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The General and the Captain: Two Period Pipes of the Early Twentieth Century: Difference between revisions
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The General and the Captain: Two Period Pipes of the Early Twentieth Century (view source)
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The General Dawes pipe has provenance, the Captain Warren does not. The Dawes was a patented pipe. There is no record of a patent for the Captain Warren pipe. General Dawes was a real person. Wherever I searched, just about every mention was Captain (No First Name) Warren. “Captain Warren’s honorable name has already received the promised fame” (''The Provi'', June 1922). “Captain Warren has a title, so he doesn’t need a first name” (Abdulhamit Arvas et al., ''Critical Confessions'', 2023). I had hoped to find his first name! However, an examination of all the available sources, the historical evidence that people left behind, yielded nothing meaningful. | The General Dawes pipe has provenance, the Captain Warren does not. The Dawes was a patented pipe. There is no record of a patent for the Captain Warren pipe. General Dawes was a real person. Wherever I searched, just about every mention was Captain (No First Name) Warren. “Captain Warren’s honorable name has already received the promised fame” (''The Provi'', June 1922). “Captain Warren has a title, so he doesn’t need a first name” (Abdulhamit Arvas et al., ''Critical Confessions'', 2023). I had hoped to find his first name! However, an examination of all the available sources, the historical evidence that people left behind, yielded nothing meaningful. | ||
Was this Warren meant to be anonymous, fictitious, contrived? If he lived between, say, 1875 and 1930, he might have been a pipe-smoking skipper or perhaps the Tommy buried in Westminster Abbey’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Or maybe it’s a mistaken identity, that Warren was his first, not his last, name. Without a first name, we may never know who he was and why he is affiliated with this pipe. It’ll remain a mystery inside an enigma. Does it matter? Well, it depends on how interested you are to know the provenance of this pipe. Was it that late 19th-Century, French Captain Warren clay pipe or the early 20th-Century British briar? As a pipe historian I was interested in the discovery—I still am—but I have little hope for an “Aha!” moment. | Was this Warren meant to be anonymous, fictitious, contrived? If he lived between, say, 1875 and 1930, he might have been a pipe-smoking skipper or perhaps the Tommy buried in Westminster Abbey’s Tomb of the Unknown Warrior. Or maybe it’s a mistaken identity, that Warren was his first, not his last, name. Without a first name, we may never know who he was and why he is affiliated with this pipe. It’ll remain a mystery inside an enigma. Does it matter? Well, it depends on how interested you are to know the provenance of this pipe. Was it that late 19th-Century, French Captain Warren clay pipe or the early 20th-Century British briar? <br> | ||
As a pipe historian I was interested in the discovery—I still am—but I have little hope for an “Aha!” moment. | |||
And last, reader, consider that in the chain of command of every military organization, a general outranks a captain…even a Navy captain. | And last, reader, consider that in the chain of command of every military organization, a general outranks a captain…even a Navy captain. | ||
[[Category:Ben Rapaport]] | [[Category:Ben Rapaport]] | ||