William Bragge's Pipe Drawings: A Scattered Set of Records

William Bragge's pipe drawings are a hand-prepared visual archive documenting, piece by piece, what is considered the most extensive tobacco and pipe collection of the 19th century. Because the collection itself was sold off and dispersed during its owner's lifetime, these drawings have become nearly the only record combining each object's measurements and provenance in one place. Yet the set itself was later split apart as well; today not all twenty boxes are held in a single place.

The Catalogue's Testimony

The most reliable description of the drawings stands in Bragge's own catalogue. Entry no. 409 of Bibliotheca Nicotiana, printed in Birmingham in 1880 in a run of only two hundred copies, describes the collection's illustrated catalogue: the drawings are to scale, all the same size, made on specially prepared paper, and each carries the object's description and history in handwriting. The same entry gives the number of drawings as roughly 1,200 and states they were kept in twenty "book-like" boxes. The preceding entry, no. 408, introduces a separate set: 232 drawings of pipes from the British Museum, Christie's, the India Museum, and the Blackmore collections. Entry no. 407, meanwhile, records a notebook drawing in ink the marks of 260 English and 310 Dutch makers of clay pipes in the collection. Bragge thus recorded not only the objects but also his own method of documenting them.

The Collector

William Bragge (1823–1884) was a civil engineer born in Birmingham. He carried out the gas lighting of Rio de Janeiro and worked on the route survey of Brazil's first railway; in 1858 he was appointed general manager of John Brown & Company in Sheffield, a post he held until 1872. In 1870 he was elected Master Cutler, the highest office of the city's cutlers' guild. He was a member of the Society of Antiquaries, the Royal Geographical Society, and the Anthropological Society. The preface to the 1880 edition of the catalogue says he began collecting tobacco-related objects roughly twenty years earlier. The number of pipes he assembled is given in sources as 13,000.

Bragge regarded the pipe not as an ornament but as an ethnographic document. In his preface he emphasized the spread and antiquity of tobacco use, ranking the Indigenous pipes unearthed from North American mounds by the same standard as Europe's worked meerschaum examples. The tobacco library he built alongside is considered the first specialist bibliography in English.

Dispersal

Records say Bragge lost his eyesight toward the end of his life and put his collection up for sale. In the early 1880s the assemblage was broken up: part of the ethnographic pipes went to the British Museum, and, according to records, part went to Edinburgh; the rest scattered to private buyers. The museum today states it holds more than two thousand objects from Bragge, of which over eighty percent are pipes. The 1,500-volume Cervantes library Bragge had donated to the Birmingham Free Library in 1873 had already been destroyed in the fire of 1879. His tobacco library is reported to have been auctioned in London in 1882; whether the drawing boxes were included in that sale is not known.

The trail of the twenty boxes resurfaces in the 20th century. It is recounted that British antique-pipe collector Trevor Barton met Bragge's great-granddaughter in the early 1970s and acquired part of the boxes remaining in the family; in Barton's own writing, the number of drawings he held is given as 450. In 1974, Louis F. Bantle (1928–2010), chairman of U.S. Tobacco's board since 1973, bought a large portion of Barton's collection along with five boxes, with the idea of founding a pipe museum in Greenwich, Connecticut. The set was thus split for a second time.

Barton had what remained in his hands printed in 1991 as A Portfolio of William Bragge and his Pipes of all Peoples, in a run of twenty-five copies for members of the Académie Internationale de la Pipe; records say the book also includes an engraving of Bragge by Tristram Ellis. After Barton's death, his collection came up for sale at Christie's in London in September 2010, and the sale notice separately mentioned the boxes carrying Bragge's original descriptions and drawings. This branch of pipe literature was thus both multiplied and further fragmented.

The real value of the drawings lay not in showing individual objects but in holding measurement and provenance information together in a single order. As the boxes separated, that order broke down too; those studying pipe history today can reach only the scattered pieces of the set.