Samuel McLardy

Samuel McLardy is the firm founded in Manchester in the second half of the 19th century that grew into one of the era's largest British clay pipe manufacturers. The company's namesake, Samuel McLardy, was born in Glasgow in 1842, the son of a tobacconist who also made pipes, and learned the trade in his father's shop. In his early twenties he moved to Manchester and set up his own business, and records show he adopted 1865 as the founding year.

From Miller Street to Shudehill

The firm's first address was 16 Miller Street in Manchester; what began as a small workshop reached factory scale before 1880. Moving to 67 Shudehill in 1890, the business continued to operate there for a stretch reaching well into the 1910s. The company's address in its final years was, as far as can be gathered from its liquidation record, 20 Swan Street.

The scale of production gives a good sense of the clay pipe industry's golden age. Around 1895 the factory reportedly held more than five hundred molds, and it was noted that, used efficiently, these molds could produce as many as five million pipes a year. This figure is comparable to the capacity of the large Dutch manufacturers of Gouda in the same years.

Product Range and Stamps

Period manufacturer catalogs display numerous McLardy-signed clay models; the firm's more than five hundred molds meant a wide variety in bowl shape and shank length. Though clay was the main line of business, production was not limited to it: silver-mounted calabash pipes also carried the firm's name. In one known example, the hallmarks on the silver band show the Birmingham assay office and the date letter for 1907; in such pipes the bowl was traditionally lined with meerschaum.

As a manufacturer's mark, the letters "S Mc L" set within a triangular cartouche were used. Because British hallmarks appear alongside this mark on the silver-mounted examples, such pieces can be dated to the year. For how British industrial and trade records are used in pipe research, see the Grace's Guide entry.

Decline and Liquidation

As briar increasingly displaced the clay pipe at the start of the twentieth century, McLardy too was forced to change direction. To offset falling revenue the product range was expanded beyond pipes, and over time the firm came to resemble a trading house more than a manufacturer. The market squeezed by the First World War, the fading interest in the clay pipe, and the financial shock following the 1929 stock market crash left the business unable to stay afloat.

The official record of the end appears in The London Gazette: an extraordinary general meeting held on 13 January 1930 at 20 Swan Street in Manchester resolved on the company's voluntary liquidation and appointed a liquidator. Sixty-five years of manufacturing history thus came to a close. Today the McLardy name is remembered, through stamped stem fragments found in collections and archaeological digs, as one of the names documenting the last great era of the British clay pipe industry.