I cannot tell you how pleased I am to own these figures and I thank Aurea Carter for providing them. I have stalked a pair of figures like this for a long time. There is a pair in The Potteries Museum. Another pair was in Jonathan Horne's 1981 Exhibition. A pair sold at Christies London almost 20 years later, in September 2000. I am unsure about the markings on all these pairs, but I do know the Christies pair, like mine, had only the male marked.
I am fortunate to already own a single marked Neale piper. You can read about him in my January 24, 2009, blog entry. I still think he is delicious and I am keeping him, despite the duplication. Greedy, I know, but I can never have enough figures of this quality . I did stand the three figures in a row, and, as you can see below, my single figure has a creamier body and a more muted color palette than does my pair. BTW, the man-bag he carries has a divine animal-skin pattern. Truly a modern man!