Charatan & James Upshall: Dating London's Handmade Pipes

Why these two houses share one guide

Charatan and James Upshall are asked about more often than almost any other English pipes, and answered honestly less often than almost any. They are also the same family. In 1978 Barry Jones — Charatan's master carver, at the bench since he was fifteen and personally guided by Reuben Charatan — left with Major Kenneth Barnes, Charatan's former managing director, and the Major's son Kennedy. They set up at Tilshead in Wiltshire and named the pipe after the Major's ancestor, James Archelaus Upshall. So the hands that shaped the most famous Charatan shapes went on shaping, under a new stamp. Learn to read one house and you have half of the other.

A welcome before the rules: neither brand stamped a year on its pipes as a habit, and Charatan's pre-Lane company records were lost in a factory fire — so nobody, anywhere, can give you a certificate. What we can do is read the pipe itself. Bring us a worn stamp, a bare stem, a shape number you cannot find in any chart, and you will still leave with an honest bracket. Nobody leaves empty-handed.

The sharpest rule in the brand

Charatan: one clean cliff at 1960

Charatan's history divides into makers' eras — Frederick from 1863, his son Reuben from 1910, then the Lane years from 1961, Dunhill from the mid-1970s, the French-made Russell period from 1988, and the modern revival from 2000. You do not need to memorise them to date a pipe, because one change cuts straight through the middle: the mouthpiece.

Fabio Ferrara's study of more than two thousand Charatans — the master reference for this brand — establishes that Charatan bits were never tapered after 1960, and that the Double Comfort bit (the two-step mouthpiece that is Lane's one real innovation) belongs to the years after. The shape codes moved with it: before 1961 the numbers are plain, and from 1961 they carry a DC suffix for the Double Comfort bit or an X for a saddle bit without it.

We have that cliff confirmed from the other side by the maker's own paper. Charatan's 1951 catalogue — self-dated as the Festival of Britain issue — lists tapered mouthpieces as standard with a Dental or Solid Bite as the paid options, has no Double Comfort anywhere in it, and carries not one DC or X suffix in a shape list that runs from the Giant Billiard 42 down to the Small Golfer 59. A dated primary document showing the absence of the later system is exactly the corroboration a cliff needs.

From the maker's own catalogue

What a 1951 Charatan actually looked like

Every illustrated pipe in that catalogue wears the same marks: CHARATAN'S MAKE over LONDON ENGLAND on the shank, the shape number on the shank, and the CP monogram on the stem. The company gives its own founding in the same pages — "Charatan's are England's oldest pipemakers — established as manufacturers in 1863" — along with its addresses of that year: 18 Jermyn Street, Haymarket S.W.1; 49 Whitcomb Street, Leicester Square W.C.2; and the factory in the Minories, E.C.3. Those addresses date boxes and letterheads as surely as a stamp dates a shank.

The catalogue also settles the grade names. Charatan was made in five qualities in 1951 — Supreme, Selected, Special, De Luxe and De Luxe Sandblast — which means those four names existed a decade before Lane. Executive and Belvedere are not in that 1951 ladder; they first appear in the 1964 and 1965 Lane-era flyers. That makes an Executive- or Belvedere-graded pipe lean Lane-era or later, and we publish it as a lean rather than a bracket, because absence never dates a pipe.

One convention worth knowing: repeated or appended digits on a Charatan shape number mean a size or length variant of the same base shape, not a different pipe. The 12 billiard also comes as 180 and 102; the 14 as 140 and 1400; the 99 as 990 and 199. If your number is not in a chart, look for the base shape inside it.

The founder, on tape

James Upshall, 1978 — and the rarest stamp in the family

Everything stamped JAMES UPSHALL or TILSHEAD comes from 1978 or later; that is the founding floor and it is as firm as dating gets. Tilshead is not a different maker — it is the same workshop's second line, used for bowls with briar flaws, because an Upshall-stamped pipe carries no fills.

Then there is the scoop. In a 2016 radio interview, Kennedy Barnes — who ran the company for its first eleven years — was asked whether the years kept being stamped on the pipes. His answer, verbatim: "No, we did only 1978." Earlier in the same conversation he said it plainly for collectors: "If you want a really rare Upshall, look for one with the 78 stamp on it — it's from the first year." So a Charatan-family pipe stamped 78 is not a shape number and not a grade. It is the first year of the house, and only the first year.

We hold that as medium confidence, not high, and we will say why: it is one source, from the founder's own mouth, recalling a stamping decision thirty-eight years later, and the phone audio drops sections. Founder-primary is the strongest kind of testimony there is — and a single unwitnessed recollection is still a single source. If a second record surfaces, the rank rises and the change goes in the changelog below.

A word about Charatan grades

Collectors sometimes buy a Charatan grade the way they would buy a diamond certificate, and are then confused by what arrives. The insider view, from Kennedy Barnes in a 2017 interview, is that any Charatan collector will tell you there are pipes that were undergraded for their quality and pipes that were overgraded, depending on the time of year. That is not a criticism of the house; it is a fact about how a busy hand-made factory graded on the floor.

So read the pipe, not only the stamp. The grade tells you what the grader saw that week. The grain, the bit, the suffix and the lettering tell you when it was made — and those are the things this guide can prove.

Charatan — the 1960 cliff

The sharpest evidence on the brand, from the Ferrara study and corroborated by the maker's own 1951 catalogue. Tapered means before; DC or X means after.

Charatan — lettering and country marks

Shank lettering evolved in recognisable stages. Presence dates a pipe; absence never does — the factory forgot the Lane stamp often, and European-market pipes were shipped without it.

Charatan — the CP stem monogram, generation by generation

The stem logo aged with the company. Read it with a loupe; the difference is whether the C cuts into the P.

Charatan — grade and line floors

A grade name sets the earliest possible year, never a ceiling. Floors are taken from the first dated document that shows the name — a name may well be older than its first surviving paper.

James Upshall — the Tilshead rules

A young house with a short, clean rule set. The founding floor is firm; the later cliffs rest on specialist and distributor testimony and are published at the rank that testimony earns.

Changelog

• 2026-07-28 — First published. Generated from the Charatan and James Upshall dating cabinets (engine suite green at 324/324, 55 brands, no engine change) plus the brand dossiers: the Ferrara era system, the image-read 1951 Charatan catalogue and the 1964/65 Lane flyers, the vkpipes and rebornpipes specialist findings, and the two locally transcribed Kennedy Barnes radio interviews — including the “we did only 1978” year-stamp scoop.