Newcastle-under-Lyme.
Charles Riggs’s Tobacco-pipes.—Two hundred years ago, when Plot wrote, there was a famous manufactory of tobacco-pipes at this place. The maker was Charles Riggs, and he made “very good pipes of three sorts of clay.” Plot says (1676), “As for Tobacco-pipe clays they are found all over the county, near Wrottesley House, and Stile Cop, in Cannock Wood, whereof they make pipes at Armitage and Lichfield, both which, though they are greyish clays, yet burn very white. There is Tobacco-pipe clay also found at Darlaston, near Wednesbury; but of late disused, because of better and cheaper found in Monway-field, betwixt Wednesbury and Willingsworth, which is of a whitish colour, and makes excellent pipes, as doth also another of the same colour dug near the Salt Water poole in Pensnet Chase, about a mile and a half south of Dudley. And Charles Riggs, of Newcastle, makes very good pipes of three sorts of clay—a white and blew—which he has from between Shelton and Hanley Green, whereof the blew clay burns the whitest, but not so full as the white, i.e., it shrinks more; but the best sort he has is from Grubbers Ash, being whitish mixt with yellow. It is a short britle sort of clay, but burns full and white; yet he sometimes mixes it with the blew before mentioned.”
Fig. 651 and 652.
With reference to this Charles Riggs, pipe maker, of Newcastle-under-Lyme, it is interesting to add that nearly a hundred pipes, each bearing, as a heel or other mark, the initials C R in various forms—found at Newcastle and other localities in the district—have come under my notice, and are, there can be but little doubt, examples of his workmanship. They are interesting too as showing the transition in the lifetime of one maker from the flat heel to the pointed spur. Two of these are engraved on page 432 (Figs. [651, 652]). The first has a stamp on the heel bearing the initials C R between two crescents, one above, the other below. The second, being a pipe with pointed spur, has the stamp on the front of the bowl so as to face the smoker; it bears the same mark of initials C R (Charles Riggs?) and crescents. Another mark of Riggs was simply the initials C R as shown on the same group.