THE CLAY TOBACCO-PIPE
13
followed rapidly upon Broseley, Bristol, Chester and London in
setting up 'manufactories'. Clay pipes were still being made fifty
years ago in most of these centres. Machines have been designed
to turn out pipes at high speed in mass-production, but, until
recently, hand-moulding was so cheap and expeditious that there
was little to be saved by using complicated machines: each hand-
moulder could make 500 pipes a day. In the mid-nineteenth
century, clay-pipes were priced wholesale at 16 pence a gross; the
retail price was a farthing each7. At the very time when rising
labour costs began to make machines worthwhile, the demand for
clay-pipes fell away. Although in the eighteen-seventies, steam-
driven presses enabled one manufacturer alone to produce 11/2
million pipes a year, declining demand soon set in with rising
'standards of living' and bulk production never spread to the
smaller manufacturers, who closed down in the early nineteen-
hundreds.
In making pipes by hand, a simple two-piece iron mould
receives a pug of wet clay which is opened out with a conical
plunger, to make the bowl. The stem is made by rolling wet clay
round a steel wire, which, projecting into the bowl to which the
stem is affixed with slip, serves to keep open the smoke-passage.
On pipes of all periods it is not unusual to see evidence of hand-
finishing, and many of the older pipes had a good deal of hand-
scraping to produce the final form.
PIPES REPRESENTED IN PAINTINGS AND DRAWINGS
Many seventeenth century paintings of Dutch Inn Interiors,
notably those by Teniers in the second half of the century, show
figures holding clay pipes, and these are usually well-drawn and
confirm the shapes attributed to the period. Woodcuts also some-
times illustrate old pipes, but not all old illustrations can be
relied upon to portray accurately the contemporary forms of the
pipes depicted. The plates at 1 and 2 show 'improbable' shapes
never found in fact.
TOBACCO PIPES AND TRADESMEN'S TOKENS
A sidelight on the established popularity of smoking in the
second half of the seventeenth century is the number of trades-
men's signs which made reference to pipes and smoking. An
Essex tradesman's token issued in 1666 (when copper coinage of
the Realm was not available) shows three tobacco-pipes, obviously
the sign of his establishment, with inscription "MILES
HACKLVITT 1666 IN BILREKEY IN ESSEX: HIS HALF-
PENNY". Similarly, in 1653 and again in 1668, SAMUELL
LEADER issued a token in Saffron Walden, and so did
WILLIAM MARTIN in "BRAYNTRE", both showing two
tobacco-pipes, while THOMAS WARRIN of Waltham Abbey
issued in 1668 a halfpenny token showing three tobacco-pipes in
a triangle13.