Comoy's History and a Guide to Dating Its Pipes

The Comoy's dating guide gathers the ways of placing the London firm Comoy's pipes into a production range based on their stamps. The firm never at any point struck a mark giving the production year directly on a pipe; since there is no year code to check as with Dunhill pipes, the date is narrowed by stacking together the shape of the brand wording, the origin stamp, the "C" inlaid on the mouthpiece, and the series name.

The result is most often not a single year but a range of several years. The firm's general history is told in the Comoy's of London entry.

Period Lines

The family, according to records, began pipe making with François Comoy in the French town of Saint-Claude in 1825; briar (funda kökü) became the main material in these workshops a short time later. Henri Comoy, born in 1850, moved to London in 1879 and opened a small workshop in Seven Dials. Production moved to Clerkenwell in 1895 and to a larger building in 1913; the business was incorporated in 1914 as H. Comoy & Co. Ltd. Henri died in 1924 at seventy-four, and the firm passed to his nephews Louis and Charles Chapuis. Records say the firm came under the umbrella of Cadogan Investments Ltd. in 1929, which brought together the pipe companies of Civic and Oppenheimer. Because production shrank to a small workshop during the Second World War, Comoy's pipes from the 1940s are scarce. Family control passed entirely to Cadogan in the early 1980s; this date marks the main dividing line in the collection.