Pipe Smokers Intelligencer

Loss of a master

While attending the Conclave of Richmond Pipe Smokers (C.O.R.P.S.) I learned that the pipe world lost one of its gifted masters, William “Bill” Ashton-Taylor. 

He was a remarkable man and a pipemaker of rare talent. His pipes were a return to the days when master artisans turned out gorgeous pipes that produced sublime smoking pleasure. 

Around 2005, I wrote a story about Bill, which will follow, but it is with heavy heart that I write a goodbye to an old friend. Over time, I purchased many of his pipes. None, none, ever disappointed. All possessed a singular quality of high art and smokability. 

The old artisans at Dunhill trained Bill. He learned the business from the ground up and from the carvers of briars from the gods. Then when British pipemaking began to fade, Bill Taylor started his own shop, reintroducing oil curing, and a costly process that Dunhill had stopped employing because of the cost. 

In Memoriam

Bill Taylor took the old British shapes and gave them new life, virtually restoring the English pipe market. Ashton-Taylor pipes were a huge success in America and around the world. They brought younger smokers to the briar. 

We are not likely to see his kind again, but there is one waiting in the wings to fill in the blank in our lives left by the death of Bill Taylor. 

I spoke to Jimmy Craig at the C.O.R.P.S. gathering. He is 51 years old and worked with Bill since Ashton began his business in 1983. Craig, too, was trained at Dunhill, and then went off on his own to work with jewelry and silver. He has also worked silver with the legendary pipemaker and silversmith, Les Wood. In fact, I have one of their pipes. It is stamped LJS and it was at CORPS that I discovered the man behind the letter J of the initials. 

Jimmy Craig to take over Ashton Pipes

During the time Craig worked at Dunhill, Les was his supervisor, he says. They collaborated for about four years. Then Craig went into the silversmith business on his own before getting in with Taylor. At first, Craig says, he worked just the silver for Bill. 

Then, the old master began showing Craig how to make the Ashton-Taylor pipe, teaching him the old ways. 

Craig says that a couple of weeks after Taylor’s death in mid-September, Bill’s wife, Irene, sold the house. 

Fortunately, Bill had already given Craig all of the tools and machinery in the workshop. 

Some of that machinery is so old, says Craig, that they are no longer made. Spare parts have to be machined. 

“He came to me one day. We were talking about the business. I think he knew he was very ill. I asked him what was going to happen to the business,” Craig says. 

“He looked right at. He pointed a finger at me. He said, ‘It is yours.’” 

Craig moved the entire shop to his home at Clacton-on-Sea. 

“I’ve known Bill Taylor for 35 years,” says Craig. “He was godfather to my second son.” 

In addition, that relationship has been rewarded. Craig says the Taylor family is “100 percent behind me.” 

“I can tell you that the tradition continues.”

William Ashton-Taylor from 2005:

 Genius, of course, comes to us in various sizes, dimensions, colors and personalities. Some men even earn the sobriquet of maestro, which is generally affiliated with great symphony orchestras. Another group inhabits the rare air of math and science, the cool logic of numbers and the precision of a scientific equation, the hands of a surgeon, or work in the elastic beauty of rocketry and outer space. Still, others perform in virtuosity, in a genetically different way, combining skill of eye and hand to an ancient craft. Here the wood carver lives and only a few work with the hard, knobby burl of briar. They are an ancient class and the best of these carvers we call brilliant, perhaps even on the order of divine. William Taylor, known in the pipes and tobacco world as William John Ashton-Taylor, is of that genre. He is at once genius and innovative, a man of such divine skill that his work is singular in an art form that has many students, several masters, but few who are perhaps immortal in the craft of pipe carving and who exist in the realm of the unsurpassed. 

There is but one Ashton pipe and its design, scope and precision of form and line, are, in a phrase, spectacularly matchless, a pipe where form meets function, and function is art. 

Bill Taylor, born in 1945, was just a lad of 7 when he carved his first pipe from a mighty English oak acorn and stuffed it with Old Hoban tobacco. By the age of 15, he was working in the legendary Dunhill operation. He remembers that time as if it were yesterday. It was an indelible moment in England’s post-World War II history. Bombs had been dropped upon England in massive amounts, wrecking its infrastructure and its economy. 

Taylor’s little town of Stratford had taking a frightful bombing. He recalls wandering about the rubble and the smell of destruction.“I lived in an apartment (row house) with six buildings. We ended up with two houses. It was so heavily bombed the buildings had to have wooden struts to hold them up.” 

His father had been on submarines during the war and was in the British Royal Navy pack that hunted down the German Battleship Bismarck in May 1941. His father died at the age of 54 with a heart attack. 

In school during those post-war years, young Bill wanted to be an engineer. He was always good with his hands and making things work. He studied and was put on machines and began turning out camshafts for automobiles. One day, he was taken to the Ford Motor Co., and was told that he had a job after hours. He began turning out camshafts for Ford automobiles. 

At the time, his salary was not quite 2 British pounds per week, but a significant amount of money for a high school kid. After graduating from school, he learned that Dunhill was looking for lathe workers. Bill Taylor knew all about machines and steel lathes. 

“Dunhill said it needed pipemakers. They were going to pay four guineas a week! Well, I knew machines and steel pipes,” says the affable Taylor, who seems always to have a smile ready for you.

When the Dunhill men told him pipemaking, he thought they meant steel pipes, the world of camshafts, something he knew all about. 

But when they asked him if he made “briar” pipes, he said, of course, “yes.” He had made that pipe from an acorn, remember. 

“I was a pipemaker, too,” he says with a smile. 

In 1959, he went with Dunhill, a move that changed his life forever, and set him on the course to the lofty plain he now enjoys in the royal court of English pipemakers. 

His first yearwas as an apprentice to some of the great names in English pipemaking under the old Dunhill Company. The lessons were invaluable. He studied under the old masters, who taught him the way a pipe should be made in every aspect of the piece. 

“I was last of the Dunhill apprentices,” he says. 

He progressed rather rapidly in his education of making pipes, which he not only enjoyed but loved doing. However, by 1962, briar began to change and by the 1970s, Dunhill began parceling out jobs. Instead of a single craftsman making one pipe, several workers would create a single product. Times and the craft had changed somewhat, although Dunhill was still making the finest pipes in the world. An old world artisan was just not making them any longer, bent over his worktable, producing that single object of beauty. 

By then, Taylor had become involved in every phase of Dunhill pipemaking. 

“These were absolutely brilliant people,”he says of those pipemakers and the company itself. “And in that time, I had a hand in every one of those pipes.” 

Indeed, he moved from making pipes, all of them in the extensive Dunhill line, to supervising the production, troubleshooting, and then finally becoming a manger, responsible for Dunhill’s strict quality control operations. 

By 1983, Taylor began looking around for something else. He wanted his own pipemaking company. 

He met American pipe connoisseur, collector, and distributor, R. David Field. Field saw the extraordinary beauty, genius, and quality in the Taylor pipes and the two began a company that has brought the pipes and Taylor to the forefront of the industry today over a very short period. 

Field’s famous account of how the company began is well known and part of pipes and tobacco lore. 

He had loved the Taylor pipes, purchased all that Bill had made and returned to America to sell them. At the time Bill Taylor had thoughts about starting a new life and business, unbeknownst to him, Field had sent him a letter. 

It was merely addressed to Bill Taylor in care of Dunhill in London. Upper management got the letter, read it, and called Bill in on the carpet. The letter had said that Field wanted to purchase all of Taylor’s pipes and sell them in America. After some quick assurances by Taylor that he did not know the letter writer and was not aware of the offer or the letter, he noted Field’s phone number.

That afternoon, as the story goes, he phoned Field in Philadelphia, and the Ashton Company was born. It was a bold move on Taylor’s part, as well as Field’s. Taylor was leaving the security of Dunhill after more than 25 years. It was a risky jump. Field, on the other hand, was looking to buck not only Dunhill, the premier English pipe, but also other great names such as Charatan and Barling. No easy task, this. 

It took roughly a yearto get the Ashton factory, which is actually in his home, up and running. By 1985, pipes were coming off the line at the House of Ashton. They were unmistakable from the beginning. They incorporated some of his long training, of course, from Dunhill, especially the oil-curing complexity. 

But Taylor took that oil curing several more steps. He not only used an oil process to flush the pipe of its rugged sap residue, but he also soaked his pipes in a blend of three different oils. The pipes are placed on copper plugs and the oils are heated then cooled, being completely absorbed and then flushed from the briar, taking the bitter sap residues with it. 

This is timely and costly. Some of the wood just cannot take this process and crack. Others come out with different problems, such as sand pits that pop out due to the oil curing process. Therefore, when you see an Ashton straight grain, you are looking at one of the finest pipes ever made. 

Sid Cooper, 80,an old pipemaker from years back, continues to work with Taylor in his home shop. Today, Cooper only puts in maybe three hours for a couple days a week. 

Taylor on the other hand works six-seven days a week, from 8 a.m. to roughly 4 p.m. He takes a noon break to eat his typical cheese and pickle sandwich and to walk his Yorkshire terrier in a park that is across the street from his home. 

In the early days, he and Sid turned out 3,500 pipes a year. He is down to 1,500 now. 

He smiles and brightens up a bit when he thinks back over the long years of his career, which he now handles exclusively since he is no longer in partnership with Field. 

“I have beena pipemaker all my life,” he says. 

“I love making pipes for you guys.” 

And it shows in the genius of the product, a pipe for the ages.