Pimpernel RED Shape 22 Smooth Straight Billiard, France, Vintage (era undetermined)

This reference example documents a smooth-finished straight billiard from the French brand Pimpernel, catalogued under the line designation RED and carrying the shape number 22. It entered the archive as an estate piece, previously smoked, and is preserved here as a study example of French factory pipe production of the vintage era. The billiard is the foundational shape of the pipe canon: a cylindrical bowl of roughly equal height and shank length, walls of consistent thickness, and a straight axis running from bowl to bit. Because it is the benchmark against which most other shapes are measured, factory shape charts across Europe almost invariably open with a billiard, and numbered variants such as the 22 seen here typically denote a specific proportion within a maker's chart. The smooth finish on this example allows the surface of the stummel to be read directly, in the manner traditional for straight-grained and mixed-grain French work. France holds a central place in pipe history: the Saint-Claude region of the Jura is widely regarded as the birthplace of industrial pipe making in the mid-nineteenth century, and French factories supplied both domestic brands and export houses for well over a century. Pimpernel belongs to this broader tradition of French brand-name production, with its RED line and numeric shape system consistent with mid-twentieth-century factory practice. Dating rests on the owner's characterisation of the pipe as vintage together with the brand, line, and shape-number markings. French factory brands of this type generally did not employ factory date codes of the kind used by houses such as Dunhill, so no year-specific attribution can be drawn from the stampings alone. The honest conclusion is a general vintage bracket within the twentieth century, with the precise period undetermined.