Mattner

Mattner is a South African pipe workshop that operated in Johannesburg during the second half of the twentieth century, named after its founder Willi Mattner. Its production never reached factory scale; the brand is known today mostly through pipes circulating on the secondhand market, stamped "MATTNER JOHANNESBURG" on the underside of the bowl.

From Seafaring to Pipe Making

Mattner's remaining in South Africa was less a choice than a consequence of the war. Born in 1914 in the Polish-Russian border region, Willi Mattner left home at fourteen to join the German merchant fleet; when the Second World War broke out he was serving as an engineering officer aboard a ship that happened to be in the port of Durban. The Hamburg-registered ship was seized; the crew was held in internment camps around Pretoria until the war's end. By the time peace came there was no Germany left to return to. Mattner worked for a while in shipbuilding in Durban, where he married and moved to Johannesburg to his wife's family.

He learned the trade in this family's workshop. The shop was known at the time as Samek's Pipe Hospital, and as the name suggests, its main business was repair rather than making new pipes. The person who passed the craft on to him was a carver who had learned the trade at Andreas Bauer's meerschaum pipe workshop in Austria; a Central European craft tradition was thus carried to Johannesburg. The workshop's name later changed to Mattner's Pipe Hospital.

Material and Production

For many years the workshop's bowl material was Corsican briar. The blocks were brought in from suppliers in France, with Mattner doing the selecting himself on regular visits; according to the record, he judged by two criteria: evenness of grain and absence of voids in the block. The phrase "Corsican Briar Supreme," which appears on some pipes, also points to this material preference. Production never became a serial line at any stage; pieces were finished one at a time.

What changed the material regime were the embargoes imposed on South Africa. When briar supply became difficult, Mattner turned to water gourds sourced from the Ladismith area of the Great Karoo region and began making calabash pipes. Almost all of these pipes were in the Sherlock Holmes shape, the settled mold for calabashes. However, the fine dust released while working the gourd caused lasting damage to his eyesight. He then gave up production and, in his final years, ran only repair work from home — returning to the very point where he had begun the trade, as a fixer.

Legacy

During this final period working from home, Mattner met a craftsman named Ebenhart and passed on what he knew; according to the record, Ebenhart later became known as a maker in his own right. Willi Mattner died in Johannesburg in 2005 at the age of ninety-two. The workshop did not continue after him, and the brand withdrew from production.

What remains is a limited number of pipes circulating on the secondhand market and a chain of transmission: running from Austrian-rooted meerschaum craftsmanship to a repair shop in Johannesburg, and from there to Karoo gourds, this line is counted among the most cited links in South Africa's own pipe-making tradition.