"We all filed into the front room and sat round the central table while the Inspector unlocked a square tin box and laid a small heap of things before us. There was a box of vestas, two inches of tallow candle, an A.D.P. briar-root pipe..." [SILV] These are but part of the personal effects of one John Straker, the newly-departed trainer of Silver Blaze.
ADP is a trademark of the Adolph Posener & Co., headed-up by one Adolph David Posener. It is not, as some apparently suggest, to be taken as Alfred Dunhill Pipe. Dunhill pipes were still a good few years from their (1904 at the earliest) inception and also never used that insignia. The Adventure of Silver Blaze, to be clear, was published in 1892.
AP&C, a London briar, meerschaum, and clay pipe manufacturer was on-the-scene at the time of Arthur Conan Doyle and definitely while he was writing Silver Blaze. Doyle, like his creation Sherlock Holmes, was no stranger to tobacco, and I like to think of him puffing at his briar while putting pen to paper. I sometimes do the same thing, often. A look around, need a name... Let's see... Ronson Butane Fuel. (Not a sponsor.)
(A thought crosses my mind.) Why did Doyle name names when 'a briar-root pipe' would have done? He doesn't mention brands in any of the other but one (more on that in a tick) of the items mentioned. Let me continue after the "..." of the quote up-top. "a pouch of seal-skin with half an ounce of long-cut Cavendish, a silver watch with a gold chain, five sovereigns in gold, an aluminium pencil-case, a few papers, and an ivory-handled knife with a very delicate, inflexible blade marked Weiss & Co., London."
Could it be that ACD was the world's first social media influencer? Silver Blaze as a sponsored Instagram post? Did Adolph Posener & Co. send him a free pipe or two in return for this shout-out? We may never know, quite thankfully. The other name brand mentioned here is, as you can and hopefully have read, Weiss & Co. London. This is an odder hat tip because the company's actual name seems to have been John Weiss & Son, a 1700 & 1800s London surgical equipment concern.
'Funny' story. There are some ties here of the familial/professional variety, in that Frederick Foveaux Weiss (a partner at JW&S at a time) died in 1892. Perhaps just a name in the news (even an acquaintance or chum). Particularly news of an industry ACD was well-enough versed in, as he of course studied (and tried hard to successfully practice) medicine. Thankfully, as the story goes, while Doyle waited for patients who never-enough called, he honed his fiction-writing chops.
Another (closing) thought. A hurdle that seems to have existed between ACD and his famed creation is that Doyle was not, according to himself, a man who easily noticed small details. I'd imagine this made it quite hard for him to have come up with the subtle almost imperceptible nuances that Holmes needed to grok in order to make his deductions. Perhaps the love of a smoke they held in common was a place for the writer to feel at ease in the world of 221b. I like that bet best.
Online Resources for this article include: Project Gutenberg, The Arthur Conan Doyle Encyclopedia, Pipes Magazine, &, of course, Wikipedia (John Weiss & Son).
::: very :::