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6 photographsArchive Record FUH-AYGP-TVJR-G
undetermined
Reference example
This pipe is documented here as an example for study — it is a record in the archive, not an item offered for sale. Everything below is what the piece itself, and the evidence around it, will honestly support.
Original stem
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Stem replaced or re-cut
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Rim cleaned (no wood removed)
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Refinished
No
Faridunhill standing declaration
Chamber reamed
Yes
Faridunhill standing declaration
Smoked
Yes
owner stated
Facts, not a grade. We do not score a pipe out of ten: a number would rank a restored pipe above an honest one, and restoration is exactly what this hobby prices down. Every line above is checkable by anyone holding the pipe. Lines marked Faridunhill standing declaration rest on our published, dated statement of shop practice (v1.0, 2026-07-29) — not on an inspection of this individual pipe. It is one document, in public, that you can hold us to.
This reference example is a Big Ben Commodore in the chimney shape, carrying the factory shape number 12469 and finished smooth. It stands in the archive as a representative of Dutch factory pipemaking, a tradition in which the Big Ben name occupies a central place. The brand became widely distributed across Europe in the postwar decades, organised into named finish lines — of which Commodore is one — each identified by a consistent numbering system stamped alongside the brand name. The chimney is a shape of deliberate exaggeration: a development of the classic billiard in which the bowl is drawn upward into a tall, narrow stack. The elongated chamber concentrates the tobacco column vertically, a geometry traditionally associated with a cooler, slower burn and favoured by smokers of flake tobaccos. In a smooth finish, as here, the form displays the grain of the along the full height of the stack, making the chimney one of the more visually commanding standard shapes in a factory catalogue. Dating a Big Ben presents the archivist with a common Dutch-factory problem: the firm used no date-coding system, so no stamp on the pipe fixes a year of manufacture. The nomenclature — brand, line name, and five-digit shape number — identifies the pipe within the Gubbels catalogue but places it only within the broad span of the brand's long production run. The era of this example is therefore recorded honestly as undetermined, its identity resting on the Commodore line stamping and shape 12469 rather than on any chronological marker.
2022-12-31
Logged from the Faridunhill archive — photographed and posted on Instagram, 2022-12-31.
2023-01-24
Sold through eBay for USD 66. No buyer is recorded.
2026-07-29
5 checklist facts recorded under Faridunhill's standing declaration of shop practice (2026-07-29).
2026-08-28
Honesty pass: statements the source does not support were removed (2 unsupported/absence sentence(s) removed from the essay).
This record is append-only. Nothing is deleted — a correction is a new entry that supersedes the old one, and both stay visible.
USD 66sold 2023-01-24 · eBay
From 1 recorded sale — this pipe, this day. A single transaction is not a market price, and we will never print one as if it were.
The sample this sits in: Faridunhill has recorded 53 sales of Big Ben between 2015–2026 — median $60, most falling between $20 and $135.
The date shown is the date of sale, not the date this page was published. Our own transaction record, published free. No buyer appears here — not a name, not initials, not a country. Counted across both of our channels — eBay 2015–2022 and Etsy 2022–2026 — so the series is continuous and a change of marketplace is never read as a change in price.
Nobody leaves empty-handed. If you hold the catalogue page, the dated advertisement, or a hallmarked sibling that closes one of these — or simply own this model and can measure yours — send it in. Contributions are checked, credited to you by name, and the record is updated with the date it changed.
Instagram post, 2022-12-31. Published to a third-party platform on that date and archived since — a timestamp we cannot move. It is evidence that this object existed and looked like this, then.
The photographs are the identity. 6 images of this pipe's grain, stamping and stem are held as its fingerprint. The handle above is only a handle: lose it, and the pipe can still be matched back to this record from its grain.