J. B. Priestley: Novelist and Pipe Enthusiast

J. B. Priestley (John Boynton Priestley, 1894-1984) was one of the most prolific names in twentieth-century English literature and a writer who made the pipe an inseparable part of his public image. He was born in the Manningham district of Bradford and reached a wide readership through novels, plays, essays, and radio broadcasts. The Good Companions (1929), English Journey (1934), and An Inspector Calls (1945) are his most frequently cited works. His Postscript broadcasts on the BBC during the Second World War made him a nationally recognized voice. That most of his photographs show a pipe in his hand or mouth is no coincidence: for Priestley, tobacco was not merely a habit but also a subject to write about.

An Essayist Who Wrote About Tobacco

Many writers smoke a pipe; few write about the pipe itself. Priestley belongs to this second, smaller group. In the section devoted to tobacco within his essay collection Delight (1949), he writes that he took up smoking in 1910 with a cheap Cavendish cut; the same section laments that tobacconism ceased to be a craft during the First World War and became an ordinary retail trade. Rain Upon Godshill (1939) and The Moments and Other Pieces (1966) also contain pages devoted to tobacco. His 1966 essay "Tobacco" was reprinted in the 2016 collection Grumbling at Large.

Priestley's habits differed from those of the smoker loyal to a single blend for life. In several pieces he describes never settling on one brand and always continuing to try whatever new mixtures came his way; names such as Virginia, Latakia, and Perique come up frequently in his experiments. He is said to have smoked a pipe for more than sixty years.

The Pipe and Public Image

In twentieth-century England, the pipe had become synonymous with the sensible, measured male figure; Priestley is considered literature's counterpart to that image. Matthew Hilton, who has written the history of tobacco culture, notes that the same symbol was deliberately adopted by politicians from Stanley Baldwin to Harold Wilson as well. According to Hilton, Priestley was concerned that the briar pipe was losing this cultural standing in the years when debates over cigarettes and health became widespread.

Award and Archive

The award launched in 1965 as "Pipeman of the Year" by the Briar Pipe Trade Association, and presented in later years by the British Pipesmokers' Council each January at the Savoy Hotel in London, was given to Priestley in 1979. The same award ended in 2004 because of restrictions imposed on tobacco promotion. The writer accepted the Order of Merit in 1977, having earlier declined a life peerage offered to him in 1965 and the Companion of Honour in 1969. He died at his home in Warwickshire on August 14, 1984, at the age of eighty-nine.

Today, the J. B. Priestley Archive in the University of Bradford's Special Collections department preserves more than seventy of the writer's pipes together with his tobacco tins, pouches, matches, and the holder he used for his pipes in daily use. For this reason Priestley is among the famous pipe smokers whose habit has been most extensively documented, both in writing and through surviving objects.