Memories of Charatan Pipes and Notes on their Dating

"Memories of Charatan Pipes and Notes on their Dating" is an article published in 1998 in The Pipe Collector, the bulletin of the North American Society of Pipe Collectors (NASPC), that attempts to work out an approximate production date for Charatan pipes from their stamps and stem shapes. Its author, Ivy Ryan, was a pipe smoker who visited the Charatan workshop in London repeatedly from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s; the text draws not on factory records but on memories from those visits and on pipes that passed through the author's hands. It is one of the most frequently cited texts in dating Charatan pipes — and, just as often, one of the most disputed.

The Brand History the Article Relies On

The facts that frame the text are these: Charatan was founded in London by Frederick Charatan, reportedly in 1863; his son Reuben took over the business after his father's retirement, around 1910; and the workshop operated for many years on Prescot Street. The firm's departure from family ownership is dated to the early 1960s: the American importer Lane Limited bought the brand. Sources do not fully agree on either the founding year or the year of the sale; some compilations place the founding in the 1870s and the Lane takeover in 1962-1963. For this reason, both dates should be read as approximate rather than exact.

Later milestones are less disputed. Charatan bought the machinery of the Ben Wade workshop, which closed in 1965, though it never used those machines on Prescot Street. In the late 1970s, Lane Limited came under the Dunhill umbrella; the Prescot Street workshop closed in 1982, and production moved to another Dunhill facility. The brand name's move from Dunhill to J. B. Russell is dated to around 1988; some compilations place the new owner's production in the early 1990s.

Dating Criteria

The article's real contribution is its attempt to fill the gap left by the fact that, unlike Dunhill, Charatan never used a year code. Because the brand offered a lifetime exchange guarantee, it felt no need to mark a pipe with its year. Instead, Ryan suggests looking at the following details:

Marker	Period it indicates, per the article
Pronounced serif on the CP stamp	Before 1955
Lane's ornate "L" on the stem	Pipes sent to the US; postwar to 1988
"FH" (Free Hand) stamp	1940s to around 1958
Lowercase "MADE BY HAND" stamp	1958-1965
Three-line, script "City of London" stamp	Late 1965 to 1979
"D.C" stamp with a number	Late 1970s to 1988

The same article notes that the Double Comfort stem came into use in 1960, and that the "X" mark next to the shape number distinguishes pipes made with an ordinary saddle stem. It also gives a hierarchy of quality grades running from Belvedere up to Supreme, and states that new top grades were added to this hierarchy after 1965. For the general logic of stamp reading, see the pipe stamps and logos entry.

Why It Should Be Read with Caution

When republishing the text, Pipedia added a warning up front: a portion of Charatan collectors find some of the dating information incorrect or misleading. The author herself says she never had access to factory records, and that she was told the pre-war documents had been destroyed in the bombing. The sections of the text dealing with manufacturing methods and briar curing practices are observational accounts; they have not been confirmed by independent records. For this reason the article should be used not as a standalone dating authority, but as a testimony to be weighed against other sources.