THE CLAY TOBACCO-PIPE IN ESSEX AND EAST-ANGLIA 35
CHAPTER FIVE
The clay tobacco-pipe in Essex and East Anglia
OF the four centres of manufacture mentioned in the 1619
Charter of the Tobacco-pipe Maker's Company, only one,
London, can be closely related to East Anglia (including Essex);
yet, by the middle of the seventeenth century, Colchester, Ipswich
and Norwich are known to have had pipe factories, and there were
small pipe-making concerns in Saffron Walden, Blythburgh and
elsewhere16.
During the demolition of an old building (Joslin's shop) in
Colchester High Street (1959/60), a Colchester archaeologist, Mr.
L. H. Gant, discovered and described a tobacco-pipe kiln, with
some wasters bearing the initials 'I.A.'9. It is conjectured that
these may have been the initials of John Angier, a Dutchman
known from town records to have traded in Colchester about 1688.
The broken pipes forming part of the kiln wall were of typical
Dutch shape, with no more than a rudimentary foot and smooth-
sweeping curve of bowl-outline, while the pipes being made in the
kiln at the time of its closure were of the English pattern common
about 1690 to 1700, akin to the Dutch type but with a more
prominent foot.
As the area round the site was known to have been filled and
levelled in 1700, this provided a terminus ad quern for the Anglo-
Dutch pattern, consistent with what is already known of bowl-
shapes at the turn of the seventeenth century. If Gant's attribu-
tion of 'I.A.' be correct, it would seem likely that I.A. came to
England with a cargo of Dutch-made pipes, sold them, then
decided to settle in Colchester and make more pipes here, using
his cargo breakage and scrap to build the kiln. At fig. 7 (a) is
shown one of these pipes marked I.A., which the Author found in
1953 some 100 yards to the East of the kiln-site referred to above.
It will be noted that the plane of the bowl-rim is roughly parallel
with the axis of the stem, a feature introduced about 1685-1690,
and superseding the sloping bowl-top characteristic of most earlier
pipes: in this example, the bowl-top even slopes backward a
little, and must mark the very beginning of the new fashion.
Of the fourteen pipe-makers known to have worked in
Colchester, Gant has discovered an eighteenth century record of
the sale in 1759 of the "pipe-making implements of John Randall,
formerly James Bland" in "George Lane" (now George Street,