and expensive alternative to the more popular 36?

I don’t know and I don’t suppose I ever will. It’s just part of the pleasant puzzle that was the Conway Stewart product range.

By the 1950s, Conway Stewart had overcome the postwar material shortages, and once again offered such a range of choice to buyers that selecting a pen must have been quite a task. There were prices to suit all pockets, a dazzling variety of colourful patterns and a selection of trim levels. If, for whatever reason, having two cap bands was important to the potential purchaser, there was only one choice: “The Conway Stewart” No24. Introduced around 1949, the 24 was the only model with two rings, but it came in two different forms; one had the rings narrowly spaced, in the slightly later version the rings were noticeably further apart. This example is one of those with the closely-spaced rings:

Some of the plastics used in the 24 are quite stunning. As well as burgundy, green and grey hatched, the now much sought-after tiger’s eye and cracked ice patterns were available. It was often sold together with the No18 pencil as a boxed set.

Though obliques and stubs are less common among Conway Stewarts than they are among Swans, they do turn up, and this pen has an excellent factory medium stub which imparts appreciable line variation to the writing.

Though not rare, 24s are less commonly seen than, for instance, 58s and 27s.

For more than forty years, tiny pens were extremely popular in Britain. Though several companies produced their own versions, by far the best known is the Conway Stewart Dinkie. It was introduced in 1922 or 1923, depending on who you read, and the first examples were advertised as men’s waistcoat pocket pens, but they soon became the favourite ladies’ pen, whether in purse form with no clip, the chatelaine type with a ring or as a standard pen with a pocket clip. Many of the earliest ones were in hard rubber but they soon became a showcase for the new material, casein, and appeared in an almost limitless range of wonderful colours and patterns. Later, in the post-war period, the 550 range Dinkies became miniature versions of the company’s standard pens, with the same shapes and patterns.

Though they were advertised as “the smallest practical fountain pen ever made”, I, for one, don’t find them practical. Though I have small hands, Dinkies are too small for me to write with for an extended period. What they are, though, is the collector’s pen par excellence. Such is the range of models and the variety of colours and patterns within each model that one could build a very large collection of Dinkies alone. Many of the pre-war models are rare or uncommon and fetch high prices.

The post-war 550 is very common and doesn’t fetch especially high prices. They’re beautifully made, jewel-like objects, and the sets are well-presented in attractive boxes.  Popular as birthday and Christmas gifts, the sets often remained unused and frequently appear in first-class condition today.

This example is in what Jonathan Donahaye described as a “wallpaper pattern”.

The pen and pencil are in the “marbled green/black veins” pattern which was issued quite late in the 550 series. The gold plating is immaculate and I suspect that the pen and pencil have hardly ever been out of the box. The tiny nib is an example of the jeweller’s craft and the pen writes with some flexibility.

During the years when it was an outstanding success, Conway Stewart was known for lever-filling pens. They did experiment with other filling systems such as the piston filler and, quite late in the company’s history, the Speedy Phil, a “one-click” filling system similar to Sheaffer’s Touchdown. These were not a great success. Perhaps they didn’t work very well, or perhaps the market just wasn’t there for that type of pen from Conway Stewart.

Around 1930, though, they introduced a novel and efficient button-filling system. It was quite different from the button-fillers made by their competitors. The pressure bar assembly screws into the end of the barrel and remains fixed there. This makes sac replacement very simple and the filling method works very well in daily use. Several of the Duro range were button fillers, as were some of the 226s and the 485.

The 485 isn’t very common. Superficially similar to the Universal 479, it was in production from 1933 to 1940, but it is generally believed that not very many were made. Though it came in some attractive colours like toffee swirl and the various colours of the hatched pattern, it was clearly intended, like the Scribe or 475 to be a low-cost, practical, workaday pen.

My example is in black celluloid with minimal trim, deep-cut chasing and flat top. The barrel bears the patent number 297194, which I assume relates to the filling system. The thin gold plating is well worn on the clip, but otherwise the pen is in pristine condition. Conway Stewart’s black celluloid of this date seems to be exceptionally hard-wearing.

The nib is extra fine, quite an uncommon point-size in Conway Stewarts. The combination of the parsimonious trim and the fine point suggests to me that this might have been the type of pen bought by companies to supply to their clerks. With its highly efficient filling system (this pen holds a lot of ink) and the fine point, the pen would have filled many pages of columns of figures between fills.

In general, button fillers were very popular, and it surprises me that Conway Stewart did not continue with their excellent version. Perhaps it made more economic sense to concentrate production on lever fillers. Be that as it may, after the 485 went out of production, no more button fillers were made.

Beautiful though the more opulent Conway Stewarts are, there’s something very satisfying about these practical, minimalist pens, with the lines of the barrel and cap unbroken by lever or cap rings.

The Conway Stewart 286 had a long production run, from 1930 to 1945. For strict accuracy, one would have to say that it wasn’t quite the same pen throughout the whole period. There were a couple of redesigns. It was always the same type of pen, though, a quite large pen, in the middle of Conway Stewart’s price range, bearing a single narrow cap ring and a big No5 nib. It was always a big seller, probably the company’s biggest seller during the years it was in production. The 286s are well-made pens and they survive in large numbers. Of all the CS pens of that period, I find that these are the ones I have to do least remedial work on. Yes, there can be nib repair and replacement to be done, because people drop pens, but the main components survive better on this model than on most others. The lever, often a problem on Conway Stewarts, rarely is on the 286. It seems to be a little sturdier.

The 286 comes in wonderful colours, including the ever-desirable cracked ice, blue rock-face and the wonderful toffee swirl. Most 286s that turn up, though, are black. Much as I enjoy the colours, I like black pens too. With no distraction of pattern or colour, the proportions of a pen really show in black. I realise that it’s a personal preference, and there’s no mathematical or scientific formula that can be applied to back up what I say, but I think the 286 is the most handsomely proportioned of all Conway Stewarts. Barrel to cap length, clip to cap length, nib to the pen as a whole, all seem more satisfying than on any other Conway Stewart model of the time.

This harmony of proportion makes for a comfortable and well-balanced pen in the hand. Again, it’s a personal preference, but I find the 286 a better pen to use than, say, the 55, which is a little chunky and top-heavy when posted, or the very popular 388, which is just a bit too slender for extended periods of writing.

It’s a good thing, then, that 286s were so popular and have survived so well. For the time being, at least, there seems to be a near-endless supply of them.

Part of the genius of Conway Stewart was hitting the right niche in the market. Soundly made and instantly recognisable but comparatively inexpensive, the pens had an air of worth and respectability that recommended them to other companies and associations wishing to advertise themselves. Conway Stewart sold thousands of pens in this way. Many associated pens are listed in the late Jonathan Donahaye’s excellent web site:

http://www.ftic.info/Donahaye/ConwayStewart/csbook/page1.htm

and other previously unlisted ones are frequently discovered. Mostly (though not always) the pens chosen for this purpose were from the lower end of the range, often 475s or 479s. Such a pen is this one, apparently a give-away for Bennett College in Sheffield:

Though the name “Conway Stewart” is not imprinted on the barrel, the intertwined “CS” initials are stamped on the shoulder of the clip and the nib is a Conway Stewart one.

For several decades, Conway Stewart pens were produced for the Boy Scout Association. Given Baden-Powell’s Imperialist vision, it’s perhaps fitting that this is The Empire Pen! The first Empire pen I got, many years ago, before such good reference materials were available, was a black pen with chasing. The barrel imprint was “The Empire Pen 411” and where the Conway Stewart logo would normally be on the clip, there was a fleur-de-lys, the emblem of the Scouting Movement. The nib was warranted. Nonetheless, every inch of that pen insisted “Conway Stewart” and so it turned out to be.

I bought another one recently, an older Empire Pen, probably from the early thirties, bearing the number 46. Sadly, the inserted clip was missing and, even worse, there’s a hairline crack in the cap lip. The pen is unsaleable but I’m not too disappointed. I’m happy to keep this one as a daily user. I’m fond of mottled hard rubber Conway Stewarts, especially the ones with the flange lever. As a bonus, this one has a broad flexible oblique nib. That’ll do for me!