I was 10 in 1965, having started cigerettes at the age of 7, couldn't afford this habit so my friends and I used to collect dog ends or butts to USA folks and break the unsmoked tobacco out of them and smoked this in roll-ups, my older Brother was a bit light handed and for reason only known to him came home with a couple of pipes that he had come upon in woolworths, I was 10 at this time and my Brother 11 1/2, so the gains from our tobacco collecting ended up in these pipes and we would sit puffing away on these in the shed at the bottom of our garden, we upped our level and started hunting down cigar butts and loaded these into our pipes, this was heaven and the craze spread to a few of our friends who stole pipes from their dads, granddads and few followed my brothers trip to woolworths, imagine 1/2 a dozen 10 to 12 year olds sitting in this shed puffing away, we did refine our tobaccos and proper pipe tobacco was being found from somewhere, I never asked, my Father never commented on all the smoke that used to waft from his shed, as time past we got better pipes and even paid for them and started to spend our hard earned pocket money on pipe tobacco. I was thrown out of school in 1970 at the age of 15 and was lucky to get into an apprenticeship that paid quite well and lucky to start a year ahead of my friends that had remained at school untill they were 16, anyway my first wage packet went on my first Peterson system pipe and the next on a Falcon which were all the rage then, still have these pipes, in fact I have never parted with a pipe in my life and became a collector before there was such a thing, well not to my knowledge, me and my brother spent years playing a one-upmanship against each other with the buying of pipes. Anyway 46 years on, I am still a pipeman and will always be.
