Parker Jotter Ballpoint: House of Commons variant

[PartyWithHavarti]

Someone with a habit of buying pens in terrible condition recently donated their collection to a local charity shop. I picked up a root beer Esterbrook J (9550 nib) the first time I looked through it. I visited again and this time the Parker ballpoints caught my eye. One of the 10 (hey, they were $2 each!) that followed me home is different than the others. It is drab olive-green, and has "House of Commons" written along the side of it, as well as a small drawing of a drawbridge gate. All the other pens I picked up say 'MADE IN UK' or 'MADE IN USA', but this one says 'MADE IN ENGLAND AC', and the font used for 'PARKER' is stretched out farther. Finally, the threading that holds the two halves of the pen together is metal instead of plastic, and a much finer pitch. 

 

I guess what I'm saying is if you do see a House of Commons Jotter, go ahead and grab it if it's cheap. I'm not saying it has amazing build quality or anything, but compared to a regular plastic Jotter it's not bad at all. Everything about it is slightly nicer, from the finish of the metal to the thickness of the clip. One last difference is that the little spring the refill's tip sits into is fitted into the pen instead of simply floating around freely to get lost when one swaps refills. 

 

 

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

neat!

I mean... for a ballpoint and all  

 

[PartyWithHavarti]

3 minutes ago, IThinkIHaveAProblem said:

neat!

I mean... for a ballpoint and all  

 

 

Haha I know what you mean. I thought I might as well make this post since google came up short when searching for information about this pen and why/how it's different. 

[IThinkIHaveAProblem]

well, that does appear to be the logo for the UK House of Commons

Sadly, searching for

"made in England ac" Parker

only turns up people trying to sell pens, and I didn't see any explanation of what it means 😕

 

As to the physical differences... could it be a 45 and not a jotter? 

Here again my google-fu has failed me and I have been unable to find out what (if any) differences there are between a jotter and a 45 ballpoint.

 

[gwid]

I think that all 15,45,61,51 are cap actuated... maybe it's an old jotter, around 1958 (parker arrow was included on 1957)?

Edited June 25, 2021 by gwid

[PartyWithHavarti]

Y'know,  I think you're right. It's just an older model of jotter when they still had brass threads and other things. What a mystery I had on my hands   

[Mercian]

On 6/25/2021 at 4:15 PM, gwid said:

maybe it's an old jotter, around 1958 (parker arrow was included on 1957)?

 

The date code that was found by the OP (see below) indicates that the pen was made in Q2 of 1982.

 

On 6/25/2021 at 3:56 AM, PartyWithHavarti said:

All the other pens I picked up say 'MADE IN UK' or 'MADE IN USA', but this one says 'MADE IN ENGLAND AC', and the font used for 'PARKER' is stretched out farther. Finally, the threading that holds the two halves of the pen together is metal instead of plastic, and a much finer pitch. 

 

The production date code 'AC' conforms to a very short-lived coding format that Parker used only at the start of the 1980s (see this link).

Since 1988 Parker pens have indicated the quarter in which the pen was produced by the mark 'III' for the first quarter, then grinding a 'I' off the stamp in each successive quarter.
The full scheme is thus:
'III' for pens produced in the year's First quarter;

'II' for pens produced in the year's Second quarter;

'I' for pens produced in the year's Third quarter, and;

' ' (i.e. no marking) for pens produced in the year's Fourth quarter.

 

Between 1979 & 1987, Parker used an 'E' stamp in the First quarter, then ground off horizontal bars as the year progressed, giving:

'E' for pens produced in the year's First quarter;

'C' for pens produced in the year's Second quarter;

'L' for pens produced in the year's Third quarter, and;

'I' for pens produced in the year's Fourth quarter.

 

Parker has stuck with the code marking for the year since they came up with their 'QUALITY PEN' phrase in 1979.

 

If you have a pen with the date code 'Q' it was produced in a year that ends in 0,

'U' is stamped on to pens produced in years that end in 1;

'A' → year ends in 2

'L' → year ends in 3

'I' → year ends in 4

'T' → year ends in 5

'Y' → year ends in 6

'P' → year ends in 7

'E' → year ends in 8

'N' → year ends in 9.

 

On my UK-made Parkers I have observed that one can see the decade change because the letter for the quarter code and the letter for the year code change order.

 

So, in one decade you will get codes such as 'Q.II', 'I.I', and 'N.II', whereas in the next the codes will be 'II.Q', 'I.I', and 'II.N'.

 

I also think that Parker might go through another cycle by including a '.' to separate the year letter and quarter letter for twenty years, and then of NOT including the '.' for the next twenty years.
If I am right about that, Parker pens will each have a production code that won't be repeated for forty years.
Pens produced in the first quarter of the first year of successive decades would bear codes such as 'Q.III', 'III.Q', 'QIII', and 'IIIQ', before cycling back to 'Q.III' in the fortieth year.

 

It is also worth noting that:

1- the letters of 'QUALITY PEN' are stamped in a serif typeface, so the 'I' in year 4 will have a bar at its top and bottom, whereas the quarter letters are simple vertical lines (like a sans-serif capital 'I');

2- on my Parker pens that were made under license by Luxor in India, there is an additional stamping to indicate that the pens were produced in India.
On my pens that is a capital 'I' (in a serif font) that is separated from the year & quarter letters by a dash/hyphen.

E.g. my 2019 Luxor Vector is stamped 'I-IIN'.

[Mercian]

  

On 6/25/2021 at 3:56 AM, PartyWithHavarti said:

It is drab olive-green, and has "House of Commons" written along the side of it, as well as a small drawing of a drawbridge gate.

 

The 'drawbridge gate' (the technical name for which is 'portcullis') is the symbol of our Parliament. Probably because the building/estate in which we have our Parliament is, technically, a Royal Palace. The people who work for our MPs in the House of Commons are not classed as 'Civil Servants', but are instead 'Crown Servants'. I.e. they are employees of 'the Crown', not of the Civil government.

Our Parliament is bicameral.

The 'lower chamber' (roughly equivalent to e.g. the US Congress) is the 'House of Commons' - it is the chamber/House in which one would historically find members of Parliament drawn from among the 'common folk'.
The UK Parliament's 'upper chamber' (roughly equivalent to e.g. the US Senate) is the 'House of Lords' - it is the chamber/House in which historically one would find only Members of the 'nobility', the 'aristocracy', or 'peerage'. The largest number of these were hereditary peers, but senior politicians have long been 'ennobled' as 'Life Peers' - a way of 'bumping them upstairs' and letting the next generation in to the Commons. The children of 'Life Peers' don't inherit the right to sit in the House of Lords.
The House of Lords also contains the 'Lords Spiritual' (the most-senior Bishops of the Church of England), and a small number of very senior judges (the 'Law Lords').
The composition of the House of Lords has been changed a lot (well, by the standards of British Constitutional change 😉) during the last forty years (particularly concerning how many of the UK's hereditary 'nobles' now have the right to sit in the House of Lords and make laws that govern the rest of us), but the situation as I outlined it above still obtained in 1982.

 

The long benches upon which the 'Honourable Members' of the House of Commons sit in the actual debating chamber are covered in a leather that is a deep shade of green.

The long benches upon which the 'Noble Lords' (& 'Noble Ladies') in the House of Lords sit are covered in a sumptuous leather that is a deep shade of 'red' or burgundy.

I suspect that the green 'House of Commons' Jotter would originally have had a 'red'/burgundy counterpart that bore the legend 'House of Lords'.

I also suspect that the pen's colour has been adversely affected by light since it was produced - the benches in the Commons are a much less 'olive' shade of green than the pen appears to be!

In terms of the pen's quality, I have found that my 2000s-era Newhaven Jotter was manufactured to a lower standard (i.e. less-expensively) than my early-1990s Newhaven Jotter. I suspect that the Jotters made in the 1980s may have been better still than my 1990s Jotter. I recall my mother's early-1980s 'Harlequin' 45 BP as being very well made, but that 'disappeared' out of her possession in about 1985, before I had handled any Jotters, so I cannot be sure whether their quality also subsided between the early 1980s and early 1990s.

It's a bit like how my two 45 'Flighter' FPs from the 1970s seem to have been made to a higher standard than my 'Flighter' FP Jotter, Frontier, Vector, & Urban (from the 2000s-2010s) are.

 

Oh, lastly, the pen is a Jotter, and not a 45.

The 45 ballpoints are NOT actuated by pressing a button, but by pressing-down the whole of the cap.

Slàinte,
M.