A Siberian Pipe Made of Mammoth Ivory: From the Dunhill Museum to Auction

A pipe carved from mammoth ivory is one of the rare antique pieces whose provenance can be documented from beginning to end. Over roughly a hundred years it traveled a path from the private collection of Alfred Dunhill, founder of Dunhill, through a night of wartime bombing, into a long gap, then into an American collection, and from there to a British auction house. Despite the break in between, the reason it could be identified is simple: the piece had been pictured on the spine of the dust jacket and inside the pages of the 1924 edition of The Pipe Book.

The Piece Itself

The sale record describes the pipe as an Eastern Siberian, Samoyed-made piece. "Samoyed" is a now-abandoned exonym used during the Russian Empire for peoples speaking the northern Samoyedic languages; the Nenets are the largest group within it. The pipe is 31.5 centimeters long and has a bowl that widens toward the mouth, a long octagonal-section shank, a detachable mouthpiece, and a leather carrying strap.

Its material is unusual given where it was made. Studies of ivory carving in Yakutia indicate that mammoth ivory was not extracted and traded commercially until the end of the eighteenth century, and did not become a widely used material even afterward; it was used occasionally for items such as sewing needles, arrowheads, and pipe bowls, and its use was often accompanied by a ceremony asking the animal's forgiveness.

The Night of 1941

Alfred Dunhill's London shop housed a small museum of antique pipes he had assembled himself. Michael Balfour, who wrote the company's centenary history, describes the raid that began on the evening of 16 April 1941 and continued through the night as the heaviest London had seen since the start of the war: in the early hours of 17 April, two parachute mines struck the shop. The section facing Jermyn Street was completely destroyed, while part of the older building on the Duke Street side remained standing. Balfour records that most of the stock and the entire museum were lost. According to accounts based on the firm's own records, the pieces recovered from the wreckage were crated and temporarily set out on the pavement, and it was at that point that some of the antique pipes were taken; no list was kept of which pieces went missing.

The Documented Chain

The pipe's trail resurfaces years later in the United States. Antique pipe collector and writer Ben Rapaport writes that this piece was among a group of pipes he bought in the early 1990s, and that he only recognized its origin two years later, upon comparing it to the book's dust jacket. The pipe passed by trade in the late 1990s to British collector J. Trevor Barton (d. 2008). Known in antiquarian circles as "The Pipe Man," Barton had gathered pipes from around the world over more than half a century. Part of his collection was dispersed in two separate sales at Christie's South Kensington in the autumn of 2010; the remainder stayed with the family and was put up for sale by Sworders in Essex across three separate sessions in the autumn of 2020. The mammoth-ivory pipe was listed as lot 179 in the two-day "Fine Interiors" session of September 2020, its provenance citing both the Alfred Dunhill and Trevor Barton collections, and offered together with a copy of the book.

What proved decisive across the whole chain was not a stamp or a signature but a book printed a hundred years earlier. Establishing a piece's history in this much detail is considered rare within antique pipe collecting; at pipe auctions as well, provenance most often becomes documentable only when it rests on just such a printed record.