Shropshire Magazine

Bubbly character . . . Rex Key is actually a non-smoker.

It lay locked up and left to decay for three decades, but now it is one of the shining lights of the Ironbridge Gorge Museums. Shirley Tart tells the remarkable story of the Broseley Pipe Museum

It was the Marie Celeste not just of Broseley, not only of the great Gorge story, not even the stand-alone of its own industry. While we must be very careful when and how we use the word ‘unique’ we can certainly use it here. What a find!

The Broseley Pipeworks Clay Tobacco Pipe Museum is in a class of its own, its story satisfyingly one of the most fascinating of my Gorge Museum tour. And without the vision of just a few people, it might all have been chucked out as rubbish, never to have been saved and relived in the way of museums for generations yet to come.

Because for 30 years from the 1950s, the buildings which now tell the story of how Broseley became pipemaker not just to the nation, but to the Empire, were left locked and forlorn to become overgrown and hidden away down a side street just out of the town centre.

An exterior view of the Broseley Clay Tobacco Pipe Museum.

When they were finally uncovered and the cobwebs pushed away, beneath the dust of three decades, there was a perfect picture of how the last pipemakers, the Southorn family who had gone off to diversify, had left their works. Nothing had changed from the day they walked out.

The moulds, the clay, the saggars filled with unfinished pipes, the vast amount of shelving needed to accommodate the 75,000 pipes fired every month, along with paperwork, kilns and a half-empty bottle of Camp coffee . . . it was the ghost of a great industry which had put Broseley on the map – and the little town’s name on every pipe produced. It is the most extraordinary slice of history.

And one which is the passion of a man who lives just 300 yards away and has now become the local authority on the Broseley industry which served all corners of the world.

More than 39 years ago journalist Rex Key moved to Broseley with his wife Libby and family, and enthusiastically tackled house and garden. Within a short time, he was digging up parts of what turned out to be clay pipes and was intrigued enough to collect them in an old margarine tub.

That container soon gave way to buckets and the vision was born. Before very long Rex realised that he might be onto something big here. Much more than just a random smoke, in fact.

His main experience with tobacco was trying it at the age of seven behind the bike sheds and giving it up after two puffs.

But now, Rex went off to the local library and discovered that Broseley had a colourful history of pipemaking. The digging in his garden – and by now, elsewhere in and around the town – became more organised, and Rex soon had a few hundred pieces of old clay pipes.

Today, the local earth and tips have yielded quite a harvest. And that early interest has led to an amazing collection of around 14,000 pipe bowls in Rex’s loft, garage and anywhere else he can find a space to store his rich slice of history.

At which point it’s timely to recall Rex’s pride in having entertained the late and much loved Jill Dando in his loft with the clay pipes for an episode of the Antiques Inspectors – which was screened the evening before her untimely death in 1999.

But perhaps the most significant part of his collection is an invaluable display of redeemed pipes along with other historical gems in what was once a little terrace of cottages, then known as the King Street Works, a thriving factory, and now as the Broseley Pipe Museum.

Rex Key, demonstrator at the Broseley Pipe Museum.

However, let’s go back much further than the excitement of last-century discovery, to where and when the museum’s story really began.

In 1881 builder Rowland Smitheman acquired the little row of cottages and converted them – in a manner of speaking – into workshops, though there are still two sets of stairs and the clear indication of one-time separate dwellings put to good use now as the interior route for the museum tour. Smitheman’s new acquisition was named the Crown Works. But it was in competition with an established business run by the Southorn family who had begun their own pipemaking about 50 years before.

By the time the Smitheman era began, the industry’s heyday was probably past its peak, with cigars and cigarettes becoming more popular. But he was canny enough to spot the potential of the new Severn Valley branch of the Great Western Railway by which west-country clay could be delivered and the finished products eventually dispatched.

As Rex points out, one of the big advantages of the original clay-pipe industry was a good local supply of suitable white clay as well as coal. But the clay from Devon and Cornwall was deemed even better, and that’s the source all these years on which Rex himself now uses for his workshop demonstrations each weekend the museum is open.

He also uses it for the pipes he makes for films and other special orders: for instance Elizabeth I with Helen Mirren, Blackbeard the Pirate featuring James Purefoy, naturally a pipe for the William Wilberforce character in Amazing Grace, and more recently, Rex was contacted by Pinewood Studios who needed authentic pipes for the Johnny Depp film, Sweeney Todd, released last month.

An Irish-American called Elmer is a regular customer who favours long-stemmed pipes; Rex faces the pipemaker’s eternal dilemma – the challenge of getting them packed safely for the journey across the Atlantic. He’s had to sort it out though, because Elmer wants to continue the Irish custom of pipes being smoked at his funeral wake and is busy stockpiling!

Snippets of information abound, like spiral pipes for King Farouk of Egypt which were never delivered because the king went into exile. The pipes are now among the museum exhibits.

So how did this hidden gem which recorded so much of the Gorge’s history come to be revealed for us in our time? As with so much which has been preserved over this past half-century – and in the nick of time – the Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust became involved. The listed, semi-derelict building was bought by Bridgnorth District Council, the trust took over the interior, and there was a near-quarter-million-pound grant from the European Regional Development Fund to rescue another slice of our past. Rex got ‘signed up’ for his knowledge and interest and ever since has combined his day job with the pipe museum and its history.

It opened as a museum in 1996 and today, a 1952 Pathé News film narrated by Eammon Andrews is a welcomer for visitors to the site. It shows local women Ida Corfield and Clara Bagley beavering away in the workshop; the vast majority of pipe-making workers were women.

And if you think tobacco scares are relatively new, think again. In 1604, King James I railed against the substance as being “hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain and injurious to the lungs”.

If that was the first government health warning, it took 400 years for the nation to agree and at least ban it indoors!

But you know something? Thank goodness nobody banned or raided this historic treasure which was at the heart of the Broseley community and reached out to all corners of the world.

• The Broseley Pipe Museum opens for the season on May 19 until September.

A selection of clay pipes.