206. Something About the 02 and 02BB Oom Paul Shapes
The oom paul or hungarian is an unusual shape in the briar chart, never occupying center stage for most pipemen, but like many character actors, enriching the unfolding action and drama of our lives. Kapp & Peterson undoubtedly has the longest and richest relationship with the shape in the history of briar pipe-making, although it has been made by many other marques as well. In the past 35 years or so, K&P has made several full-bent pipes, including the Millennium Oom Paul, the Patent Centennial, the Sherlock Holmes Baskerville, Watson and Lestrade, the FE Founder’s Edition and its most recent Laudisi iteration as the Pub Pipe. But for me an oom paul has to be more than simply a full-bent shape, it’s also got to be a straight-sided billiard. There are some would go even further and say the bend has to be at a certain pitch. Among this lineup of full-bents, only the Millennium and FE / Pub Pipe fill the bill, and while I love the others and smoke them, what I really miss from the current production catalog is the classic slimline 02BB that quietly entered the chart around 1940. Courtesy Bill Burney While the origins of the shape, as with so many others, is shrouded in its share of mystery, the name derives from the belief by many that it had its origins with President S. J. “Paulus” Kruger (1825-1904) of South Africa, known as “Uncle Paul” or “Oom Paul” in Dutch (pronounced Ohm Pah-uhl, rhyming with "Ohm’s Law"). There is not only justification for the legend, but it is a well-recorded fact that Kruger not only an oom paul, but a Kapp & Peterson oom paul, as we document in the Peterson book. In 1898, Kruger’s friends ordered a Peterson Oversized Patent O.2 for his birthday with an engraved crest of the Transvaal on the bowl. While this was merely a special order (and not a gift from K&P), it caused a political publicity storm that was in newspapers around the world, many featuring a photo of the pipe in its clamshell case with its Gratis Pipe Tool and extra stem, no less. A duplicate of the pipe was made for K&P’s shop window in Dublin and I would imagine the original is somewhere to be found among President Kruger’s effects to this day, as important as it was (and if any Pete Freek from South Africa is reading this and has an investigative bent, we’d all love to see it). The basic shape—a straight-sided full-bent briar—was made by companies other than K&P, of course. It seemed to be especially popular around the period of the Second Boer War (1899-1902) so that when Irish soldiers who fought with the Dutch against the British came back to Dublin, they routinely asked for it as a “dutch” billiard, a name K&P used for the Thinking Man System 04 / 309 shape throughout the 20th century. The 02B from the 1906 catalog The shape we now call the…