The "Pen with No Name"

[North Yorkie]

This is an unnamed pen which I bought off the 'Bay purely out of curiosity (It only cost £3, so was not a great gamble). As you will see from the photos, it has a chisel top to the metal cap, which is finished in a gilt colour. The clip is plain with parallel sides, has no markings and is joined to the cap by, what I believe is referred to as 'stapling'. The cap is inscribed with fine circles around most of its circumference.

 

It is a piston-filler but the filler seems to be one piece with the section/hood. At least I have not been able to remove it.  So it would seem that it was not a cartridge filler to which a converter was subsequently added, but was designed and built as a piston-filler from the start. I have not tried to remove the nib from the hooded section as I have no experience of this.  The section has a small Perspex? window just before the single thin band. The barrel has no markings at all but it does have matching blue jewel on the blind cap (a bit 'Parkeresque' perhaps?).

 

My rough guess is that this is from the 60's or 70's. Has anyone any suggestions as to what it might be?

[Paul-in-SF]

I would call that filler arrangement a captured converter. Most converters work on the piston model, and so do most captured converters; I guess what makes them "captured" is that they are not designed to be removable (for cleaning or repair). What makes them different from most piston fillers is that the whole mechanism is enclosed within the barrel and it's not using the barrel for ink storage.

 

The cap definitely has a 70s "modern" vibe to me, while the barrel jewel is a bit of a throwback to earlier times. So the whole thing is kind of transitional. 

 

I have no idea of the make or model. There were so many Parker 51 knockoffs being made even into the 60s and 70s, I wouldn't know where to start. 

[Format]

During the 1960s the UK was swamped with badly made pens from Italy, some were syringe fillers, others a twist captive converter.

 

The plastics were brittle and they were typically sold in small newsagents, 12 on a display card, the purchase price was less than £1. Schoolboys wrecked them inside a week.

 

Sometimes they were marked on the clip as VV.

 

If it can be made to write then great, I wouldn't put anything on the cap, not even water, just a soft duster and try to pump some water through just to clean some of the old ink out of it.

 

I had the same pen but with a syringe filler, so stiff that I needed the right arm of Popeye to pull the ink out of the bottle.

 

 

[North Yorkie]

Many thanks for your observations, Paul and Format.

 

I agree that this looks like a cheap 'school pen' particularly as the manufacturer/assembler/retailer didn't want to go to the trouble (and presumably the expense) of having some kind of logo or inscription to declare their involvement. And yet surely they could have kept manufacturing costs down by making it a simple cartridge pen?

I see that captive converters don't get a good press on the Network, so were they so cheap to manufacture/buy in that the cost was immaterial?

 

One other point is that the push-on cap is a bit of a tight fit on the barrel, so it might not be the original.

 

Finally, Format's suggestion of an Italian origin might be confirmed by a post on the Network back in 2018;

The Unknown Italian Pen - Other Brands - Europe - The Fountain Pen Network

This featured a similar pen (thought to be initially by OMAS, but later rejected) which looks to have had the same captive converter as mine.

 

Whatever its origins, I have flushed and filled it and it writes very well with a good ink flow.

Edited September 3 by North Yorkie
Additional point re cap

[Format]

Good result if it fills and writes as it should.

 

As regards your point on why not a cartridge. At the time, mid 60s,  that this pen was introduced to the UK Parker had a domination of the pen market, the majority of Parkers had their own filling systems or cartridges for the 45. I cannot remember school pens of any brand that took the international cartridge, I may be wrong.

 

 

 

 

[North Yorkie]

Yes, Format, I agree. When I was at Grammar School from 1960 onwards, I only experienced lever fillers -I never graduated to Parkers! And in the 1950s, at primary school we had to use 'dip pens', although, in those days, we didn't use that term!