Dunhill's Uncommon Shapes: Don, Duke, and Opera

Dunhill's shape repertoire isn't limited to the numbered standard list. In the brand's catalogues and stamps are shapes that never entered the list at all, or appeared for only a few years before disappearing. Among these, the trio that has occupied collectors most is Don, Duke, and Opera; all three look familiar at first glance, but each follows its own rules in the details.

The Fine Line Between Don and Duke

Both shapes are relatives of the poker family: a cylindrical bowl, a flat-sitting base. The distinction knots at the shank. The Don has a real shank, short as it may be, and the mouthpiece sits on it. The Duke has no shank at all: a metal band set into the side face of the bowl does the shank's job, and the mouthpiece attaches directly into that socket. The Duke's mouthpiece is most often two pieces: a thin body with a flared bit at the end; the body is made in some examples of ebonite (vulcanite), in others of bone. This construction lightens the pipe noticeably.

The Duke's bowl leans slightly forward and balances on a flattened heel; the mouthpiece sits right below the bowl's waistline. Records show the shape stamped with the numbers 519, 4144, and 41441, and produced in the Bruyere, Shell, Tanshell, Red Bark, and Root Briar finishes. Its production is said to have begun in the mid-1910s and continued intermittently to the present day. A similar bowl-and-band arrangement turns up under different names at other makers; some shape charts note that Peterson calls the same construction tankard. The entry on the origin of briar pipe shape names gives detail on how shape names shift from one brand to another.

Opera and Quaint Records

The Opera is a small pipe with an oval bowl flattened from the sides. The flat cross-section is no accident: the pipe is sized this way so it won't bulge in the narrow pocket of evening dress; its name, too, comes from the setting where this carrying habit prevailed. According to information passed down from Dunhill's own product management, the shape's trail can be traced back to the fourth edition of the 1922 catalogue About Smoke, which featured three separate flat-bowled Quaint shapes. Records say two of these were straight and one bent, coded in the period's system as FS, FB, and FC respectively. FB was a flat-bodied bulldog; for the classic version of this family, see the entry on the Bulldog and Rhodesian.

In the Dunhill vocabulary, the word Quaint does not name a single shape but covers the entirety of shapes that don't fit the standard shape chart. When the particular structure of a briar block took the maker outside the chart's measures, the resulting pipes were gathered under this heading. The Vest Pocket, from the same family, offers an even flatter silhouette with its oval bowl and a mouthpiece attached at a near-vertical angle.

Why They Get Confused

These three shapes form a closely related cluster along with the Poker, Cherrywood, and Friendly. The place to look for the distinction is always the same: is there a shank, does the band serve as the carrier, is the bowl's cross-section round or oval. The number on the stamp is also a guide; for a rundown of the numbers, see Dunhill shape numbers, and for reading the stamps' years, see Dunhill dating.