Tinned Tobacco Dating to the 1970s and 1980s

Tinned tobacco dating to the 1970s and 1980s is the subject of a compilation in which John C. Loring gathered the pipe tobacco tins of these two decades into a single table. The piece carries Loring's byline; its Pipedia version carries a contribution from Yang Forcióri. The work does not describe a dating method; it gives a record of tins held in hand, and reads more like a ledger of evidence than a set of method guides.

Layout of the Table

The record has six columns: maker, brand or blend name, tin type, weight, date, and the number of tins matching that description. Over thirty makers are named across more than two hundred rows, and the total of tins counted exceeds six hundred. By row count, the leading headings are, in order, Dunhill, Rattray's, and Balkan Sobranie.

A five-abbreviation key is given for the tin type column. The great majority of rows are CT: a lid twisted open with a coin (coin twist). Second is PT, opened by pulling a ring (pop top). The rest are a handful of rows: LT, a lever-opened lid (lever top), and ST, a canister without an airtight lid, appear only a few times each, while KL, the knife lid defined in the key, does not appear at all. In some rows, the lid color is also added to the CT entry.

A working assumption is stated at the head of the table: unless noted otherwise, the blend is taken to have been made in England. This is why a country is added next to the maker's name; Lane and Drucquer's are marked "USA," Niemeyer "Netherlands," Gallaher's and Murray's "Northern Ireland," Rattray's and Cotton "Scotland." American shop names carrying no country note, by the table's own rule, are taken as English-made; the blends Robert McConnell prepared for Leavitt & Peirce, located at Harvard Square in Massachusetts, appear across four separate rows.

Special Marks in the Date Column

Dates are given at the scale of a decade, but for two brands the abbreviations carry a meaning independent of the calendar. Production of most Dunhill tobacco blends passed in 1981 to Murray, Sons & Co. in Belfast; to separate the tins right at that break, the table uses the abbreviation "L70s" on Dunhill rows. The abbreviation does not mean the late 1970s but points to 1980 and 1981 specifically; that is, it marks not a decade but the last tins made in London. Murray, founded in Belfast in 1810, sold to Carreras in 1953, and later tied through further mergers to the Rothmans group, is also listed in the table under its own name as a maker.

On Rattray's rows, the distinction is by who prepared the blend. "70s" marks tins the Perth shop blended itself, "70s/80s" marks those made after the blends passed to Robert McConnell. The handover is reported to have taken place around 1980, when the shop closed; because some accounts push the change of hands earlier, the year should not be taken as certain. Since the tin label stayed largely the same across both periods, this note is the only thing that separates them.

Patterns in the Table

How the weight is written is itself taken as a period marker. Nearly all tins dated to the '70s carry weight only in ounces (2 oz, 4 oz). On "L70s" rows, the dual form giving grams and ounces side by side (50 gr / 1.76 oz) dominates. Among those dated to the '80s, tins carrying only grams stand out; ounces alone doesn't vanish entirely but recedes. This shift is the concrete counterpart of the weight-unit criterion listed under dating English tinned tobacco.

Brand histories, too, are reflected indirectly in the table. Sobranie, which gave its name to the Balkan blend, is the third-largest heading by row count; although the brand is known to have passed to Gallaher in the early 1980s, the table records the maker throughout as Balkan Sobranie, showing Gallaher only in a separate cluster of rows with its own Northern Ireland blends. There is a single entry from Türkiye: a tobacco listed with the maker Kabataş, carrying the name "Pipo," in a cylindrical tin, dated to the 1950s. No independent production record supporting this row has been found; even so, it can be counted among the rare traces showing that Tekel pipe tobaccos made their way into a collection compiled abroad.

Its Limits

The table is not a census but the inventory of a collection; it shows not how often a given tin was produced but which tins came into the compiler's hands. Although the title names two decades, rows dated to the 1950s and 1960s have also mixed in among them. The dates, too, are not exact years but ranges given based on the tin type, weight notation, and label detail. The compilation should therefore not be taken as evidence on its own; it works as a comparison table to search against once one has a tin in hand.