Seen this offered as experimental Whitefriars, but surely not!

So, a few weeks ago I was in an antique dealers, and I saw one of these. The dealer said he'd bought it from someone who used to work at Whitefriars who had taken it home as a leaving present when the place closed. This particular dealer, by the way, knows his Whitefriars, and used to be well known for mid-century stuff. Seemed odd to me - it looks nothing like any Whitefriars I've seen and I'm more inclined to believe it's modern, but why would anyone worth their salt try to make out this is a Whitefriars piece when it looks so unlike Whitefriars? It's about 12" high, smokey glass over quite thick white, and it has a ground and polished pontil. Anyone seen the like?

I'd say it was contemporary Polish glass myself.

The smokey glass does look a little like Whitefriars' Twilight colour... but nothing else about it says Whitefriars to me - not even experimentally. And Twilight had stopped production in 1971... but the factory closed in 1980.

I agree. Seemed like a very complicated story to use to push a bit of modern Polish glass though!

Some dealers will say anything to sell a piece......

Any dealer worth their salt would have got the original owner to write down the provenance and sign it, otherwise, even if the story is true, it can't be verified and so should be taken with a large pinch of salt.
I've had dealers spin a complete load of bollocks about some pieces they were desperate to offload because they'd fallen for a tissue of lies and bought it at a silly price.

All true, of course. I should point out, by the way, that the item in the photo is not the one I saw at the dealers. I bought this one at a car boot, on the off chance that the the story might have been true! Which, I guess, might prove that it wasn't true!