Ben Wade

Ben Wade is an English pipe brand founded in Leeds in 1860; yet the name is now most associated with a production period that has nothing to do with its country of origin — the freehand pipes made in Denmark in the 1970s. Having passed through three different owners and three different production setups over a century and a half, two pipes bearing the same name may not resemble each other at all. For this reason Ben Wade should be read not through a single description but through its eras.

A Century in Yorkshire

Benjamin Wade began in the pipe trade and opened his own briar workshop in Leeds sometime in the 1860s. The workshop remained in the same city for more than a century. Pipes from this period were made in classic English shapes, mostly of modest size and from unfilled wood; the brand is therefore counted among the top-tier English producers of its day. Before the war, products were divided into three grades: the top tier was stamped "Ben Wade," the middle line "BW," and the lower line "BWL." The factory was destroyed in air raids on Leeds during the Second World War; the family rebuilt the plant shortly after the war and resumed production where it had left off.

An American Owner and the London Stamp

In 1962 the family sold the business to Herman G. Lane, head of New York-based Lane Limited. Lane had also bought Charatan that same year and focused his attention there; Ben Wade's production was scaled back, and the Leeds factory closed in 1965. This marked the end of pipes stamped "Made in Leeds England."

The machinery moved to London, to Charatan's Prescott Street plant, and from then on the name was used entirely for machine-made mass-production pipes. Products of these years bear the stamp "Made in London England" or simply "London"; with their ready-molded stems and conspicuous fills, the brand is considered to have dropped to a second-tier line in this period. Lane's heirs sold both Charatan and Ben Wade to Dunhill in 1978. Since Dunhill's Walthamstow plant already covered second-tier pipes, the name was shelved once again.

The Danish Era Signed by Preben Holm

The collaboration that built the brand's present-day reputation was born right in the middle of this confusion. Preben Holm was a Copenhagener who, at twenty-two, had risen fast enough to run a workshop of forty-five people; but at the end of 1970, when his American distributor stopped paying him, he fell into serious cash trouble. In February 1971 he met Herman G. Lane in New York, and the resulting agreement was built not on mass production but on hand-carved freehand pipes. Because the old distributor still held unsold Preben Holm stock, releasing the pipes under the maker's own name was seen as risky; the Ben Wade name held by Lane filled this gap.

Pipes carved in Denmark were stamped "Hand Made in Denmark" and distinguished by series names such as Golden Walnut, Golden Tan, Royal Grain, Danish Pride, and Majestic. Lane promoted the brand with full-page ads in major magazines; volumes soon exceeded both sides' expectations. Holm fell into financial trouble again in 1986 and had to let go of most of his staff; production shrank and stopped entirely with the maker's early death in June 1989.

The Name's Latest Chapter

The Ben Wade stamp sat unused for a long time in Dunhill's hands. Records show that in 1998 Peter Wilson, who had worked at the established English workshop Duncan Briars, bought the brand rights and returned the name to the market. These new pipes are made at the Walthamstow plant in London, and are mostly large-bowled, dark-colored, and sandblasted. Even so, what defines the brand's value among collectors remains the Preben Holm-signed Danish-era pipes still circulating in the estate market.