Wimbledon

Wimbledon is one of the pipe brands whose identity is most often confused, purely because of its name. The English name, evoking the tennis tournament, leads many readers to assume the pipes came from London workshops; this is why estate listings so often search for a GBD or Comoy's of London signature. In fact, the overwhelming majority of Wimbledon-stamped pipes in circulation today were made in the United States, at the Dr. Grabow factory in the town of Sparta, North Carolina. Wimbledon is not an independent workshop but one of the secondary brand names of a large mass-production plant.

Starting from the Shank Stamp

The quickest way to tell where a Wimbledon comes from is to look at the shank. Examples carrying the "Made in England" stamp and a tennis-racquet emblem on the mouthpiece are genuinely English-made, but their numbers are very small; they rarely turn up in collectors' hands. Over time, this small group's reputation attached itself to the whole brand, and pipes made in Sparta also came to be assumed English.

The real telltale sign of the American arm is the shape number. The factory built the Wimbledon series by adding a zero to the end of its own catalogue numbers: shape 19 is stamped 190, shape 81 is stamped 810, and shape 69 is stamped 690. A reader who finds a three-digit number ending in zero on the shank can place the pipe directly in the Grabow catalogue. The body shapes, too, are drawn from the factory's regular repertoire; no shape unique to the brand, absent from any other Grabow product, has been sought out. According to accounts, the sandblast texture of the pipes also matches that of the same factory's Commodore series, though this similarity has not been confirmed in an independent source.

The Coupon Period

According to records, American Wimbledons were made from the late 1970s to the first half of the 1990s and were among the items offered by a tobacco brand in exchange for coupons. This information rests on a single researcher's record and carries no claim of certainty; even so, the generally simple workmanship of the examples found on the market fits this period.

The Diamond Emblem and the Briarcraft Confusion

The second major misidentification concerning the brand arises from the emblem on the mouthpiece. Briarcraft's Smokemaster pipes were stamped with a B set inside the outline of a wide diamond. After the rights to the Smokemaster name passed to Dr. Grabow, the factory launched its own Smokemaster series; this time the diamond was not a stamped outline but a solid-colored plastic piece embedded in the mouthpiece.

The same wide diamond, said to have been used in white, appears in the Wimbledon series as well. Because the shape is shared, Wimbledons — just like the Grabow-made Smokemasters — are frequently advertised as Briarcraft. In the end, what determines the brand's identity is not the emblem's silhouette but the shank stamp and the shape number ending in zero.