Tinned Tobacco Dating to the 1960s and Earlier

Tinned tobacco dating to the 1960s and earlier is a compilation in which John C. Loring gathered the old tobacco tins in his hands into a single table; its Pipedia version carries a contribution from Yang Forcióri. It is the counterpart to the same compiler's list for the 1970s and 1980s, but looks at a different packaging era: the record begins in the interwar years, when the tin's shape had not yet become standardized.

The Table's Scope

The record has six columns: maker, brand or blend name, tin type, weight, date, and number of tins. One hundred twelve rows name up to thirty-eight makers; a few of these are simply different spellings of the same firm, and the total of tins counted comes to one hundred seventy. Although the dates span the 1930s to the late 1960s, the center of gravity is clear: nearly half the rows carry only the note "50s." Unless stated otherwise, the blend is assumed to have been made in England; entries from Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, Jersey, the Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Türkiye, and the USA are marked off by a country note next to the maker's name.

Tin Type and Condition Codes

The key at the head of the table defines six abbreviations: CT, a lid twisted open with a coin (coin twist); PT, a lid pulled off by a ring (pop top); LT, a lever-opened lid (lever top); ST, a cylindrical canister; KL, a lid pried off with a knife (knife lid). RUB, meanwhile, is not a tin type but an additional note flagging a rubber gasket exposed on the lid and expected to have degraded.

The distribution is the reverse of that in the later decades. KL is the most common type, at fifty-three rows; CT appears in forty-five rows, three of them carrying the RUB note. ST appears in five rows, LT in three, PT in two. That the later list is dominated by CT and has no KL at all is the clearest sign of the packaging shift between the two eras.

On KL rows, a second mark is added next to the type abbreviation; this mark records not the date but the current condition of the tin, and rests on a single observation: whether the inner lid has bulged outward. Bulged tins are marked "Ex," and the tobacco inside is considered likely to come out intact when opened; tins showing no bulge are marked "OK" and noted as likely to need re-humidifying. "Bd" marks tins suspected that even humidifying would not help. Intermediate grades are given with the suffixes "OK+" and "OK-"; rows with several tins of the same item are written as, for example, "KL-2Ex,1OK." The compilation thus also records what time has done to the tin itself.

Wartime Packaging

Five rows carry "WWII" in the date column instead of a year range. Four of these stand out in terms of packaging: Dunhill's American Mixture appears in a half-pound and one-pound cardboard box, and two blends listed under Peper's appear in glass jars; neither cardboard nor glass appears anywhere else in the list. The fifth wartime entry, Dunhill's blend No. 10, is in the usual knife-lid tin. The withdrawal of tin from civilian packaging during the war years is a well-documented restriction; the decision taken in the US in 1942 is the most commonly cited example. Whether the cardboard and glass containers are connected to this restriction has not been documented, but it fits the dates noted.

What the Maker List Shows

The headings with the most rows are Gallaher's (twelve), Dunhill (ten), BBB and Carroll's (eight each), and Cotton (six). The ranking itself marks an era: while the later list is carried by Dunhill, Rattray's, and Balkan Sobranie, here the weight sits with Belfast, Dundalk, and Edinburgh houses. Gallaher's, founded in Derry in 1857 and later moved to Belfast; Carroll's, which began in 1824 with a tobacconist's shop in Dundalk and is associated with the Mick McQuaid blend; and Edinburgh's Thomson & Porteous, founded, according to records, in 1854 and closed in 1960, represent a generation of names with no counterpart on today's market.

A change of ownership is not always reflected immediately in the label. On the Escudo row the maker is written as Cope's; but Liverpool's Cope Bros had, according to collector records, passed to Gallaher in 1952, while the row's date is the 1960s–1970s. The weight unit also gives a clue: nearly all the entries are in ounces, and of the four rows written in grams, all four date to the 1960s or later; one of the criteria listed in dating English tinned tobacco is thus borne out in this small sample. There is a single row from Türkiye: a tobacco listed with the maker Kabataş, in a 1 3/4-ounce canister, dated to the 1950s. No independent record beyond this table has been found for this name; even so, the row is one of the rare traces showing that pipe tobaccos produced in Türkiye reached collections abroad.

The table's limit follows from this: the record is not a production census but an inventory of the tins that came into the compiler's hands. The dates, too, are not exact years but ranges given based on the tin type, the weight notation, and the label.