The Fake Dunhills of the 1980S

The fake Dunhills of the 1980s are a small group of pipes made in England in the early 1980s and passed off to American collecting circles as early, rare finds. The problem was not the material or the workmanship: most of these pipes were made from genuine Dunhill briar, by hands trained at Dunhill itself.

What was false was the writing stamped on the shank; the marks made the pipe look decades older than it was, and like a rare shape hard to match in the catalogue. The affair is considered the most talked-about forgery case in briar pipe collecting.

How the Opportunity Arose

When Dunhill acquired Lane Limited in 1976, the Charatan pipe line came under the same roof. In the early 1980s Dunhill pipe production was consolidated into a single facility; Charatan production moved to Walthamstow in 1982, and a number of skilled workers lost their jobs. People were not the only thing that left the facility: hand tools, stamping sets, raw briar, and boxes of bowls set aside and left unfinished during quality culling also made their way out unsupervised. In these same years, Bill Ashton-Taylor, who had trained at the Dunhill factory, made his own brand Ashton's first pipe in 1983.

In America, meanwhile, collecting used briar pipes had emerged as a new pastime; shows, mailing lists, and phone calls formed its early framework. The most sought-after pieces were large, early Dunhills. The field's body of knowledge, however, was quite thin: early catalogues were hard to come by, oversized examples were poorly recognized, and misconceptions circulated — such as the belief that the letters in the ODA stamp indicated countries. This lack of benchmarks left wide room for forgery.