Barling

Barling is an English pipe house founded in London in 1812, counted among the oldest surviving names in the pipe world. At the outset stood not pipe carving but silversmithing: Benjamin Barling, a silversmith working in Marylebone, founded the firm by making mounts, bands, and lids for meerschaum bowls.

When his sons William and Edward joined the business, the firm took the name B. Barling & Sons. Records show the company exhibited silver-mounted meerschaum sets at the 1851 Great Exhibition in London and used the medal it won there on the cover of its later catalogs.

From the Silver Workshop to the Briar Lathe

When briar was introduced to English smokers in the 1850s, Barling turned to this material as well. The path it followed at first was the common method of English pipe houses of the day: bowls were roughly turned at French production centers such as Saint-Claude, finished at the London workshop, and completed with silverwork. Exactly when the firm moved to turning its own bowls is disputed; sources give years ranging from 1906 to 1909. Even this transition was not absolute: according to testimony given during a legislative hearing in 1928, the company was still forced to keep buying semi-worked bowls (stummel) from Saint-Claude in order to meet demand.