Abdulla

Abdulla is the name of Abdulla & Co. Ltd., a company founded in London in 1902 that became one of Britain's best-known luxury cigarette brands in the first half of the twentieth century. Within the pipe world the firm is remembered not as a workshop but as a tobacconist brand that put briar pipes bearing its own name on the market.

For that reason, pipes stamped Abdulla carry a trace of the era's London tobacco trade, in which pipes and cigarettes routinely shared the same shop window.

A Brand Born of Cigarettes

The company's fame rests on the cigarettes that carried its name. Abdulla cigarettes were prepared in several blends — Egyptian, Turkish, and Virginia — and these three options formed the backbone of the brand during the years when Europe's fascination with Oriental tobacco was at its height. Despite the Eastern flavor the name evoked, the advertising leaned less on exoticism than on elegance and distinction. The Oriental tobacco tradition behind these blends is the same tobacco family that, on the pipe side, fed the English blend tradition of the period.

Records show the firm moved its headquarters to 173 New Bond Street, Mayfair, in 1917. This address also appears in a 1929 entry in the British national archives, alongside the description "cigarette specialists," and the same address serves as the company's identifying detail in museum catalogues. Abdulla is also said to have opened a branch in the Netherlands in 1923.