Peterson Pipe Dating- It May Not Be What You Think

[papipeguy]

I found this on another forum. It's about 4 years old but very interesting. Kind of makes pipe dating a bit more intruiging.
About 12 or 14 years ago, I was in constant email touch with an elderly gentleman, 90 plus years old, in Ireland who had worked all his life for Kapp & Peterson, started at the age of 13 and worked for them until he got too old and feeble. He was a gold mine of information which I am incorporating into my little booklet. One of the items he passed along -
Peterson buys sterling silver bands annually by the thousands and sends them to the essayers office in Dublin to be essayed and hall marked. Upon receipt of the silver bands, K&P would distribute them to the various finishing stations where they may be dumped on top of older dated silver bands. Thus due to this inversion layer of bands, it may be two or three years before the older bands are used, meaning the pipe itself is two or three years newer than the dated band. There is no absolute way of telling these pipes from ones that use the year band in which the pipe was made.

 

[john218]

Thanks for sharing, Papaguy.
Do you plan on making your booklet available to others in print or electronic form?

 

[seanlamb63]

I'd love to hear more from this gentlemen.

 

[numbersix]

Thanks for the info. Makes sense - too bad though.

 

[rmbittner]

I'm not surprised. It's a situation common to dating electric guitars as well. A box of knobs or tuning keys, say, doesn't get replenished just because the calendar rolls over. And a neck that's finished and dated in one year might well end up on a body that's ready a year or two later.
But does it really matter? I mean, we can date Dunhill pipes to specific years, thanks to Dunhill's dating system. . . but that doesn't necessarily mean that the stems were from that same year. But, again, does it matter?
This is why we have that wonderful Latin word circa.
Bob

 

[jogrefoln]

I bet an afternoon talking pipes with that ol' fella would be an afternoon to remember.

 

[misterlowercase]

I bet an afternoon talking pipes with that ol' fella would be an afternoon to remember.

For sure it would, first-hand info like that is always the most valuable!
I really enjoyed reading this about the old Gallaher's factory in Ireland:

http://www.belfastforum.co.uk/index.php/topic,37355.0.html
...more Gallaher's info:

http://www.nmni.com/um/Collections/Collections-highlights/GALLAHER-S-TOBACCO
About Peterson I have no idea, but the silver-band thing makes sense although the rings wouldn't be too far off the actual manufacture date, like RMBittner said:

This is why we have that wonderful Latin word circa.

I did come across this:

http://thepetersonpipeproject.blogspot.com/2007/07/dating-peterons-pipes.html
"The assay office will stamp the date of the year in which they received the bands and it may be a year or two or three before Peterson's employees happen to place one of these bands on a pipe though generally the bands are placed on a pipe in the year they were stamped."