Among the Pipemen

I realized that, in order to hold my own in that booth, the epicentre of British pipe smokership, I had better work on my smoking technique. But where to light up? Certainly, I was banned from smoking in my own home. So I found myself, pipe in hand, in a wooden shelter overlooking the sea at Southwold, where we have a weekend bolt-hole. The shelter was open at the front and the sides, and so was more outdoors than indoors, and there was a nasty crosswind that threatened to affect my loading of the pipe with tobacco, let alone the lighting of it.

I took the tobacco and put it, half gently, half firmly, into the bowl. I was trying to follow the maxim quoted by Georges Herment, hero of the French Resistance, jazz enthusiast and author of the classic pipe smoker’s apologia, The Pipe (1954): ‘Fill your pipe firstly with a child’s hand, then a woman’s, then a man’s.’ Easier said than done of course, but the aim is to have the tobacco loose at the bottom of the bowl, to facilitate an easy draw, then more tightly packed above, so as to prevent the overheating that results from too easy a draw.

The loading completed, I reached self-consciously for my matches. Two birdwatchers sat ten feet along from me in the shelter. Muffled in thick coats, they looked out to sea through binoculars. The first of the pair was more upbeat, or possibly naive, than the other. ‘Wader at twelve o’clock,’ he said, as I lowered my match into the tobacco. ‘Right,’ the second man unenthusiastically replied, as the tobacco failed to take. (Not to worry. I had read that the first match seldom does the job.) I introduced a second match as the first birdwatcher suggested, ‘Might be a bit…long-necked?’ ‘Nah,’ the second man was saying as I puffed at my pipe, alarmed at the great gouts of blue smoke streaming from it and me. ‘Bog standard, that is.’

The pair must often have shared the shelter with pipe smokers, I decided, as I began blowing thinner streams of smoke in a more urbane manner. Southwold is that sort of place. At any rate, they had not so far paid me any attention. My pipe went out again as the second man gloomily enquired, ‘Nothing doing yesterday, I suppose?’ ‘There was a chiffchaff calling all the time,’ the first man brightly offered, as I puffed the thing into life again. I was then vouchsafed a further five minutes of mellow pipe smoking, in which the second man tried to make out that the chiffchaff had in fact been a bullfinch, and as such nothing to write home about. The tobacco had a creamy, moreish savour, wholly superior to any cigarette I had ever tasted. I began to relax. I left the pipe out of my mouth for five seconds…ten… I realized that I did not have to concentrate absolutely on it, but could take it for granted and look out to sea, towards where the optimistic birdwatcher was pointing and saying, ‘Just there, about two o’clock…’

And then my pipe went out. I tried to light it again; it went out again. I tried three more times without success. In annoyance, I bashed it against the bench and the contents of the bowl spilled out. It is permissible to leave a bit of unsmoked tobacco – the dottle – but about half of mine was unsmoked. I kicked in frustration at the mound of baccy and walked out of the shelter. If the two birdwatchers had noticed that today’s pipe smoker was a little less well balanced than the usual sort, they gave no sign of the fact, the first one merely trying to interest the second one in a sighting of ‘about a hundred and fifty starlings and a few skylarks’.

The Thatcher’s Arms, a week later, was a vision of a country pub in the Fifties, only more so. The place was full of men walking about with pipes between their teeth. Except that it was like one of those puzzles: ‘What is missing from this picture?’ The answer: smoke. William Ashton-Taylor was present, at a table of his pipes for sale in velvet-lined cases. He had put on a pinstriped double-breasted suit to be commensurately smart.

I walked into the backyard of the pub to the smoking shelter, which was occupied by eight or nine men. There was perhaps an above-average incidence of facial hair, and of waistcoats. A distinguished-looking, grey-bearded man was puffing on a pipe (well, they were all doing that) and saying, in patrician tones, ‘This is Aylesbury Latikia blend. John’s given me a taste of it and it’s really rather good.’

The speaker was Patrick Brain, a Methodist minister from Walthamstow, known to his flock as ‘the smoking vicar’. As I set about filling my own pipe, the assembly had moved on to the question of throwing old pipes away, which hardly any of them ever did. ‘The only pipe I’ve thrown away,’ said Patrick Brain, gently puffing, ‘was the one I was smoking when my wife told me she was expecting our first child. It was a City Deluxe and the bowl had burned right through. I kept the stem, though,’ he added, after a moment of smoke-filled silence.

My own pipe was now lit, and I found that I didn’t feel particularly anxious about whether it would stay lit. Pipe smokers en masse are no more intimidating or judgemental than they are individually.

I asked the assembly, ‘What is the point of pipe smoking?’

Everyone smoked for a while and then Patrick Brain replied, ‘It’s a revolt against the speed of our daily life… Have you read In Praise of Slow by Carl Honoré?’ I was about to ask whether Honoré talks about pipe smoking specifically in that book (he doesn’t, I subsequently found out) when one of the pipemen interrupted, ‘Somebody should send a copy to Gordon Brown!’ and we were into the question of the public smoking ban, which deprives the current, depleted generation of British pipe smokers of what they see as their birthright: not so much the right to smoke in public places as the right to be detached. None of the previous generation of pipe smokers would have described themselves as being in ‘revolt’ against anything. ‘It’s intolerable,’ said Patrick Brain, ‘it’s an assault on our civil liberties. His sentiments were echoed in between puffs of smoke from around the booth:

‘It’s health fascism…’

‘It’s obesity now…’

‘And it’ll be alcohol next…’

‘You won’t be able to smoke in your own home soon…’

‘You already can’t adopt children…’

The majority of the speakers considered pipes to be more or less harmless. ‘Our problem,’ drawled one of the members, ‘is that what we do gets lumped in with smoking’, meaning pernicious cigarette smoking. He said it used to be the case that you could put down ‘non-smoker’ on a life insurance application if you only smoked pipes. One man present had been weaned off cigarettes and on to pipes by his father, and he’d done the same with his own sons. He indicated two lads in their twenties, the youngest in the club by twenty years, who sat dutifully puffing away alongside him. It is held among many pipe smokers that ‘the only danger is cancer of the mouth, which is very rare’.

I asked whether pipe smokers of today tended to be part of the libertarian right. This suggestion was digested during ten seconds of silent smoking before someone removed his pipe from his lips and said, ‘Let’s start a real row!’ ‘I think Che Guevara smoked a pipe, you know,’ said Patrick Brain, ‘and I know Bertrand Russell did.’ (And then there’s Tony Benn, Pipe Smoker of the Year 1992).

At length the pipes did their sedative work and the pipemen grew philosophical. There had been many previous assaults on Lady Nicotine, after all. Hadn’t King James I tried to ban smoking for a while? We were now joined by one of several female members of the club, the marvellously named, and drolly engaging, Veda Lumber. She carried a couple of pipes in a leather case that I could see would have made the ideal gift for Uncle Sid: a Pipe Companion, it was called. I asked Veda how she came to start smoking pipes. ‘I liked pipes and I liked tobacco,’ she said, somewhat tautologically. ‘You’ve got something left at the end of your smoke and you can watch it age. I was fifteen when I started. My father was a naval type, so he was okay about it. My mother thought it wasn’t womanly.’ But I suspect this was not a big consideration with Veda. She had worked as a schoolteacher and a prisoner custody officer. The group fell to reflecting on the unlikelihood of any criminal smoking a pipe. ‘I don’t know,’ chuckled Patrick Brain, ‘I’ll bet Crippen did.’ ‘Didn’t Albert Pierrepoint say he’d never hung a man who smoked a pipe?’ someone else put in. That made sense, a pipe being a badge of honesty. ‘The only criminal I know who did,’ said Veda, ‘was a fraudster.’

During my conversations in the backyard of the Thatcher’s Arms, my pipe had gone out many times and I was stuck on a personal-best score of about twelve minutes. But I had been paying close attention to the pipe smokership of the club members. They’d puffed at varying speeds according to the state of the tobacco; they’d covered, or half-covered, the bowl with their fingers; and one of them had definitely blown down the stem in answer to some odd circumstance. I was thinking about all of this when parking my car in Mayfair one evening a couple of weeks later. I was feeling vaguely miserable and I had some time to kill; my pipe and tobacco were on the passenger seat of my car.

I would resort to the steadfast companionship of the briar. I loaded the pipe hastily, unselfconsciously, and somehow knew I was on to a winner as I introduced the first match. It immediately made a very promising glow in the bowl; the second match was hardly necessary. It was as though, after a period of wariness, my pipe had warmed to me.

At twenty past eight, I stepped out of my car and began to walk the streets of Mayfair. It was the first time I’d been at large in public with my pipe. I half expected to attract amused glances: Such a young man to be smoking a pipe! But I received no such glances. I looked, for better or for worse, a plausible pipeman, and I felt myself drawn to pipemen’s places: Catholic churches, antiquarian bookshops. Passing one of the latter, I caught sight of my reflection – with pipe in mouth – in the window. It, or I, looked like the opening image of some hoary, but watchable, TV series: Inspector Maigret Investigates.

I walked on, and as I walked, I smoked, and kept on smoking. The church clocks of Mayfair chimed nine. I was smoking still, and it was not until about ten past that I resigned myself to the end of the pipe and tapped it on the top of a pillar box. All that came out was ash. I will never be Pipe Smoker of the Year, but I had become a pipe smoker, surely one of the last recruits to the brethren.