Dopp Bag

[LegionPrime]

After my dad died I made sure to give my brother his dopp bag. It was a pleather one, nice enough but I had always thought I remembered him having one that was a much nicer softer leather rather than the stiff pleather one. Well I was going through the boxes in the attic of our garage and I found an old leather dopp bag. Now, I pitched some stuff as it was was more contemporary and a hand lotion had leaked on them and I assure you I wanted nothing to do with the sticky bottles or the nasty old plastic hotel toothbrush. However the rest of the stuff was fine and while the polyester??? lining is drying out and cracking it did wipe clean fairly easily. Most of the stuff was fairly pedestrian Revlon nail clippers, a bent pair of Pakistani LaCross nose hair trimmers etc (you know at least as much about the rock as I do). BUT, there was a Rolls Razor in there as well.
I have another one I got at some point and the hone is broken, the strop is rather rough looking and it has neither a handle nor a blade. At some point my dad gave me another one he had and it had a blade, no handle but the hone is unbroken and the strop is in much better condition. This one looks to be maybe an earlier model as it's more rounded and the release buttons are bars rather than round buttons. The strop, hone and blade are in great condition and it has a handle. I may get to try a shave with a Rolls yet! I'll have to talk to my mom and see if she knows whose it is. It may be my dad's and it just got lost in one of the moves but he didn't really seem to know much about the Rolls he gave me so maybe it's one of my grandfathers'.
The blade from the razor my dad gave me says on the back of the blade G 47 so it's just postwar and may have been HIS fathers, This one though has an F but instead of a number below it there's just the letter J. They're both marked Rolls Razor & Made in England so maybe it's a replacement blade? I would not be surprised if someone here knew, hope you guys found this interesting.

 

[PLANofMAN]

Sounds like it was made in 1947. That should be enough to determine whether the razor belonged to your father or to another member of your family. Also you have two different models of Rolls there. The one with the more rounded corners is the Viscount (a later model), and the one with squarer corners is the Imperial. Both were manufactured concurrently, so they might be the same age.

On the back edge of the blade, next to the word "razor" will be two numbers. This is the production date for the blade that came with the Rolls Razor. Replacement blades were not marked with a production date. It's an easy way to both date your razor, and identify whether the blade is original or a replacement.

I'm on my 6th consecutive shave with a Rolls Razor, and they can be quite nice shavers.