Pipe- Confusion ????

[Charles Kaiser]

Hallo Kameraden,
After sailing through many Threads about pipes on this Forum, I have some Qustions about the Term "Briar", I often read, what kind of wood is it ? Is it Erica arborea, or Bruyère, this could not be, because this wood wasn't used prior 1880.
I used "Aunt Wiki" and "Uncle Google", but the only Information I found, is the German Term "Dornstrauch" for Briar, but no further useful Information.
Does anyone knows the latin term of Briar ? Are some biologist on this forum ?

[Hank Trent]

Re: Pipe- Confusion ????

Oops, didn't find what I wanted, thought I deleted rather than posted! Stupid machine reader and its wrong dates.

I see Pete as come along with better things. Consider this post blank. :)

Hank Trent
hanktrent@gmail.com

[PetePaolillo]

Re: Pipe- Confusion ????

Charles, below are a couple of 1865 refrences I found using Google books. I hope this helps.


...Witness the briar-root pipes of St. Claude. Smart young fellows who sport this kind of smoking-bowl in England, neither know nor care for the fact that it comes from a secluded spot in the Jura Mountains. Men and women, boys and girls, earn from threepence to four shillings a day in various little bits of carved and turned work; but the crack wages are paid to the briar-root pipe-makers. England imports many more than she smokes, and sends off the rest to America. M. Audiganne says that "in those monster armies which have sprung up so suddenly on the soil of the great republic, there is scarcely a soldier but has a St. Claude briar-root pipe in his pocket." The truth is, that, unlike cutties and meerschaums, and other clay or earthen pipes, these briar-root productions are very strong, and will bear a great deal of knocking about. The same French writer says that when his countrymen came here to see our International Exhibition, some of them bought and carried home specimens of these pipes as English curiosities: not aware that the little French town of St. Claude was the place of their production.

In Germany the wood-work, so far as English importers know anything of it, is mostly in the form of small trinkets and toys for children. The production of these is immense. In the Tyrol, aud near the Thuringian Forest, in the middle states of the ill-organised confederacy, and wherever forests abound, there the peasants spend much of their time in making toys, ill the Tyrol, for example, there is a valley called the Grodnerthal, about twenty miles long, in which the rough climate and barren soil will not suffice to grow corn for the inhabitants, who are rather numerous. Shut out from the agricultural labour customary in other districts, the people earn their bread chiefly by wood carving. They make toys of numberless kinds (in which Noah's Ark animals are very predominant) of the soft wood of the Siberian pine—known to the Germans as ziebelnusskiefer. The tree is of slow growth, found on the higher slopes of the valley, but now becoming scarce, owing to the improvidence of the peasants in cutting down the forests without saving or planting others to succeed them. For a hundred years and more the peasants have been carvers. Nearly every cottage is a workshop. All the occupants, male and female, down to very young children, seat themselves round a table, and fashion their little bits of wood. They use twenty or thirty different kinds of tools, under the magic of which the wood is transformed into a dog, a lion, a man, or what not. Agents represent these carvers in various cities of Europe, to dispose of the wares; but they nearly all find their way back again to their native valleys, to spend their earnings in peace....

All the year round: a weekly journal, Volume 13 By Charles Dickens

[PetePaolillo]

Re: Pipe- Confusion ????

The interesting description by M. Audiganne, in a recent number of the " Revue des Deux Mondes," might once have induced me to make a trip to the Jura Mountains to look at the domestic manufacture of turnery, known as articles of Saint Claude, which has existed for centuries. Here the snuff-boxes which once employed the labour of the district have given place to the briar-root pipes.. England is the greatest importer of these pipes, next to the United States. Do many of our youths who display their genuine briar-root on the top of an omnibus, know where these pipes are made; or consider that when they paid five shillings for a warranted article, the cottager who is producing it sits for twelve hours a day at his lathe, turning out dozens for the reward of two or three francs?...

Passages of a working life during half a century: with a prelude of early reminiscences, Volume 3