Laxey Pipes Ltd.

Laxey Pipes Ltd. is an unusually large production venture for its scale, founded on the Isle of Man in the middle of the Irish Sea. Born at a time when pipe manufacture was concentrated in centers such as Saint-Claude, London, and Copenhagen, the factory was set up to bring work to the island economy, and is counted among Britain's few meerschaum workshops.

Founding and the Factory Building

The company began operating in the mid-1960s in a four-story stone building on the quay in Old Laxey. The building had not originally been designed for pipe making: archive records show it was built in 1866 by Richard Rowe, manager of the Laxey mines, as an additional grain store for the town's flour mill. After changing hands several times it passed into island government ownership in the 1960s, and from there was leased to the pipe factory. Production was spread across the building's four floors, with the stages from turning to polishing divided among them. How many people the factory employed at its busiest is not clear from archive records; accounts point to a workforce of a few dozen.

The factory's raw material came from East Africa. Laxey processed block meerschaum mined by the Tanganyika Meerschaum Corporation in the Amboseli basin into bowls; this material, distinct from the classic Eskişehir stone of the Mediterranean basin, supplied a significant share of the world market in the postwar period.