Among the Pipemen

As a boy I owned, and kept in a drawer containing my personal treasures, a pamphlet entitled Pipes and Pipemen. On the cover was a drawing of a bouffant-haired man (this was the mid-Seventies) puffing on a pipe with eyes half-closed in rapture. Inside was some purple stuff about ‘the pleasures of the briar’, followed by a list of all the men who’d won the Pipe Smoker of the Year award. I knew some of these men, and their pipes, from watching children’s television. There was the bucolic broadcaster Jack Hargreaves (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1969), who was apparently a very important player at Southern Television, but who was always dressed as though about to go fly-fishing. When, as a panellist on the programme How!, it was his turn to explain some scientific curiosity to his audience of eight- to fourteen-year-olds, there would be a good few seconds of preliminary pipe-puffing – very relaxing for Jack, but very tense-making for us children as we fretted: ‘Is he ever going to take that thing out of his mouth and begin?’

Then there was the cricketer and professional Yorkshireman Fred Trueman (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1974), who fronted a teatime programme called Indoor League. Trueman presented this show – a children’s programme, I repeat – from a pub, while drinking a pint of beer and smoking a pipe, and the opening shot showed him doing these things in profile, apparently perfectly content, so that when he turned and faced the camera (in order to introduce games of darts, shove ha’penny and pub skittles), he did so with an air of great magnanimity or, indeed, martyrdom.

My Uncle Sid smoked a pipe. He maximized the soothing, ritualistic aspects of the process in that he not only wielded the pipe cleaners, the various prodding instruments of a pipe tool and the weathered, old-faithful tobacco pouch, but he also rubbed his own tobacco, which came out of the tin solid, like a little piece of card. When these preliminaries were complete, and the flame was lowered on to the tobacco, there was what seemed like a crisis (not that Uncle Sid was remotely unsettled) as he discharged great clouds of smoke in the opening moments of combustion. This, to me, was as time-hallowed, as wholly masculine and right, as seeing a steam locomotive getting going. And in fact Uncle Sid was a train driver, and it was the contrast between his man of action persona – he was also a keen gardener – and the state he fell into with the pipe properly lit that I found particularly attractive. When Uncle Sid’s pipe was up and running, so to speak, then the smoke streams issuing from him were almost invisible, and he seemed to exist in a different dimension. He might be referred to by those present (especially, and in rather aggrieved tones, by his own wife), but he hardly ever participated in the conversation himself. Well, he didn’t need to: he had his pipe.

On those occasions when my father took me into pubs, I would focus on the Uncle Sid types, with their pipes in their mouths and their pipe paraphernalia on the table before them, forming a barricade between them and the outside world. The pipe was so obviously the priority with these men that I would wonder how those in their company could put up with being marginalized in that way. But I was on the side of the pipemen. Objectively, you might say they were under-weaned, but to me their pipes symbolized maturity and achievement. Pipes were not dashing or rakish, as cigars were in the nineteenth century and cigarettes in the twentieth; they were for men who’d graduated beyond trying to be ‘cool’, and I admired that, perhaps because I stood on the foothills of trying to be cool myself, and I knew it was going to be a hard slog.

I wanted, some day, to escape into the dreamworld the pipe smokers inhabited. I wanted the sure, steadfast companionship of a pipe (as I believe my pamphlet had it). That would solve the problem of what luxury I would select when invited on to the radio programme Desert Island Discs. ‘I would like my pipe, if I may, Roy... [the presenter was Roy Plomley in those days]. Or might I be cheeky and ask for my whole collection of pipes?’ I would one day feature on the programme, perhaps for my achievements in farming, since I wanted to be a farmer. I also aspired to be a Pipe Smoker of the Year. My only reservation about pipe smoking was that, since you didn’t inhale, it carried a taint of cowardice compared with cigarette smoking. But I felt that, having paid my dues with a couple of decades of cigarette smoking, I would be entitled (if still alive) to graduate to the more tranquil realm of the pipe.