Former

Former is both the nickname and the brand of Danish pipe maker Hans Jonny Nielsen. The name arose in childhood, when his peers likened him to the English comedian of the day, George Formby; repeated aloud, "Formby" settled into "Former." That the Danish word "former" means "shapes" is a coincidence noticed only afterward.

Born in 1941, the maker took his place at the bench at fifteen; with a working history spanning more than sixty years, he is counted among the living links of the Danish school tradition.

From the Repair Bench to Foreman

He entered the trade in the mid-1950s at Poul Rasmussen's repair shop in Copenhagen; some sources name this shop Suhrs Pibereparation. Over the two years spent there, pipes of every brand and in every condition passed through his hands. Pipes taken apart and reassembled served as a kind of school, introducing him to the internal dimensions, bore alignment and typical weaknesses of different makers.

After leaving Rasmussen's, he earned his living at a machine workshop, and in his spare hours assisted part-time Sven Knudsen, who had left W. Ø. Larsen to set up on his own. Following sixteen months of military service, Rasmussen's connections introduced him to Larsen's workshop manager Svend Bang, and in 1962, at twenty-one, he was taken onto the staff. Bang would go on, six years later, to found his own workshop under his own name, S. Bang.

The decade spent at Larsen proved the defining period of his career. He learned to reproduce the catalogue's shapes by hand without deviating from their dimensions, following the path shown by Knudsen, who knew the Larsen models by heart. In time he rose to foreman, taking charge of quality control, training new carvers, and grading the pipes. Under the same roof worked Poul Ilsted, Teddy Knudsen, Tonni Nielsen and Jess Chonowitsch; sources put the number of carvers at anywhere from seventeen to nineteen.