Oom Paul: The Name and Origin of a Pipe Shape

Oom Paul is a full-bent pipe shape with a cylindrical bowl and a shank that curves up almost vertically, with the mouthpiece tip ending roughly level with the rim of the bowl. The body is usually large and the mouthpiece thick; when the pipe is set down, the bowl stands upright. The name comes from a South African statesman, but where the shape originated and why it also carries a second name remain disputed. For other members of the classic repertoire, see classic pipe shapes.

The Man Behind the Name

Stephanus Johannes Paulus Kruger (1825-1904) was head of state of the South African Republic (Transvaal), known by the Afrikaans nickname "Oom Paul," meaning "Uncle Paul." He took office on May 9, 1883. When the course of the Second Boer War turned against the Boers, he left Transvaal by train on September 11, 1900, and after waiting at port for about a month, managed to cross to Europe aboard a Dutch warship on October 20, 1900; he spent the rest of his life in exile, his final months in the Swiss village of Clarens, where he died on July 14, 1904. Newspapers and memoirs of the period describe him as rarely seen without his pipe. Vanity Fair's caricature titled "Oom Paul," dated March 8, 1900, portrays him just this way: black frock coat and top hat, a closed umbrella in one hand, an open book in the other, a bent pipe smoking in his mouth.

A Shape That Became a Symbol of the War

The visual memory left by the Second Boer War (1899-1902) played a large part in attaching this name to the shape. During the war years, a significant share of the factory-made briar pipes sent to the front from Britain were of this bent form, and their large bowls proved well suited to carving; soldiers and prisoners of war engraved regimental crests, battle names, dates, and their own names into these surfaces. A piece in the Australian War Memorial collection sums up the situation well: a briar pipe made by a Boer prisoner of war between 1899 and 1902, catalogued directly as an "Oom Paul type" pipe, bears the coat of arms of the South African Republic in relief, with the name and date of the war engraved around it. Similar examples turn up in many collections, from the Anglo-Boer War Museum in Bloemfontein to the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa. Soldiers are reported to have called these pipes "Kruger pipes."

Oom Paul or Hungarian?

The same shape appears in many catalogs under the name "Hungarian." Whether the two terms should be treated as synonyms has long been debated within the community. One view holds that they are two distinct shapes, differing in the bowl: the Oom Paul's is cylindrical, the Hungarian's egg-shaped. In common usage, however, the two names are used interchangeably.

The most widely circulated explanation is political: it is said that British manufacturers, unwilling to carry in their catalogs a model named after Britain's chief adversary in the war, switched to the "Hungarian" label instead. No period catalog has yet been produced to confirm this story, however; moreover, in the Dunhill ODA 800 series that entered catalogs in the 1950s, shape number 818 is listed as an Oom Paul. A second explanation ties the shape to Central Europe. In the centuries before briar, Hungary was one of the centers of wooden and clay pipe manufacture; it has been suggested that three native bent forms recorded in Hungarian pipe literature—Kalmasch, Debrecen, and Rákóczi—may have inspired the workshops of Saint-Claude. It is also reported that the French adjective "hongroise" was used in Saint-Claude to name a particular bowl shape. On Saint-Claude's rise in briar manufacture, see The Briar Revolution.

Place in the Catalogs

Peterson records show that the shape predates the naming dispute: the model known today as the Oom Paul, shape 02, appears in the 1896 catalog as one member of the straight-sided billiard group. In 1898, Kruger's friends ordered a large example with the Transvaal coat of arms engraved on the bowl for his birthday. The same shape family branched out with the 02B in 1906, the 02BB entered the chart around 1940, and after dropping out of catalogs for a time, the 02 reappeared under the name XL02 in US shape charts of the 1970s. For the broader framework of how shape names were settled, see The Origin of Briar Pipe Shape Names.