James Upshall E Grade EXL Smooth Cavalier Estate Briar Pipe, Unsmoked

Description

James Upshall was, along with Ferndown and Ashton, part of a new wave of British hand-made, high-grade pipes in the late 20th century, with their founders largely coming from previous positions in the factories of companies such as Dunhill and Charatan. James Upshall was founded in 1978 by Barry Jones and Ken Barnes, both of whom had previously worked for Charatan and who had worked their way up to being carvers Charatan’s higher-end, non-standard shapes. Jones and Barnes’ pipes quickly grew to being something of a status symbol, and were enjoyed by King Hussein of Jordan, Anwar Sadat, Bing Crosby, Yul Brynner, Robert Wagner and Tom Selleck. The company also made house-brand pipes for Astleys in London, along with many of the other major makes of the era. James Upshall pipes are no longer made, but their reputation as some of the finest hand-turned British pipes continues to endure.

The “E” grade was the third-highest attainable by James Upshall pipes, beaten only by the extremely rare “X” grade and the practically mythical “XX”. It was, per Ken Barnes, his and Jones’s attempt to match the quality of the Charatan Coronation grade, which is ambitious to say the very least. In the case of this E grade James Upshall, the Charatan connection goes a little deeper than mere straight grain quality, however (though the grain is indeed very good). English freehand pipes all but began at F. Charatan & Son, and they were typically quite different from their Danish counterparts, having their own identity and their own assortment of signature motifs. As for the latter, two motifs were particularly prominent at Charatan and, naturally, they were prominent at James Upshall, too. One was the “cup and saucer,” and the other was the cavalier. The former came about when a young Barry Jones was tinkering with a heavily flawed stummel from a Charatan “Giant Bent” shape during his lunch break, sloughing off the pits from the bowl to see if he could salvage it, resulting in a shape with a distinct, slightly flattened, protruding base, upon which the remainder of the bowl appeared to “sit” like a mug of tea on a plate; the latter was a briar re-imagining of pre-briar hunters’ pipes, with a long, over-extended shank and a bowl that jutted out of it about 3/4 of the way down. One might say that this James Upshall is somewhere in between those two shapes, having reined in the pipe’s base in length and breadth, but retaining enough to still give that hallmark sense of separation between it and the Dublin bowl springing forth from it.

This pipe is completely unsmoked. A few slight scratches and handling marks.

Details:

Length: 7.7″ / 195.5mm

Bowl Width: 0.91 / 23.11mm

Bowl Depth: 1.90″ / 48.26mm

Weight: 2.4oz / 70g