The Fake Dunhills of the 1980s

The fake Dunhills of the 1980s are a small group of pipes made in England in the early 1980s and passed off to American collecting circles as early, rare finds. The problem was not the material or the workmanship: most of these pipes were made from genuine Dunhill briar, by hands trained at Dunhill itself. What was false was the writing stamped on the shank; the marks made the pipe look decades older than it was, and like a rare shape hard to match in the catalogue. The affair is considered the most talked-about forgery case in briar pipe collecting.

How the Opportunity Arose

When Dunhill acquired Lane Limited in 1976, the Charatan pipe line came under the same roof. In the early 1980s Dunhill pipe production was consolidated into a single facility; Charatan production moved to Walthamstow in 1982, and a number of skilled workers lost their jobs. People were not the only thing that left the facility: hand tools, stamping sets, raw briar, and boxes of bowls set aside and left unfinished during quality culling also made their way out unsupervised. In these same years, Bill Ashton-Taylor, who had trained at the Dunhill factory, made his own brand Ashton's first pipe in 1983.

In America, meanwhile, collecting used briar pipes had emerged as a new pastime; shows, mailing lists, and phone calls formed its early framework. The most sought-after pieces were large, early Dunhills. The field's body of knowledge, however, was quite thin: early catalogues were hard to come by, oversized examples were poorly recognized, and misconceptions circulated — such as the belief that the letters in the ODA stamp indicated countries. This lack of benchmarks left wide room for forgery.

1983–1984: Coming to Light

One of the first suspicious examples surfaced in 1983: a genuine early-1920s Dunhill bearing the LC shape letter. Its sandblast was worn, its stem damaged; the stem had been shortened, the mouthpiece socket re-bored, the body re-stained, and the pipe stamped with the exceedingly rare letters "LLC."

The following year, a well-known collector opened a display of thirty pipes at one of America's major pipe shows; sources don't name the show. The display featured large Shells (Dunhill's sandblasted-surface line) bearing shape numbers never before recorded, unsmoked ODA examples, and two Canadians reaching nine inches. The display won an award, with a Shell Canadian named best in show. In fact nearly all of the pieces were fake. Once the forgery was discovered, the collector who had staged the display withdrew from the scene; some of those who had been fooled destroyed the pipes they owned, and some gave up collecting altogether. Sources do not name who actually made the pipes. John C. Loring, who studied the matter for years and published a reference work on the Dunhill briar pipe in 1998, estimates the number at somewhere between fifty and seventy-five.

Criteria for Telling Them Apart

As collections were dispersed, these pipes began to resurface and, on occasion, be passed off as genuine again. Loring's compiled warning signs are as follows:

• Stamp layout: The Dunhill lettering was struck with block sets changed yearly for the date code and applied in a single stroke. A hand-added date code, wrong typeface, crooked line, or the total absence of "MADE IN ENGLAND" alongside the patent block is cause for suspicion.

• Shape letters: Codes with no catalogue match are a red flag. Dunhill did issue a few large "H"-prefixed shapes in the early 1980s, but these always carry a date code from the mid-1970s or later.

• Consistency with period: An oversized pipe carrying an early-1980s design sensibility being dated to the 1930s is, on its own, grounds for suspicion. During the Blitz (7 September 1940 – 16 May 1941), both briar supply and production capacity were constrained; oversized pipes dated to that period never fit at all.

• Sandblast character: The shallow, regular sandblast of the 1980s is distinct from the deep, rugged texture of the 1920s and the first half of the 1950s.

• Wall thickness and flaws: A thick bowl wall near the rim is not typical of early Shells. A sand pit, a concealed crack, or a shaved rim points to a bowl that the factory had rejected being finished off-site.

• White dot and condition: A dot that appears oval under magnification indicates the mouthpiece was not factory work; an early-dated pipe showing no wear at all is also cause for question.

• Provenance: Being able to trace who a pipe passed from and to whom is the most practical of these criteria.

Aftermath

Loring argued that once a pipe was confirmed to be fake, an X should be scored across the "D" in the "DUNHILL" stamp on its shank. The suggestion did not gain wide acceptance; most collectors preferred to keep the pipe as it was and disclose its status openly when it changed hands.