Memories of Charatan Pipes and Notes on Their Dating

"Memories of Charatan Pipes and Notes on their Dating" is an article published in 1998 in The Pipe Collector, the bulletin of the North American Society of Pipe Collectors (NASPC), that attempts to work out an approximate production date for Charatan pipes from their stamps and stem shapes.

Its author, Ivy Ryan, was a pipe smoker who visited the Charatan workshop in London repeatedly from the mid-1960s to the early 1970s; the text draws not on factory records but on memories from those visits and on pipes that passed through the author's hands. It is one of the most frequently cited texts in dating Charatan pipes — and, just as often, one of the most disputed.

The Brand History the Article Relies on

The facts that frame the text are these: Charatan was founded in London by Frederick Charatan, reportedly in 1863; his son Reuben took over the business after his father's retirement, around 1910; and the workshop operated for many years on Prescot Street. The firm's departure from family ownership is dated to the early 1960s: the American importer Lane Limited bought the brand. Sources do not fully agree on either the founding year or the year of the sale; some compilations place the founding in the 1870s and the Lane takeover in 1962-1963. For this reason, both dates should be read as approximate rather than exact.

Later milestones are less disputed. Charatan bought the machinery of the Ben Wade workshop, which closed in 1965, though it never used those machines on Prescot Street. In the late 1970s, Lane Limited came under the Dunhill umbrella; the Prescot Street workshop closed in 1982, and production moved to another Dunhill facility. The brand name's move from Dunhill to J. B. Russell is dated to around 1988; some compilations place the new owner's production in the early 1990s.