I picked this up on that auction site a while back. It's about 90mm tall with a barrel diameter of 65mm.
As you can see it has 'PPE UK PAT APP FOR' on the barrel. Googling PPE currently brings up thousands of results for (er...) personal protective equipment, but I did find out that they were a divsion of Pillkington (UK glass manufacturers) and later had a dedicated factory in Wales.
The aperture 'notation' is amateurish (it does say 'approx'!) but the iris is 10 bladed and the whole thing certainly isn't of lightweight construction (it's all metal).
The back of the flange has the word 'original' scratched on it, and scratched on the barrel is '185mm (8 elements)'.
The very front portion unscrews with a particularly long thread (about 15mm), and houses what appears to be a single, thin element of negative power (I hope that is the right term - it makes my fingers look very slightly smaller when viewed through it). The fact that it has such a long thread makes me think it might be for some kind of adjustment?
I did find a page of PPE patents at https://patents.justia.com/assignee/...on-p-e-limited (some refer to lenses, many don't) - but of course 'patent applied for' isn't the same as 'patent granted'.
I've yet to get it on a lens board but would be interested to hear any views on what purpose it was intended for.
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