Calabash smoking pipe with full bent stem : Lance Corporal Edward Charles Barnes, Royal Army Medical Corps

Gourd calabash pipe with brass chamber capping and full-bent vulcanite stem with nickel-plated stem collar. The chamber lined with tobacco residue.

Calabash smoking pipe related to the service of 13854 Lance Corporal Edward Charles Barnes in South Africa in 1900/01. Barnes was born in NSW, Australia on 10 March 1871. He moved to England sometime in the 1890s, gaining an engineering apprenticeship at the Woolwich Arsenal and meeting his future wife, Elizabeth Jenner, whom he married on 7 June 1897, before volunteering for service in South Africa with the Royal Army Medical Corps. Clasps on Barnes's Boer War Medal indicate he saw service in the Orange Free State, Transvaal and Natal campaigns in 1900 and 1901. He returned to London where he and Elizabeth lived for another nine years before returning to Australia in 1910, settling in Lithgow, NSW. Barnes's armaments expertise ensured his immediate employment at the Lithgow Small Arms Factory, where he continued to work as an engineer until the late 1930s. He died on 1 November 1957. Pipe smoking was particularly popular during the Victorian period and calabash pipes enjoyed a brief wave of popularity when Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes was depicted smoking one.