Jan Pietenpauw

Jan Pietenpauw is the name under which Jean Christophe du Toit, working in Pretoria, South Africa, signs his pipes. There is no real craftsman behind the name; Pietenpauw is a Dutch carver du Toit invented for his brand, one who never existed at all. The brand was founded in 2009 and continues today as a small father-and-son bench.

The Joke Behind the Name

Du Toit deliberately tells an exaggerated backstory for his fictitious maker: it is said that Pietenpauw first carved Van Hunks's pipe, and then Sherlock Holmes's famous calabash — after which it is pointed out that neither of them, nor Pietenpauw himself, ever actually lived. The promotional copy thus undercuts its own claim. The Van Hunks reference draws on South Africa's best-known pipe story: a retired sailor said to have entered a tobacco-smoking contest with the devil on the slopes of Table Mountain in Cape Town, who in popular imagination is credited as the source of the cloud that covers the mountain's summit. Sherlock Holmes's calabash, meanwhile, is a later addition that emerged not in the novels but in stage adaptations. Neither reference is a claim of historical lineage — both are an openly stated joke.

Workshop and Production

By du Toit's own account, he was born in 1953 and has, since his youth, tried shaping pipes out of whatever material came to hand — plaster, cherry branches, reed; this date has not been confirmed by independent records. He only began working briar in earnest in 2009, a fairly late start. Once his son Pieter joined the bench, pipes began to be stamped "JP and Son"; production is not batch work but pieces finished one at a time.

Surface work uses both plain polish and sandblasting, sometimes combined on the same piece. Stems are hand-cut, shaped from ebonite or acrylic rod. The brand's most-cited detail is its turn to Africa-sourced materials for the bands placed between shank and bowl: South African blackwood, Mozambique ebony, and bamboo are among the materials cited for this purpose. The shape repertoire, however, does not stray from established molds such as the billiard.

Recognition

Among collectors, du Toit is known for a flowing carving line and his use of materials specific to his continent. His actual visibility within the community, however, has come mainly through online forums.

The clearest example of this is the PipeChat forum commissioning a custom pipe from du Toit in 2010. The resulting piece, in the maker's own interpretation, was a Rhodesian shape: a flat-left cap combined with a sandblasted bowl and shank, an extension added to the shank end creating a ring effect, and cumberland (mottled ebonite) chosen for the stem. On the flat underside of the shank, the forum's name, the brand name, and the year were stamped together. Working in a country far from the traditional centers of briar pipe craft, Jan Pietenpauw is counted among South Africa's few independent benches.