PIPE (SMOKING)

A copper alloy tobacco pipe bowl weighing 34g. The bowl is 41mm in height, with a 40mm long socket for attaching a stem and a small forward pointing spur, which is 6mm long. The top of the bowl has been quite badly dented and distorted with a certain amount of lateral squashing. This means that the side profile would originally have been a little narrower at the rim than it presently appears. Similarly, the stem socket had been bent slightly upwards but would have been straight originally. The end of the socket is rather dented and corroded but it appears to be essentially complete rather than being part of a longer stem that has broken off. The quite sharply flaring shape of the socket also supports this view, since this would admit a separate stem, most likely of wood, whereas an all-metal pipe would be expected to have had a parallel sided stem. A forward leaning spur is found on some patterns of English pipe from the early eighteenth century onwards, although it is not typical of forms produced on the near continent. The walls of the pipe bowl are quite thin at the top (<0.5mm), as are the ends of the stem socket, but the pipe feels quite heavy when held, suggesting that they are somewhat thicker in the lower part of the bowl and at the socket junction. No seams are evident and it is possible that this is a cast object rather than one made of sheet metal and soldered.

This is a very unusual find, making it hard to establish an accurate date or place of manufacture. Although metal pipes are occasionally found in Britain they are rare, and most of the known examples are of iron with a long stem formed as an integral part of the object. The relatively large and slightly egg-shaped or ovoid bowl form is reminiscent of mid-eighteenth century or later pipes from northern France or the Low Countries rather than England. The use of a detachable stem is also more continental than British in character and this piece seems most likely to have been made somewhere in northern continental Europe and then imported to Britain. The bowl form is certainly not of a seventeenth century type and so a date somewhere within the range c1750-1900 seems most likely for this piece.

The finder has kindly donated this object to the National Pipe Archive, which is currently held at the University of Liverpool (http://www.pipearchive.co.uk/). The archive's accession number for this piece is LIVNP 2017.04.