J. B. Priestley: Novelist and Pipe Enthusiast

J. B. Priestley (John Boynton Priestley, 1894-1984) was one of the most prolific names in twentieth-century English literature and a writer who made the pipe an inseparable part of his public image. He was born in the Manningham district of Bradford and reached a wide readership through novels, plays, essays, and radio broadcasts.

The Good Companions (1929), English Journey (1934), and An Inspector Calls (1945) are his most frequently cited works. His Postscript broadcasts on the BBC during the Second World War made him a nationally recognized voice. That most of his photographs show a pipe in his hand or mouth is no coincidence: for Priestley, tobacco was not merely a habit but also a subject to write about.

An Essayist Who Wrote About Tobacco

Many writers smoke a pipe; few write about the pipe itself. Priestley belongs to this second, smaller group. In the section devoted to tobacco within his essay collection Delight (1949), he writes that he took up smoking in 1910 with a cheap Cavendish cut; the same section laments that tobacconism ceased to be a craft during the First World War and became an ordinary retail trade. Rain Upon Godshill (1939) and The Moments and Other Pieces (1966) also contain pages devoted to tobacco. His 1966 essay "Tobacco" was reprinted in the 2016 collection Grumbling at Large.

In several pieces he describes never settling on one brand and always continuing to try whatever new mixtures came his way; names such as Virginia, Latakia, and Perique come up frequently in his experiments. He is said to have smoked a pipe for more than sixty years.