Decorated clay pipe bowl
By Cova Escandon, Finds Supervisor
On 27th of July 1586, Sir Walter Raleigh brought back three unknown weeds from one of his trips to the New World. They were the plants of potato, maize and tobacco.
Although tobacco was most likely to have been known in England before this date through Spanish and Portuguese sailors, Raleigh was the first person to introduce smoking as a fashionable habit in the court of Elizabeth I. Imagine the first time these courtesans saw smoke coming out of someone’s nose and mouth! It is said that one of Raleigh’s servants threw water on him thinking he was on fire. Smoking soon became very popular, and it was even thought to be beneficial to health. It was highly recommended to heal conditions such as worms, halitosis and toothache. Even during the Great Plague (1665) it was thought to clean the air, so schoolboys at Eton College would smoke a pipe at breakfast. But at the beginning of the 17th Century some voices started speaking against its use. One of them was King James I who wrote a famous text called ‘Counterblast to Tobacco’ where he condemned the use of the aforesaid plant. He also destroyed the crops existing in England and taxed severely the import from America. Despite this, the use of tobacco continued to grow until the 1930s. It was around this time that clay pipe use declined due to competition from cigarettes.
The pipe bowl that we bring to you today was found in Lincoln and made at the Watkinson Clay Pipe Factory in Market Rasen. This factory was founded in 1843 by George Spencer Watkinson and it was very successful until 1893 when wooden pipes started being more popular. Watkinson’s son, George Spencer Watkinson Junior, wrote a journal of his memories of the factory and drew sketches describing the process of making clay pipes. This source of information is priceless as not much is known about this type of factory.
Back in those days, each factory would produce their own designs incorporating the name of the manufacturer or place of production. Our pipe bowl is beautifully decorated with a trophy, possibly related to horse racing, and what appears to be thistles and roses in a laurel crown. On the rim of the bowl you can read MARKET RASEN. Interestingly, we know that the Watkinson Factory often used another design showing a chained slave on one side and the personification of Liberty on the other. This antislavery decoration is highly unusual in the tobacco industry, given its close relationship and dependence on the slavery system.
As you can see in the photograph, the stem of the pipe is missing. We actually often find them with short stems, or none at all, and one reason is that in the second half of the 19th Century, pubs would provide pipes for their clients to smoke: the customer would break the end of the stem, fill the bowl with tobacco and smoke, returning it to the landlord once he had finished. The next client would break the stem and start again. This artefact not only is a beautiful piece of art, it is also a little window into our past.