A little history : the high water mark of pipes and pipe smoking came around 1903, going by reported production volumes. From then on, cigarettes slowly but irresistably gained ground.
Pipe manufacturing in England had already reached the typical finance capitalist efficiency-chasing over-production level by 1902, when the initial Openheimer consolidation came about.
Given production over-capacity in a shrinking market, "private labeling" became a standard practice. If you could produce X,500 pipes a week but could only sell X,000 under your own name, you'd contract with tobacco shops to stamp their name on your over-production and sell them at a discount. Occasionally, if you cut a wide-enough swath on the brand war battlefield, you'd stamp your name on the other side of the shank as well, resulting in old pipes with tobacconist's names and "Made in London England by Charatan" on the other. Ordinarily, though, this was not the case.
In the aftermath of WWII, with England struggling to pay off the horrendous debts she'd run up, her creditors got Congress to pass legislation enabling England to, essentially, dump her pipe (and other) over-production here at a minimal tariff rate. American pipe manufacturers screamed bloody murder but, as usual, the ones with the gold made the rules. Money talked and bullsh*t walked away to lick its wounds. What could have been the American Pipe Renaissence in the 1950s was thus delayed by 40 years or so.
Thus the number of "Genuine Imported Briar"s is legion (after a while even the cost of having a name stamp made up figured into it). While the cheapest pipes made in any period are real trash, the better no-names or semi-names can be quite good indeed, and real bargains, seeing as they were not infrequently made by Barling, Charatan, GBD and other concerns. Get LL here to open up and re-stem a better old Bewlay, a Puff-&-Brouse, or one of the "seconds" (Drury Lane was one of Comoy's), and you can have a great pipe, exceptionally well broken-in, for about the cost of a mid-level Peterson or Stanwell that isn't.
FWIW
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