A Hypothetical World War II Pipe

A hypothetical World War II pipe is the name given to a dating puzzle raised by John C. Loring, who compiled Dunhill stamps. The puzzle is set up like this: if a pipe carries on its shank only a die used exclusively during the war years, yet at the same time carries a year code that never appears with that die, what does the code date? Loring does not say he has such an example in hand; after laying out the wartime conditions, he suggests that a piece like this could turn up, and that if it did, the code would document not the manufacture but a later repair.

The Uncoded War Stamp

At Dunhill, a stamp is struck not with individual letter punches but with dies cast together as whole words and numbers. This method turns each year's code into a separate job: the dies for the following year's code have to be ordered in advance. The war broke this ordering chain, and starting in 1941 a great many Shells were stamped with a single die carrying no year code at all: "DUNHILL SHELL MADE IN ENGLAND" above, "PATENT No 1341418/20" below. Sources give the year this die fell out of use as anywhere between 1943 and 1945.

Here the absence of a code is not a gap in knowledge but knowledge itself. Because the die belongs only to these few years, the stamp's mere presence places the pipe in the war years on its own; examples that have entered repair-shop records are also assessed within this range. Records suggest a similar reading may apply to certain smooth-finish pipes that carry neither a year code nor the word "INNERTUBE." On the other hand, not every war year passed without a code; Shells dated to 1944, carrying both a year code and a different patent number, are known. The whole family of stamps is the subject of the Dunhill dating guide.

A Ten-Year Gap in the Dunhill Timeline

Behind such a necessity lies a decade in which the brand nearly stopped altogether. In April 1941, during the Blitz bombing, Dunhill's London shop was hit; it is recounted that a significant part of the firm's old records were also lost at that time. This is one of the reasons Dunhill dating relies on the stamp rather than on documents. Distribution of raw materials was put under rationing, and the restrictions did not end with the war but continued into the early 1950s. Because the brand did not put out a regular annual catalogue between 1940 and 1950, the Dunhill chronology jumps almost in a single step from the late 1930s to the early 1950s.

The clearest trace of the restriction shows up in the wood. The Italian briar sought for smooth-finish pipes became unobtainable throughout the war; the Algerian briar the Shell line relied on faced a somewhat less severe shortage. Dunhill's output of the period is both small in number and narrow in range.

A Second Reading of the Year Code

The restrictions also reached mouthpiece material: ebonite (vulcanite) was either rationed or banned outright, so horn mouthpieces are frequently found on pipes of the period. Horn's known weakness is a tendency to crack; its lifespan does not match that of the shank it is mounted on. A pipe carrying a war stamp that today wears an ebonite mouthpiece is, for this reason, expected to have had that mouthpiece replaced later. Independent repair records, however, don't leave the picture entirely one color; some war-stamped pipes are also documented with ebonite mouthpieces.

Loring's inference comes in at this point. A year code that has landed next to an uncoded war die, in his view, marks not the year the bowl was carved but the year it came back to the workshop; the code is a date of maintenance, not of manufacture. The same reading is applied to pipes made before 1922, when the year-code system began, and later repaired: there too, a lone digit gives not the age of the shank but the age of the repair. For a comparison of horn, ebonite, and other options, see the entry on mouthpiece materials.