Mattner

Mattner is a South African pipe workshop that operated in Johannesburg during the second half of the twentieth century, named after its founder Willi Mattner. Its production never reached factory scale; the brand is known today mostly through pipes circulating on the secondhand market, stamped "MATTNER JOHANNESBURG" on the underside of the bowl.

From Seafaring to Pipe Making

Mattner's remaining in South Africa was less a choice than a consequence of the war. Born in 1914 in the Polish-Russian border region, Willi Mattner left home at fourteen to join the German merchant fleet; when the Second World War broke out he was serving as an engineering officer aboard a ship that happened to be in the port of Durban. The Hamburg-registered ship was seized; the crew was held in internment camps around Pretoria until the war's end. By the time peace came there was no Germany left to return to. Mattner worked for a while in shipbuilding in Durban, where he married and moved to Johannesburg to his wife's family.

He learned the trade in this family's workshop. The shop was known at the time as Samek's Pipe Hospital, and as the name suggests, its main business was repair rather than making new pipes. The person who passed the craft on to him was a carver who had learned the trade at Andreas Bauer's meerschaum pipe workshop in Austria; a Central European craft tradition was thus carried to Johannesburg. The workshop's name later changed to Mattner's Pipe Hospital.