British Pipemaking (Great Britain)

Britain is one of the select countries that shaped pipemaking in both its clay and its briar phases. The clay pipe workshops founded after tobacco reached the island supplied the European market for centuries, and the briar workshops that gathered around London in the second half of the 19th century gave rise to a distinct approach to shape and craftsmanship known as the "English pipe."

The Clay Pipe Centuries

The product of the first phase was the clay pipe. Shaped in a mold and fired, these cheap pipes remained, until the spread of cheap cigarettes at the end of the 19th century, almost the sole smoking implement in Europe. Production was organized early on: in 1619 the pipemakers of Westminster were formed into a body by royal charter, and within a few decades this structure was folded into London's livery-company system. Outside London, the town of Broseley in Shropshire became the best-known provincial center, with production reportedly beginning at the end of the 16th century; the practice of date-stamping pipes by makers there in the last quarter of the 17th century remains one of the anchors of archaeological dating today. The town's last clay pipe factory ceased production at the end of the 1950s, and the building reopened as a museum in 1996.

The Arrival of Briar and the London Workshops

After the 1850s, briar of Corsican origin reached the island via France and quickly pushed clay into the background. For the background to this shift, see The Briar Revolution and Saint-Claude. The step that set the direction of the trade in Britain was Henri Comoy, of the Saint-Claude-based Comoy family, settling in London in 1879 and opening a small workshop in Seven Dials (today's Cambridge Circus area); Comoy's of London is thus considered the pioneer of briar production in the country. Silversmith Benjamin Barling's Barling, founded in 1812 and known for fitting silver bands and caps to meerschaum pipes, continued for a long time to finish briar bowls turned in France under its own brand; it began working its own bowls in England around 1906. In these same years, Alfred Dunhill, who came from the leather-goods and motoring-accessories trade, began selling pipes under his own name at his Duke Street shop in 1907.

Mergers and the Decline of the Industry

The 20th century was a period of consolidation in which scattered workshops were brought under single roofs. The Oppenheimer group acquired BBB (A. Frankau) in 1920, and within the same decade also bought Loewe & Co. and a significant share of Comoy's. This string of acquisitions led to the founding, in the 1930s, of Cadogan Investments Ltd., a holding company named after its Cadogan Square address in London. Names such as GBD, Civic, Dr. Plumb, and Sina came under the same umbrella over time. With Orlik's acquisition in 1980, the group consolidated production in a single factory purpose-built for pipemaking near Southend-on-Sea.

The market's contraction with the rise of the cigarette led many storied names to close or change hands after the war. Even so, the country's production tradition was not entirely cut off: alongside corporate manufacturers such as Dunhill (White Spot), a limited number of independent workshops continue to carry on English craftsmanship.