Winslow (Poul Winsløw)

Winslow is the workshop bearing the name of Danish pipe maker Poul Winsløw, working in Hvidovre, one of Copenhagen's southern suburbs. Winsløw's work belongs to the freehand wing of Danish School design; what sets the brand apart from other names of the same generation is not so much the search for form in the body as the richness of color and inlay used on the surface and shank.

Training at the Holm Workshop

Winsløw's introduction to pipes came at a factory door. He applied when Preben Holm's workshop in Copenhagen was looking for an apprentice, and was taken on at just seventeen; sources place this start in the late 1960s. He rose quickly through the production line, and by age twenty-two was foreman of a staff of forty-five. In the autobiography Holm wrote in 1983, when he speaks with praise of the journeyman he took on as practically a child and trained himself, it is Winsløw he means. That a third of his salary kept being paid throughout his military service is cited as further proof of this regard; the aim was to make sure he would return to the bench after discharge. When American interest in freehand pipes waned and Holm's illness worsened, the factory disbanded its staff in 1985; Winsløw was among those who lost their jobs.

His Own Workshop in Hvidovre

This closure forced a decision that had long been put off. In 1985, Winsløw converted the outbuilding of his home in Hvidovre, a southern Copenhagen suburb, into a small but orderly production site and began working under his own name. The early years were difficult. During this period he attended foreign trade fairs together with Stanwell, the country's largest pipe factory, finishing half-made pipes in front of visitors at the booth. This arrangement, aimed at gaining recognition in the trade rather than selling his own product, helped the brand build its first customer network. According to a record from the late 1990s, the workshop, with two assistants, was turning out roughly nine hundred pipes a year.

Color, Inlay, and Material

The first feature setting Winsløw's work apart from his contemporaries is his use of color; a wide staining range running from dark brown to much lighter tones has become the brand's familiar look. The second feature is the inlay on the shank: boxwood, laburnum, acrylic, and silver are materials frequently used in this work. Briar is used for the bodies; records give Corsica as the source of the blocks. Mouthpieces are made of acrylic and, in the upper grades, hand-cut. Including a handmade wooden tamper with every pipe is one of the workshop's established habits.

Stamps, Grades, and Crown

On early pipes, the name is struck either in large block letters or inside an oval frame; in the later stamp, a stylized pipe symbol accompanies small block letters spelling WINSLØW. The silver dot on the mouthpiece also helps with dating: old pipes carry a single dot (rarely three, arranged in a triangle), while newer ones carry two dots, one larger than the other. At the top of the quality ranking, according to records, sits the P.C. (Private Collection) stamp; pipes below it are lettered A through E, with A the best.

Alongside the main line, a second series called Crown is run. Crown pipes are made from blocks with sparser grain among those reaching the workshop, and are finished with a pre-shaped acrylic mouthpiece rather than a hand-cut one. Crown 200, Crown 300, Crown Collector, and Crown Viking are the known names in this series. As the workshop states, Crown is not a second-quality sorting of the main line but an independent series built with its own criteria.