Chambers and English Pencils, Old and New
Chambers Pencils is one of many pencil manufacturers without a brand. In the US, there is Moon pencils (whose domain recently expired, forebodingly), and China is saturated with such concerns. Chambers like these function to provide bespoke and novelty pencils for other businesses, and rely on this strange brandless ghost market where nothing is what it seems.
I tend to prefer using pencils to track corporate and political stories. Chambers has only a couple consumer-level direct-marketed products, but they seem to be slowly expanding on this. Last year I purchased my first item from them in a couple packs of branded artist pencils in several grades.
This year they came out with 3-packs of 3-grade pencils with magnetic tips, and whilst I was grabbing some of these I also got a few sets of their small-batch custom printed HB and coloured pencils, of course with "Chambers Pencils” as my preferred motif.
Chambers is no new concern, but quite the old kid on the block. I found an old jumbo triangular pencil in one of my Ebay purchases a while back, along a slew of other British-origin pencils, a surprising number in left-handed orientation.
After about 80 years operating in and around Nottingham, Chambers was bought by Lyra and British operations ceased. But obviously the founder didn’t sign a non-compete agreement, because before too long he was making custom pencils on old refurbished equipment, which the tiny company continues to do to this day.
Rumours on social and news media imply that the pandemic economy has not been kind to Chambers, but I do hope they come up with some more retail goodies - I am intrigued to one day grab some square or triangular pencils from them, hopefully with an interesting branding and logo to go with it. Until then, they remain as an oddball one of the smallest pencilmakers in the world, in the former graphite superpower’s homeland.
Speaking of which, the British pencil market of the 20th century seems to have closely mirrored the Canadian, with the same Anglosphere brands such as Eagle, Berol, Venus and Royal Sovereign, as well as local imprints of German brands Staedtler and Eberhard-Faber. I have found an oddball named “General Pencils” that seems unrelated the US-based General Pencil Co./General’s Pencils. There’s also a Cumberland and British Graphite, likely the precursors to present-day Derwent. If you have any stories about these British pencilmakers, get in touch!
