A Century in Ink

In early 1905 two young Londoners took a first-floor back room at 13 Paternoster Row, a narrow street of printers and booksellers behind St Paul's, and began to sell fountain pens. Francis Charles Jarvis was 22. Thomas Howard Garner was 28, and the rent was five shillings a week.

They did not make the pens. They bought the parts in from outside workshops, assembled them and sold them on, meaning to put a fountain pen within reach of people who could not afford one, at a time when the cheapest pen of a recognised make cost 10s. 6d. The name is believed to come from a vaudeville act of the day, though no source has ever settled it.

By June 1906 the two men had a company, Conway Stewart & Co, with a capital of £50 and three rooms further up the same street. Turnover that year passed £2,000 across nearly 900 separate sales, and the next year it more than doubled.

The pen that carried them was the Post, designed by Major Post of the Salvation Army. You pulled out a plunger rod and the pen drew up its own ink, probably the first self-filling fountain pen made in Europe. Ten branches of WH Smith took stock, from Penzance in the far south west to Scarborough on the Yorkshire coast, and then the war came and nearly all the firm's skilled workmen enlisted.

Until the 1920s pens were black, cut from vulcanite, a hard black rubber. Conway Stewart brought in coloured pens, and the record is blunt about what followed: the coloured types created a world-wide vogue. The colour came from casein, an early plastic made from milk, in shades named Lapis Blue, Jade Green, Grey Jazz and Pink Satin.

The pen that carried all this was the Dinkie, a miniature made from 1922 until 1972 and sold at 5/6. Its own advertising called it a great favourite, ideal for a vest pocket or a lady's handbag. Between 1922 and 1929 alone there were at least 25 different Dinkies.

In 1950 and 1951 the whole works moved east to Copperfield Road in Mile End, its reception lit by lampshades shaped like two large gold nibs. The original staff of two men and a boy had grown to nearly 400, and twenty-four nib grinders worked four to a bench. One finisher remembered the thrill of repairing a pen sent in by someone famous, such as Winston Churchill.

Gold stood at nearly £8 an ounce, so hands and overalls were washed in special basins to collect the dust that came off them. A few months after the move a gang overpowered the doorkeeper, rolled the safe out of the gold nib office on two lengths of broom handle, lit a fuse and retreated to the floor above. The blast jammed the door, they left almost empty-handed, and one man was convicted on the evidence of a piece of broom handle found under his floorboards.

The company had money and no appetite for change. In April 1963 it reported the previous year's profit at £11,000, with £80,000 cash in the bank. Two weeks later a bid arrived valuing Conway Stewart at £191,000, roughly 30% above the market price of the shares, and it was promptly accepted.

What the Welsh factory made was no longer fountain pens, with ballpen and fibre-tip production each rising to over a million units a week. At the peak more than a thousand people assembled pens at home in the valleys, collecting parts in cardboard boxes that had held tins of tomato soup and fetching them in push-chairs and home-made trolleys. The end came quickly: the winding-up order is dated 28 July 1975, and by September the Official Receiver had moved in with liabilities that might reach £6m.

For nearly twenty years the name belonged to nobody in particular. Don Yendle, who had been assembling pens in a converted primary school in a small village in south Devon, acquired the Conway Stewart trademarks in 1994 from an entrepreneur in Dubai who bought and sold trademarks.

By 1997, after a great deal of trial and error, Yendle and a small team had made barrels and caps from casein the way it had been done in the 1920s, working from blocks shipped in from Italy. The pens went to people who make news: the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh received solid 18ct 58s for their Golden Wedding, and in 2005 the Prime Minister presented No 58 sets to the G8 leaders. It did not hold, and the Plymouth business ceased trading in August 2014.

When the Plymouth factory closed, Bespoke British Pens Ltd bought what was left of it: the stock of components, the technical drawings, the domain and the trademark. Assembly of pens from those original components began in early 2015, first on the Isle of Wight and then at Emsworth in Hampshire.

It is a small business, of about five people. Nibs are 18ct gold, casein is cured for a minimum of three months before it is worked, and collections are limited to 500 pieces. The work still turns up in other people's stories, and the company's own account puts a Churchill in Darkest Hour and a Marlborough in both Kingsman films.