Samuel McLardy

Samuel McLardy is the firm founded in Manchester in the second half of the 19th century that grew into one of the era's largest British clay pipe manufacturers. The company's namesake, Samuel McLardy, was born in Glasgow in 1842, the son of a tobacconist who also made pipes, and learned the trade in his father's shop. In his early twenties he moved to Manchester and set up his own business, and records show he adopted 1865 as the founding year.

From Miller Street to Shudehill

The firm's first address was 16 Miller Street in Manchester; what began as a small workshop reached factory scale before 1880. Moving to 67 Shudehill in 1890, the business continued to operate there for a stretch reaching well into the 1910s. The company's address in its final years was, as far as can be gathered from its liquidation record, 20 Swan Street.

The scale of production gives a good sense of the clay pipe industry's golden age. Around 1895 the factory reportedly held more than five hundred molds, and it was noted that, used efficiently, these molds could produce as many as five million pipes a year. This figure is comparable to the capacity of the large Dutch manufacturers of Gouda in the same years.