Broseley Clay Tobacco Pipeworks

At the beginning of the 1880s local builder, Rowland Smitheman, took over a row of cottages in King Street Broseley, the small industrial town just a few miles south of the Iron Bridge. He converted the cottages into workshops, built a compact coal-fired bottle kiln, and began to manufacture clay tobacco smoking pipes. He christened his new 'factory' the Crown Pipeworks. Today his works are the Ironbridge Gorge Museum's Broseley Clay Tobacco Pipeworks.

Broseley has been famous for its pipes since the seventeenth century. When Smitheman started his business his chief rival was the Southorn family that had been making pipes since the 1830s and had established an enviable reputation for their high quality products. By the 1880s the demand for clay pipes had probably passed its peak, smokers being lured away to buy cigars and cigarettes, but the nearby Severn Valley branch of the Great Western Railway gave the trade a real boost and Smitheman seized his opportunity. Clay could arrive efficiently and quickly by train from Devon and Cornwall, the finished pipes could be dispatched to almost anywhere in the country, and the 'travellers' promoting their sale, could also make personal visits all over the British Isles.

Smitheman immediately began to produce a wide range of decorative pipes as well as Broseley's most famous clay products, the Churchwarden and Dutch Long Straw pipes. These pipes had become very popular in the coffee houses of late eighteenth century London. So that smokers could enjoy a cool smoke they had long stems ranging in length from 600mm to 750mm. You had to sit down to smoke these pipes if you were not to break the stems, so most working people, particularly farm labourers and navvies building canals and railways, smoked 'cutties', pipes with stems no longer that 150mm. Some workers even snapped most of the stems off these pipes so that the bowl, and the fumes from it, was closer to the nose!

Despite Victorian 'cutties' having all sorts of decorative bowls (for example, some in the shape of bunches of grapes, others like a football being kicked by a boot), the smoking of cigarettes became increasing popular in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In the trenches of the First World War battlefields, everyone smoked cigarettes, so it was not surprising that after the war, the Broseley clay tobacco pipe industry dwindled considerably. At the end of the 1920s, the Southorn family took over the running of the Crown Pipeworks, abandoning production at their two other Broseley works, and continued to make pipes commercially until the last owner, Harry Southorn, died in 1957. After that, the site was left virtually untouched, the bottle kiln stacked with saggars, the three storey buildings left with most of the original tools, equipment and pipe moulds, as well as orders, receipts and letters dating back to the 1880s still impaled on their office spikes. The whole factory had become a true 'time capsule'.

Although the historical importance of the Crown Pipeworks had been appreciated for many years, it was not until 1991 that Bridgnorth District Council and the Ironbridge Gorge Museum were able to join forces to preserve the site and plan a museum. The contents were purchased by the Ironbridge Gorge Museum, photographically recorded, and then carefully removed so that extensive restoration of the buildings (purchased by the district council) could take place in 1993. Given the fragile state of all the structures after years of neglect and the ravages of woodworm, this absorbed large sums of money, with little left over for the museum aspect of the project. Fortunately, the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Worshipful Company of Pipe Makers & Tobacco Blenders, and other groups and individuals were persuaded to give their financial support and during 1995 and 1996 the buildings were transformed into a museum with the majority of the original contents returned to exactly the same positions they had occupied over the previous one hundred years. On 14 September 1996, the Crown Pipeworks was opened to the public.

Women's work

Making clay tobacco smoking pipes was a skilled job and within living memory, the majority of the fiddly tasks were done by women. The men did the heavy tasks such as mixing the clay to make it soft enough to mould, or stacking the saggars in the kiln and then firing it. The women's work started at the moulding benches. There, handfuls of clay were rolled out to the approximate length of the finished pipe. At this stage of production the pipes were called 'dummies'. Then the part of the dummy that was to form the stem was pulled onto a wire to form the hole. Once on the wire, the dummy was positioned into one half of a two part cast-iron mould, the other half then dropped on top, and the two parts clamped into a vice. The hollow bowl was then formed by pressing an iron stopper attached to the end of a lever into the clay. The stopper was removed and the mould then extracted from the vice. The wire was pushed through to the hollow just created and then removed, which left the stem very floppy.

The next process was 'trimming'. This task was achieved using three special tools and eight separate little procedures. No matter had carefully a pipe had been moulded, there was always excess clay that had to be removed from the bowl and the stem. First a wire was pushed up the pipe stem. Then a 'smoother' was used to cut off the excess clay. Then the 'head tool' (a small metal hook on a wooden handle) was used to polish the stem and bowl. And finally a slightly moist sponge was rotated over the top of the bowl. In 1922, Eva Parry at just 14 years old, earned 2.5p for trimming 186 (or 15.5 dozen) pipes in this way. One week she remembered earning 35p which meant she must have trimmed 2,604 pipes!

Eva had just started to work in William Southorn and Co's Legges Hill pipe factory in Broseley. Her working day started at 7am and ended at 5pm, except on Saturdays when everyone went home at 12.30pm. Her first job was as a 'tipper'. This involved taking three fired pipes at a time and dipping the ends into a green 'glaze'. The mixture was probably an enamel because, unlike a true glaze, it did not need to be fired. The finish was supposed to stop the pipe sticking to the smoker's lips. For this work, Eva was paid 30p a week.