Every time I dig my garden I dig up pieces of clay pipe stems – also known as shanks. I have only once dug up a complete pipe bowl, but sometimes find sections of bowl or the heel where bowl meets stem. It happens so often that I have become adept at spotting pieces even as the soil turns and a piece is disappearing under clods. I now have a pot full of pipe shanks.
I have even been enthused enough to buy a small publication entitled Clay Tobacco Pipes by Eric G Ayto, and learnt from this that clay pipes were first made from about 1558, and the last company closed in 1962.
Ayto also informs us that “the nineteenth-century working man preferred his ordinary short clay, which was very cheap and often given away with a pint of beer by the local publican. The shorter pipe had the advantage of reducing the load on the teeth when smoking and working at the same time…. although many a pipe was shortened by breaking off the unwanted portion of stem to suit individual needs.”
“Before leaving the factory the ends of the stems were normally treated with red sealing wax to prevent the lips sticking to the porous clay; to overcome the loss of this treatment when shortening the stem, the owner would have either dipped the broken end in tea or beer or carefully bound it with thread. Short clays were often referred to in the north of England as nose warmers.”
“Two dodges favoured by navvies and other labourers were the use of a metal trouser button at the base of the bowl to act as a filter and the fitting of a metal bottle cap, pierced with holes , on top of the bowl to keep the rain out.”
I also learnt that “the use of clay pipes for blowing bubbles was a popular pastime with children until about 1930. Pipes for this purpose were of the cheaper variety and were often found in penny packets of sherbet dab.”
Finding pipe stems so regularly in my garden has created a picture in my mind, as I believe the ones that I find date from the time of the building of the Totley Tunnel from 1888 to 1894. Brian Edward’s book “Totley and The Tunnel” gives details of the dreadful pressure on accommodation and services at the time of the construction, as seven hundred navvies descended on a village of about 650 residents. The Sheffield Independent newspaper in October 1893 reported 60 men living in one house in Greenoak, probably Lemont Road.