The Gourd Calabash pipe originated in South Africa, quickly becoming popular among British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand soldiers stationed there during the 1899-1902 Second Boer War. There is a larger Canadian connection here, too, as it was H.L. Blatter, his brother Ernest and sister Marguerite that founded a company to manufacture Gourd Calabash pipes in Cape Town. This family later emigrated to Canada and founded the pipe-making dynasty that is now Blatter Pipes in Montreal, Quebec.
After the war, returning soldiers brought the Gourd Calabash pipes back to their home countries, where their superb smoking qualities quickly led to a surge in demand. The rest, as they say, is history! For more on the origins of the Gourd Calabash pipe, see this article on SmokingPipes.com. The popularity of the Gourd Calabash continues, partly due to the Hollywood invention of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes seen smoking one in the films made in the 1930s and 1940s.
The Gourd Calabash on the workbench this time is a family heirloom that once belonged to its current steward’s wife’s great-great-grandfather. It arrived at the shop in fairly good but dirty condition. The metal rim cover was grimy and discoloured to the point that it was difficult to tell if the metal was nickel or brass.
The Vulcanite stem was lightly oxidized, with deep tooth dents behind the top button of the orific-style stem. The stem was also overclocked, a common issue with screw-in tenons where repeated over-tightening rotates the stem out of alignment with the bowl.
The only stamp on the pipe is a number, “19” on the left flank of the shank extension/mortise fitting. There is no maker’s mark or other identifying information, but the orific (round) airway and vintage style button allows us to date the pipe to the early/mid 1920s at the latest, when this older style of stem was replaced by the now ubiquitous V-Slot stem.
Another indication of the age of this pipe is the use of a bone screw tenon. It’s a bit harder to determine when bone tenons fell out of favour but push-style cylindrical tenons were not uncommon in the 1910s and 1920s. I suspect this pipe was fitted with a bone screw tenon as a nod to tradition more than out of necessity.
I completed my initial assessment of the pipe with a good look at the chamber. As you’ll see in these images, there was a noticeable crack running the full circumference of the chamber about a half inch below the rim. A bit of exploration with a dental pic revealed that the chamber is made of a whitish material, presumably meerschaum.
The chamber floor was, well, a mess – lumpy, uneven, and nearly burned through at the draft hole in the centre of the floor. Clearly the chamber would need some significant rehabilitation if the pipe’s steward was to be able to smoke the pipe again, even occasionally.
With my to-do list established, I started in on the basic cleaning of the pipe. A gentle scrub with 0000 steel wool cleared the rim cap of its layer of grime, wax and dirt, revealing a nickel finish underneath. The metal was scratched and pitted from a century of use and handling, but was structurally sound.
Unlike many Gourd Calabash pipes, which feature removable bowls, the bowl on this pipe was fixed in place at the wide end of the gourd. This made it significantly more difficult to clean the interior of the pipe, but as you can see in this pic, I managed to fit pipe cleaners dipped in 99% isopropyl alcohol through the body of the pipe, working from both ends. Blowing through the pipe ensured that air, and thus smoke, flowed freely from bowl to stem.
With the internals sorted, I moved my attention to the chamber repair. For this job, I mixed up a fairly loose, just pourable batch of pipe mud made from activated charcoal powder and Plaster of Paris.
After taping off the rim to save myself the cleanup, I inserted a suitably sized metal tube down through the draft hole to hold it open, then poured in the mud mixture, tapping the pipe gently on the bench a few times to level the mud and remove any trapped air bubbles.
As you can see, I also applied a layer of mud around the chamber to fill in the crack and smooth out the walls. I then propped the gourd upright in a safe location and let it rest while the pipe mud dried.
I cam back to the pipe when the mud was just about set but still a tiny bit malleable. The danger of filling the gourd with mud now past, I removed the metal tube from the airway and used the rounded end of a needle file handle to compress the chamber floor slightly before once again setting the pipe aside.
When the pipe mud had fully cured, I used my reamer and sandpaper wrapped around a dowel to smooth and refine the new chamber walls and floor. Much better!
While the chamber repairs were curing, I cleaned up the stem, removing the light layer of oxidation and mitigating the tooth dents somewhat. Removing them completely was not feasible (I’d have had to sand through to the airway), but a few beauty marks are perfectly acceptable on a century-old pipe.
The last issue to sort out was the over-clocked stem. This pic shows just how skewed the stem was when fully tightened.
Rather than attempt to return the fragile bone tenon to its original position in the stem face, I chose to beef up the threads with a few applications of clear nail polish. This now effectively larger tenon diameter prevents the stem from being screwed in beyond the proper alignment point, and can be repeated in the future if the stem becomes misaligned again down the road.
To finish of this restoration of this vintage Gourd Calabash, I buffed the stem on the wheel to remove the lighter handling marks and bring up the shine. Then the stem and body of the pipe were treated to a light run on the Carnauba wheel to add more shine and a modicum of UV protection.
The finished pipe is now ready to take its place in its steward’s collection and rotation, should he so desire. Any pipe of this age will require a bit of careful handling and periodic maintenance, but it should perform well for many years to come.
I hope you enjoyed following along on this estate pipe restoration. Until next time, Happy Piping!
Here’s the finished pipe.
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