Clay (Clay Pipe Makers)

Clay is a shared heading, not for a single brand, but for the workshops and factories that make clay pipes. The craft of the clay pipe established independent centers across many European countries over three centuries, and each center developed its own repertoire of molds and its own stamping tradition. This entry treats those centers, and the manufacturers whose names are on record, together.

A Distinction of Quality

What determines a clay pipe's quality is less the raw material used than how the paste is prepared. In workshop production, fine white pipe clay is first pounded at length to drive out all the air inside it; before each body goes into the mold it is hand-rolled into a wick, the smoke channel is pierced with a fine wire, and firing is likewise carried out with the temperature closely tracked. The traditional product is left unglazed.

Set against this labor-intensive method is the porcelain technique, based on pouring liquid slip into a mold. Pipes made this cheap-to-multiply way remain porous and mix their own taste into the smoke; the community mostly does not count these as true clay pipes. It is exactly here that a well-made clay pipe stakes its real claim: the chamber adds nothing to the tobacco. On the other hand, because the clay body heats up far more than other materials, these pipes are considered hard to smoke; today they are seen mostly in the hands of enthusiasts and historical-reenactment groups.

Clay pipes carry another legacy too, an archaeological one. Having been treated for centuries as disposable and discarded after use, broken stems and bowl fragments turn up in abundance in excavation layers; industrial archaeology uses these fragments as a reliable measure for dating strata.

England and France

In England, the emblematic site of the craft is the town of Broseley in Shropshire; records indicate pipe-making took root there at the start of the 17th century, and the town remained the country's foremost production center for centuries. The last of the local factories, Broseley Pipeworks, is said to have closed in the late 1950s after its owner's death, its equipment preserved intact and turned into a museum. Within the same tradition, manufactories such as John Armstrong & Sons and Pollock are noted. Among the names carrying the craft into the present are Rex Key, who works with old molds in Broseley, Eric G. Ayto, who produced from 1972 until his retirement, and also David J. Cooper and Heather Coleman.

In France, the center is the manufactory Jean Gambier founded after settling in Givet in 1780; he began by making pieces resembling Dutch clay pipes. The Gambier name became known through the 19th century for figural bowls depicting notable figures and stock characters of the day; records indicate the workshops employed around six hundred people by 1868, and the 1894 catalog listed more than sixteen hundred models. Production began to decline after 1870, and the company was liquidated in 1928. Around Marseille, Alphonse Hippolyte Bonnaud, in Rennes Crètal-Gallard, and in Montereau Dutel-Giscolon are other names within the same tradition.

Other Centers

In Germany, production was concentrated in the Westerwald region, known for its pottery: Müllenbach & Thewald, founded in Höhr in 1830 as J. W. & C. and ceasing pipe production in 1972, along with Lothar Hein and Jens Steuler in Hilgert, are the leading names of this region. In the Netherlands, Goedewaagen carries on the Gouda tradition. In Catalonia there are the workshops of Juan Castellà, working around Palamós in the 17th-19th centuries, and Creu Retinyola in Palafrugell. In Canada, the 19th-century factories of the Bell family in Quebec and Henderson & Lovelace in Montreal are on record, and in the United States, the Robert Bannerman manufactory, which operated in New York state between 1875 and 1884.

The pipes originating from Selmec, Hungary, stand apart from this picture: with their short, shankless shapes, they resemble the Turkish lüle pipes that passed from the East into Europe far more than the English clay pipe. The same thread continues in Istanbul's Tophane lüle-carving tradition, and in the work of contemporary makers such as Russia's Vladimir Ershov, tied to Asia Minor shapes. The long-stemmed churchwarden shape, meanwhile, is regarded as the best-known legacy of the English branch; the gap clay left behind was filled by briar at the close of the 19th century.