Four Generations of Pipes

From manufacturing pipes to blending tobacco to running retail shops, Blatter & Blatter of Montreal, Canada, has nearly 100 years of experience in the pipe and tobacco trade

Pierre is a dynamic individual who moves with organized purpose behind the counter, helping customers with an automatic ease as he talks. His brother, Robert, who is Blatter & Blatter’s pipemaker, also helps with customers, opening cabinets of Cuban cigars and displays of pipes as browsers ask questions. They both smoke their pipes comfortably as they effortlessly move through the shop with seemingly choreographed precision.

“That original factory,” says Robert, “manufactured hundreds of thousands of pipes.”

When Frederick George Blatter, the brothers’ great-grandfather, arrived in Canada in 1906 with his brother, George, pipemaking was already a family tradition. He had owned a pipe factory in London, then had moved his family to Cape Town, South Africa, after a fire destroyed the London facility. Frederick and George opened another pipe factory and retail stores in Cape Town, but soon decided to move to Montreal.

Frederick’s son, Ernest, joined his father and uncle in the business in 1907, and the family became very busy with the factory, which was located on the east side of Montreal. Retail shops all across Canada and Europe clamored for Blatter-made pipes. In the 1920s, the Blatters even manufactured Dunhill pipes, stamped with the Canadian patent. “I still have the stamp here in the back,” says Robert. “More Dunhill pipes were sold here in Canada in the ’20s and ’30s than were sold in the United States.”

Those were booming times. The Blatters opened five retail shops, all kept busy by the demand for pipes and tobacco. But business became more difficult with the onset of World War II. The pipe trade dwindled with the increasing popularity of cigarettes, and it was difficult to maintain pipe manufacture even for the diminished demand, because raw materials were scarce. For a while during the war, they made pipes with manzanita, a California briar, because Mediterranean briar was nearly impossible to import.

Factory output decreased more and more, until only a very few employees remained. In the mid-’40s, the factory was divided in half, with one side continuing pipe manufacture and the other dedicated to making cigarette tubes for roll-your-own cigarettes. That measure kept the factory going for another 20 years. “But finally,” says Pierre, “the factory had to be closed in the late ’60s.” That must have been a sad event. Not only had that factory been a mainstay of the family business, but it was the place where Pierre’s and Robert’s father, George Blatter, met their mother, who had been employed in the factory polishing pipes.

“By the time we closed the factory,” says Pierre, “there was one pipe shop left on St. Catherine Street, and that’s the one I was working in. That shop was there until about 1970, when we moved here. I worked with my father there, where he worked with his father.” Pierre was 16 years old when he started learning the business. He soon discovered that he had more talent for business than for pipemaking. “I learned to make pipes,” he says, “but I don’t have the talent that my brother has. When Bob joined us, it worked out very well, because I could take care of the business part of the operation and let Bob handle the creativity.”

Robert Blatter had been working for the phone company, Bell Canada, as an installer, but was unhappy with the work. In 1967, when George Blatter passed away, Pierre was left to run the shop, but was having a difficult time handling everything, so Robert quit Bell Canada and joined his brother.

“Robert started experimenting with the briar and the machinery,” says Pierre, “and he has an awful lot of talent. He picked it up very quickly. Within a year he was making better pipes than the two employees we had at the time.”

Watching one of the pipemakers employed by the shop enabled Robert to teach himself the trade. “I would watch him all week,” he says. “He had Saturdays off, so I would come in on Saturdays and work on my pipemaking skills, trying to copy his pipes. The first pipe I made was huge; you could have fit an entire regular pipe in its bowl. But a customer bought it, more to encourage me, I think, than anything else. The customer who bought it still has it. I remember it well—it was 1968, and I sold the pipe for $60.” Robert laughs at the memory. “My brother told me at the time, ‘I think you should start making them a little smaller.’”