Among the Pipemen

I am forty-six now, and it would be age-appropriate for me to start smoking a pipe, especially since I’ve been limbering up with cigarettes and cigars for years. But I can’t be Pipe Smoker of the Year, since the award has fallen foul of the ban on promoting smoking. It was given for the last time in 2004, when it was won by somebody from the tobacco industry that no layman has heard of. The last celebrity winner was Stephen Fry, in 2003. Fry is a genuine pipe smoker all right, and he sometimes goes so far as to appear on television with a pipe in his mouth, although of course it remains unlit.

Since the ban on smoking in public places, the pipe smokers that I used to see inside pubs are now outside pubs, often standing in the rain. But such is the sanguine nature of the pipe smoker that their feathers seem to have been only slightly ruffled and they appear to be keeping up with the times. I saw one dandyish figure outside the Swan hotel in Southwold, Suffolk, who was puffing on a great saxophone of a pipe (a Sherlock Holmes) while frowning over his BlackBerry. He was only in his thirties, too, so new blood is apparently coming through. I approached another man, of similar age, who was smoking a pipe outside the Gatehouse pub in Highgate in London. Why a pipe? I asked him. ‘Well,’ he eventually drawled, because he had the fascinating latency of all pipemen, even at ten o’clock on a freezing night, ‘I saw some good-quality ones for sale on eBay, and I think it’s more interesting than a cigarette… Safer, too.’

‘With cigarettes,’ an assistant at the tobacconists J.J. Fox of St James’s Street airily pronounced when I visited the shop, ‘I suppose it’s the lungs.’ (Yes, I thought, that would be the problem, along with numerous other organs.) ‘Whereas with a pipe,’ he continued, ‘you don’t inhale.’ He said that because the smoking of cigarettes had been so demonized, a steady trickle of smokers were taking to pipes as a more civilized and safer alternative. But this trickle of aspirational cigarette smokers has always existed and, from pipe tobacco duty figures he’d seen, he reckoned that the number of pipe smokers in Britain was down to ‘just over two hundred thousand’.

I told him that I was proposing to join their number, but he didn’t exactly clasp my hand in enthusiastic welcome. Instead, he gestured to one side of the plush, library-like premises, towards a display of pipes covering an entire wall. Intimidated, I asked him to pick one for me – a cheap one, since some cost hundreds of pounds. The one he chose was basically straight-stemmed but with a slight curvature ‘to break the tension’, or to take the weight off the teeth. It cost thirty pounds and was called a Billiard. This struck me as a beautiful name, but then the names of all types of pipe are redolent of seasoned soundness: Apple, Saddle Horn, Bulldog, Liverpool, Dublin, Prince. I asked the assistant to recommend a tobacco and he picked out Kentucky Nougat: ‘It’s light, won’t burn your tongue, and it’s got a Madagascan vanilla running through it.’ Overwhelmed by the exoticism, I agreed. I was thinking of going for the full ‘Uncle Sid’, namely: tobacco pouch, pipe tool and lighter, but the assistant advised, ‘Wait and see if you like it first.’ This man, although polite, could certainly not be accused of promoting smoking. When I asked for some tips on pipe-smoking technique, he referred me to the Internet. He did, however, offer me the address of the Pipe Club of London which, he said, had formerly been one of dozens of pipe-smoking clubs operating under the auspices of a parent body, the Pipe Club of Great Britain. But the parent is now dead and only about half a dozen of its offspring remain.

Any account of contemporary pipe smoking must be replete with such diminuendos. J.J. Fox, for instance, is one of only a handful of tobacconists left in central London, where before there’d been about forty. Holding open the door of Fox’s for me, the assistant said, ‘I used to service J.B. Priestley at Wix’s on Piccadilly – next to the naughty cinema. It’s a tourist shop now. He was a grumpy old bastard.’ Priestley (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1979) smoked several pipes while lying in a hot bath every morning. ‘Like many of my idle, daydreaming, egotistical tribe,’ he wrote, ‘I am a heavy pipe smoker.’ (He was speaking of writers, at a time when a pipe was a literary prop second only to the pen.)

The Pipe Club of Great Britain was founded in 1969, the Pipe Club of London in 1970. Back then, one man in seven smoked a pipe. Actually, this is another diminuendo since, at the beginning of the twentieth century, four-fifths of the tobacco smoked in Britain had been smoked in a pipe, but one in seven was a healthy enough figure, if healthy is quite the right word.

In 1970 the government was still a year away from discreetly printing on tobacco products: WARNING BY HM GOVERNMENT, SMOKING CAN DAMAGE YOUR HEALTH, though the link between smoking and lung cancer had been officially accepted as far back as 1955. Then again, the prime minister during the first half of 1970 was Harold Wilson (Pipe Smoker of the Year 1976), who paraded his pipe smoking, knowing that it indicated reliability and industriousness. In his excellent Faber Book of Smoking, James Walton quotes George Gissing: ‘A pipe for the hour of work; a cigarette for the hour of conception; a cigar for the hour of vacuity.’ (The contrast with Priestley’s remarks above is instructive. Pipe smokers see themselves as both practically competent and philosophical. They keep their heads when all about them are losing theirs. Two pipe smokers, quite independently, offered me the following homily: ‘If you go into an office and you want something done, look for the chap smoking a pipe’ – an option that is unfortunately no longer available.)

In private, Wilson smoked a more plutocratic cigar. But he scored a smoking ‘full house’ in that he recommended the bookending of a pipe-smoking session by the smoking of two cigarettes. These would point up the superior flavour of the pipe. He can be seen advocating this in footage on YouTube which is entitled Harold Wilson, Pipesmoker Extraordinaire, even though his pipe appears to go out about half a dozen times during the five-minute clip. Evidently, the mere fact of a man smoking a pipe is now a spectacle in itself.

The history of the Pipe Club of London is documented in the back numbers of the journal Pipe Line (RIP: 1990). In 1970, a pipe-smoking competition was held between the club and Cambridge University Smoking Society. Among the contestants was the BBC Radio 1 DJ Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart (oddly he was never Pipe Smoker of the Year), who ‘achieved the best time of fifty-seven minutes’. A word of explanation here. There’s lately been much righteous anger about tobacco sponsorship of sports events, sport being deemed incompatible with smoking, but for a long time pipe smoking was a sport, of sorts. A skilled pipe smoker can keep a full pipe of tobacco burning for about an hour, although the world record is more like three hours.

On November 10, 1973 – according to Pipe Line – the first, and last, pipe-smoking stand-off between the Pipe Club of London and the Pipe Club of Australia was held. Qantas Airways supplied a radio link, and the London men smoked in the boardroom of Alfred Dunhill, tobacconists, in Jermyn Street, while the Australians smoked in a pub somewhere in Australia (the exact location is not recorded). It was felt at the time that the Australians had the benefit of a more relaxed environment; including the availability of beer and the fact that it was Friday evening their time, as opposed to nine-thirty on Saturday morning in London. Many pipe-smoking competitions have been discontinued owing to the difficulty of finding a venue. And the smoking ban caused membership of the Pipe Club of London to drop from about 600 to about 300, although the figures are rising slowly again.

My first contact with the club was via a long-standing, indeed honorary, member, Mr William Ashton-Taylor, who runs one of the last half-dozen pipe-manufacturing firms in Britain. At one point, Mr Ashton-Taylor, who is in his sixties and somehow has the perfect name for a pipe manufacturer, employed twelve people. But he is now a ‘one-man band’ and makes his pipes in a workshop at the bottom of his garden.

He inhabits a large villa in Essex and, as he served me a mug of tea, I decided he had all the characteristics of a pipe smoker. The plush, silent Jaguar in which he’d collected me from the railway station seemed a pipe smoker’s car par excellence, and Mr Ashton-Taylor was dapper, calm and personable, all of which seemed quite appropriate for a pipeman. He had the hypnotic latency too, as I discovered when he asked to see the pipe I’d bought. He picked it up and took it over to a sidelight in his kitchen, the better to examine it. He turned it over and over, sighing slightly. When he returned it to me, he said, ‘Well, I’d say the person who sold you that did so in good faith. It’s not a bad pipe.’ But the grain of the briar as seen on the bowl did not swirl as densely as he would have liked. ‘They’ve used a filler, you see, so it doesn’t look so good, and there’ll be some loss of heat.’ This was a question of money. The more you spend, the more grain you get.

Mr Ashton-Taylor proposed walking the length of his garden to the workshop but was very concerned that my suede shoes would get wet, which I thought a very pipe-smokerly thing to be concerned about.

In his workshop, I was confronted with the evolution of the briar pipe in all its various stages, ranging from pipes still looking rather tree branch-like, to those half-carved and crudely approximating to the finished article, to the finished articles themselves, in different states of smoothness and refinement. I asked Mr Ashton-Taylor how many pipefuls of tobacco he smoked a day and he replied, ‘Oh, I don’t smoke. Well, maybe a cigar at Christmas.’ A cigar? At Christmas? ‘I just never got the habit,’ he said. So I had to conclude that Mr Ashton-Taylor had all the characteristics of a pipe smoker except that of actually smoking a pipe.

He has made pipes smoked by the above-mentioned Harold Wilson and Stephen Fry, as well as the flautist James Galway and the boxer Henry Cooper (Pipe Smoker of the Year in 1981 and 1984 respectively). His pipes are all handmade from the finest briar, which is not, incidentally, the prickly bush of the wild rose, as found in England, but the Erica arborea, an evergreen shrub of southern Europe – and pipes are carved not from its branches but its roots.

Mr Ashton-Taylor began his working life as a lathe turner at Dunhill. The company taught him ‘how to make pipes from start to finish by hand’, and he suggested that he might display the art by working in the shop windows of various branches of Dunhill. He then struck out on his own. His pipes are now sold to connoisseurs rather than to the casual pipeman – a category that hardly exists, now that the brotherhood of the briar is so small and beleaguered. Most of his customers have many pipes. ‘They’ll come up to one of my stands at a smokers’ event and their wives will be saying to me, “But he’s already got a pipe.” “Yes,” I’ll say, “and he wants another.” ’ His tone had gone rather steely as he recounted that dialogue, but Mr Ashton-Taylor believes he has ‘saved many marriages’ by recommending that the man smoke aromatic tobacco.

After the tour of his workshop, Mr Ashton-Taylor drove me a couple of miles in the Jag to the Thatcher’s Arms in Great Warley, a dark, oak-beamed pub where the Pipe Club of London has found a refuge and a venue for its monthly meetings, having been exiled from a pub in Holborn that ‘didn’t want smokers anywhere near it’ after the ban came in. Were it not for the sight of a chap using a mobile phone in the inglenook, one might almost have thought that clay pipes would be for hire behind the bar, as they would have been in any eighteenth-century coaching inn, the end of the stem being snapped off – in the interests of hygiene – for each successive user. Of course, the pub does not permit smoking inside, and Mr Ashton-Taylor showed me the open-sided wooden smoking booth the landlord had created in the backyard. It bore the insignia of both Ashton-Taylor Pipes and the Pipe Club of London. ‘Not bad, is it?’ said Mr Ashton-Taylor. ‘Thirteen grand the landlord spent on that.’

The club would be convening within it in ten days’ time. Mr Ashton-Taylor urged me attend – ‘This is where all the action happens’ – and I undertook to do so.