Big nibs at Newhaven - 1

The Sussex coast is a strange mix of once-elegant Regency resorts, breezy seaside towns, yachty backwaters, and one or two working ports. Newhaven is one such port, sitting astride the River Ouse. It has a seaborne trade in scrap metal and gravel. It is also the ferry port for crossing to Dieppe in France. I've never taken that boat, but really must one day, just for the experience. Newhaven also has a small marina, with the usual sort of brightly-painted modern housing that you see at marinas everywhere, which used to look startlingly clean, fresh and upmarket against the rest of Newhaven's grimy terraces, but is now toning down and becoming just a little tired. Newhaven undoubtedly has a close-knit community with a heart, but ever since I've known it has looked a bit scruffy and down-at-heel. I imagine that any person disembarking from the ferry and driving through the town must be far from impressed. Even less so, if they stop and explore the rather forlorn town centre. The place desperately needs new money thrown at it. Meanwhile it's still one of the very few places in Sussex where you can pick up a cheap house. Cheap by south-of-England standards, that is.

But the town used to have the European HQ of a pen industry giant. The Parker Pen factory was here. It was housed in a modern complex on flat ground adjacent to the East Quay. 

Do you remember the heyday of Parker? Of pens in general? When every department store, and every good High Street stationer, had a pen counter with a display of pens - fountain pens in particular. Pens, especially fountain pens, were once important. They were in everyday use by everyone who needed to write something during the course of their day. That changed, of course, when a cheap and disposable ballpoint - the BIC Cristal - was perfected and launched in 1950, the twin development of gel-like ink and a finely-engineered stainless-steel ball bearing making the pen leakproof and capable of writing smoothly and reliably without breaks in the line. 

It soon had its imitators. Gradually the ballpoint took over the pen market, but it took time. It was always regarded as a practical, convenient, but utilitarian alternative to a 'proper' pen - much as today's smartphone is regarded as a practical, convenient but utilitarian alternative to a 'proper' camera. The ballpoint's victory was inevitable, and almost complete. But it never had the perceived value or status of a fountain pen. When presidents and prime ministers signed treaties and trading agreements in front of press and TV cameras, they did so using a symbolically-posh large fountain pen, probably a Mont Blanc, and did not scribble with a BIC ballpoint. That largely remains true even today - although I imagine that should (say) the Ukraine eventually be forced into an unwelcome cessation-of-hostilities agreement with Russia, the President of Ukraine will sign the hated document with a cheap ballpoint, to indicate what he really thinks of such an expedient. 

Fountain pens have kept their status as fine writing instruments for special occasions. But writing with them was always an acquired skill that some never mastered. When I learned how to do handwriting in my junior school on Barry Island in the later 1950s, it was at a desk with a pot for liquid ink which had to be periodically filled, always making a mess. We used scratchy dip pens with replaceable steel nibs, and always ended up with inky fingers. I was diligent at learning how to use such a pen, but still made a mess. You can imagine how the little sons and daughters of dockers and poorer tradesmen fared. They hated those pens. Like their parents, they would use a simple pencil once they had left school behind.

Slowly using a fountain pen became the mark of having higher education, and after that brainy professional work. I remember, for instance, how the family doctor always wrote out prescriptions with a fountain pen. Fountain pens represented handwriting at a higher level, appropriate for pupils at a school with high and traditional standards. When I first attended my grammar school in Southampton in 1963 it was compulsory to use a proper fountain pen. Ballpoints were forbidden. So the parents of scholars like myself had to kit their expensively-uniformed offspring with fountain pens made by the likes of Conway Stewart, Sheaffer and Parker. I suppose Sheaffer and Parker were the best-regarded, but any school pen needed to be hard-wearing and easy to use, and all of them met those basic requirements. There were various filling systems and various grades of nib. And similar to the situation today with phones and other devices, there was a certain rivalry or partisanship where pen makes or filling systems were concerned. But the most kudos came from being given a pen with a gold nib at Christmas, or on one's birthday. That really was something to crow about. I don't remember any posh pens getting stolen. A high crime and misdemeanour like that would have meant instant expulsion for the perpetrator, such was the oppressive regime in my grammar school, where even in 1969 someone who unwisely swore in morning assembly was thrown out of the school. (I never found out whether they were permitted to sit their A Levels: maybe not) 

Adults too generally rated gold-nibbed fountain pens highly. As late as 1970, it was a standard gift when being transferred to another office: my Dad was given one, a black Parker 51, very handsome, which he used until he retired in 1980. Then he passed it on to me. Although ballpoint pens were by then what one usually meant by a 'pen', there was nothing unusual about using a fountain pen in an office - at least for the Inspectorate in the Inland Revenue - until it became routine to use a computer keyboard for nearly everything. But I still used a fountain pen for signing letters right up to the day I retired in 2005. Indeed, my very last official act on my very last day at the office was to sign a string of Penalty Notices addressed to non-compliant limited companies, using Dad's Parker fountain pen. 

People still use fountain pens, even now. You can still quite easily buy one online, and most stationers sell bottles of ink. But it's an unusual personal choice. You need to be a dogged individualist and an unswerving devotee of the old and arcane. I think fountain pens - new or used - have remained popular among a few because in the modern world there is a pushback against too much soulless electronic gadgetry. People crave something 'real' and 'analogue', that they can touch and handle, something that needs a little skill and expertise to use successfully. Something that conjures up an older-style world that they vaguely remember, or have heard about. Hence the fascination with vinyl records and record players, old board games, and film cameras. 

Readers will know that I own a teal-coloured Parker 51 of my own - named Water Dragon - that I bought online in 2019, and have used several times daily ever since. I steeped myself in Parker Pen history in order to find out when Water Dragon was actually made, and I discovered that my pen was manufactured in July, August or September 1955, at Newhaven. 'Steeped' was the word! I brought together snippets of information from the many online pen websites and blogs, and eventually produced this essay on my particular pen's origins:

WATER DRAGON - MY PARKER 51 FOUNTAIN PEN 2019-

Purchase

I bought Water Dragon online from Vintage Fountain Pens, run from Hornsea in East Yorkshire by Mark Catley. She cost me £125, and arrived on 2019 0109.

Teal-coloured, with a Lustraloy cap, Water Dragon is a classic Parker 51. She has a fine/medium nib and writes beautifully.

Condition, probable age and ownership history

Mark Catley thought my pen was manufactured in the ‘mid-1960s’, and if that meant 1965 then Water Dragon was already 54 years old when she came into my hands. (In fact my own research revealed she was 63 years old at that point - see below)

Mark had serviced the pen, and may have cleaned it up a little, but that wouldn't have hidden any signs of heavy-handed usage, damage from dropping, or neglectful storage. Considering her age, Water Dragon had no very obvious blemishes, suggesting that she had been quite well looked-after in her previous life.

To be sure, there were micro-scratches all over the cap and barrel, and there was some very slight pinprick pitting on the cap.

There was also a hairline crack at the clutch-ring end of the barrel, which I didn’t see at first because it was inconspicuous and might easily be mistaken for a surface scratch. Indeed, I could assume that Mike Catley had himself failed to detect it, especially as he hadn’t noticed the 1955 manufacturing date-mark on that part of the barrel (see below). But its true nature was revealed when I carefully examined the pen with a loupe in sunlight. Reassuringly, the crack was clearly of long standing, and therefore stable, and I quickly decided that it was best left alone. No likely repair would make it vanish, or look much better. The crack was, in any case, normally out of sight when holding the pen, and covered when the cap was on (and therefore protected from impacts). I simply needed to avoid tightening the barrel too much when screwing it back on after an ink refill.

I wasn’t too perturbed about this crack. Yes, it was a potential physical weakness, but like all senior but cherished things (such as cars and boats), Water Dragon deserved (and would get) careful and considerate handling. She ought to go on year after year without the crack getting worse. In any case, the micro-scratches, the pitting, and the crack were all to be expected after so long. They were evidence of many years’ past usefulness as a working pen - badges of honour so to speak. 

Bottom line: when seen at a normal distance, in the hand - rather than through a loupe - Water Dragon looked unmarked and in nice condition. It was hard to believe she was so old.

Mark hadn’t deep-cleaned the cap, and so I was able to discover from ink residue inside it that the previous owner had used blue ink. (Blue ink or black ink is always kindest to fountain pens, blue especially)

As for Water Dragon’s year of manufacture, it seemed to me - as a starting point - that cap, pen hood, filler and barrel were original and contemporary with each other. This surely wasn’t a pen cobbled together from bits and pieces belonging to other pens of different age and provenance. (Such a pen is called a ‘Frankenpen’ among collectors).

Water Dragon had all four of these key Parker 51 Mark II features:

# The Aerometric filling mechanism.

# The black plastic end-piece on the filler.

# The rounded barrel-end.

# The wide clutch ring.

As a Mark II pen, she would have been made sometime from 1948 to 1969. But there were six important clues - all consistent with each other - that narrowed the year of manufacture down to 1955:

# From 1965, caps bore an engraved 51, but this was absent. Water Dragon’s lustraloy cap was very plain, with only ‘PARKER’ engraved on it.

# From 1964 caps no longer had a lip, but my pen had one.

# From 1962 caps used an open 'four-fingered' clutch (as on Dad’s Mark III pen). My pen had the older five-barred clutch, connected with a ring at both ends.

# From 1960 the breather hole in the barrel was moved from the rear end to the side of the barrel. My pen had a hole at the rear end.

# From 1958, caps bore the Parker logo - the halo with a vertical arrow shooting upwards through it. But this was absent.

# This was the clincher. It needed a loupe and good light to see it clearly, but on the screw-on end of the barrel (on the opposite side from the hairline crack) was a faint imprint in the plastic: MADE IN ENGLAND °5. Water Dragon was clearly a Newhaven product. The figure-with-a-dot would refer to the year and quarter of manufacture. In America, dating a Parker 51 in this way (using a two-figure system) ended in 1952, but it continued for several more years on English-made pens (using a single-figure system), right up to 1959. On an English-made pen, °5 meant the third quarter of 1955. That is, July, August or September 1955.

It seemed pretty conclusive that my pen was in fact datable to one of those three months in the second half of 1955. The pen was older than Mark Catley had thought. Water Dragon was actually a mid-1950s pen and already 63 years old when I acquired her in January 2019.

That's an old pen! Fully fifteen years older than Dad's pen, and only three years younger than myself. Remarkable then that it still looked good, worked faultlessly, and wrote so well.

Mark had nothing in his records concerning who the previous owner had been. I did ask: he told me in reply that he’d bought the pen in a batch from a dealer in the Nottingham area, but had no further information about it.

Still, the generally good condition, the teal colour of the pen, the use of blue ink, and the lack of wear on the nib (indicating only light writing pressure) all pointed to a careful female owner, perhaps someone like a retired headmistress. If she had been 21 in 1955 (let’s say the pen was a 21st birthday or graduation present from her parents) then in 2019 she would be aged 85 and presumably either dead, or in a home, and the pen would have come onto the market following a house clearance.

I’m guessing that Water Dragon might have been regularly used until that elderly previous owner found that filling her up with ink had become too difficult for arthritic fingers, too much of an effort, or just pointless. If that stage was reached when the owner was aged 80, then Water Dragon could have rattled around in a drawer for a number of years before eventual salvation, and some of those micro-scratches could well date from such a final era of redundancy. (If the original presentation box had still existed, it would have been sold with the pen and meanwhile preserved it from knocks and abrasions)

Well, Water Dragon now had a fresh lease of life in my hands - and a new, handmade leather case to rest in. 

So it was a British-made pen, not an import, made not far away on the Sussex coast, and was nearly as old as myself (I was born in 1952). But good-quality fountain pens were truly 'consumer durables': they lasted. My pen is in perfect working order, and is a pleasure to use. Here are some pictures of it. Click on any of them to enlarge.

The brown leather pencase I made used offcuts from the Pittards factory in Yeovil. Pittards were a big name in the leather world until recently, but went into administration last autumn. Originally wholesalers only, they diversified into a retail trade too, selling high-class leather goods from a shop at their Yeovil factory, and from a shop in Clarkes Village at Street. I bought my favourite blue-green handbag from them - now irreplaceable. When last on sale online it would have cost £195, a bit expensive for a bag that, although made in England, and of high quality, didn't bear a name like Radley, Ted Baker or any of the well-known exotic brands. Pittards struggled, but the times were against them. The Covid lockdowns were the last straw, as they were for many a manufacturing business that relied on steady sales to a discerning customer base. 

The shots just above reveal why fountain pens all but died. It was always messy and inconvenient to refill them. Even the innovation of ink cartridges were a faff. No wonder ballpoints (and later on, rollerballs) had an easy victory. 

Back to Parker. The pen factory at Newhaven, long-established by 1955, grew in importance during the next thirty years and was a major local employer. The Prime Minister visited in 1988, to mark Parker's centenary there. 

But the writing was on the wall. Some rationalisation became inevitable. This gathered pace during the 1990s and 2000s. The managerial suite was modernised, but much of the manufacturing went abroad in 2007, and the site was vacated in 2010. Demolition followed in 2014. I used to have a 1990s picture of the factory building when it was still standing - in fact still very much in use - but somehow it didn't get scanned and digitised, and it's lost forever. There is however quite a lot of material scattered around on the Internet about Parker at Newhaven. I won't regurgitate it all here, but here are some examples that show the factory in its heyday. 

There are also pictures of the managerial offices, taken when an enthusiast was able to visit with his camera. He was overwhelmed by the extent of the manufacturing records, and the vast collection of specimen pens made over many decades. None of this was subject to a preservation plan, should another reorganisation move the manufacture elsewhere. You wonder what in fact happened to it after the factory closed.

I was intrigued to learn that in 2008 a time capsule filled with contemporary Parker-related material was buried near the factory entrance, with due ceremony, intended to be exhumed and examined in 2088.

What happened to this, when the entire site was demolished in 2014? One person commenting at the time on a local Newhaven blog thought it had been dug up for its own safety, though who knows where it is now.

The same person mentions the big brass arrow-shaped front door handles being cut off and stolen. You can see one being held in the first of the time-capsule pictures (bottom left corner). The arrow clip on fountain pen caps was Parker's especial trademark. 

By 2019 the demolition site was looking very forlorn. This time, I do have my own pictures!

In 2020, however, something seemed to be happening at last.

What was going to be built on the site? A warehouse complex? Industrial units? Was all sign of the site's pen-manufacturing history going to be obliterated? Next post.