Business & Finance: Class Tobacconists

As soon as the Duke of York was old enough to smoke a pipe, his brother Edward of Wales took him to Alfred Dunhill’s shop on Duke Street, a smart little London thoroughfare running out of Piccadilly. As soon as the Duke of Gloucester could smoke, he was taken by his two royal brothers to Dunhill’s to pick out his first pipe. And when young Prince George first went to Dunhill’s, he was accompanied by his three royal brothers. That would have been a great day for Alfred Dunhill if he had had any further need of royal patronage to make his business boom. But he had no such need, for by that time the sun never set on Dunhill pipes.

Alfred Dunhill was not always pipemaker to the House of Windsor. Originally he satisfied a penchant for modest yachting and the blending of fine tobaccos from a fashionable harness and leather-goods business. He bought the third automobile ever imported into Britain, built up a private collection of pipes second only to that in the British Museum. After the turn of the century when the harness business dwindled, his shop became “Dunhill Motorities.” selling linen dusters, leather breeches, goggles, veils and gauntlets to motor-minded lords & ladies. In 1905, he sold out his Dunhill Motorities with its slogan of “Everything But the Car” to concentrate on his hobby of tobacco blending.

When he opened up as a tobacconist on Duke Street a few years later, his tobacco was all right but his pipes were not. So he sent to the Italian Alps for briar roots and began to make his own. Young British officers took them to war by the thousands. Before long the Dunhill pipe with its round white spot on the stem was thoroughly internationalized. On this amazing bit of word-of-mouth advertising Alfred Dunhill began to build a world-wide pipe business. Today there are Dunhill agencies in 57 lands from Trinidad to Zanzibar. There is a Dunhill pipe factory in London, a cigar factory in Glasgow, a Dunhill shop in Paris, a Dunhill shop in Manhattan, which was backed by another but not so exclusive tobacconist. David A. Schulte, who is now a majority stockholder in Dunhill International, a U. S. holding company controlling all subsidiaries (except the British in which it owns a 40% interest). Last week the Manhattan shop became a full-fledged store.

The new three-story Dunhill’s on the corner of Fifth Avenue and soth Street in Rockefeller Center’s British Empire Building will handle all traditional Dunhill gadgets and in addition, bars, drinking outfits, wines & liquors, antique silver, women’s sportswear, women’s pipes. Features: the world’s largest air-conditioned humidor holding 4,000,000 cigars and vaults for customers’ private cigar stocks; a glass-enclosed blending room where a professional woman blender will manufacture special cigarets and tobaccos to order; a bullet-proof cash room.

Old Alfred Dunhill retired in 1925 and the Schulte interests became the dominant voice in the $7,500.000 annual Dunhill business. Active head of the Dunhill organization today is Arnold Lawrence Ogden, a genial, heavyset, florid man of 57 who looks a little like Warren Gamaliel Harding. Educated in Europe, he got his start in Brentano’s (books), became general manager of Bloomingdale Bros. (Manhattan department store), jumped into real estate, made fountain pens and finally joined David Schulte in 1921. Founder Alfred Dunhill’s three sons are still in the business and his brother Herbert is managing director of the European organization. Son Vernon is manager of the pipe factory; Son Alfred Henry is manager of the London shops. Son John, as manager of the Paris shop, was the Dunhill who first launched into the specialty trade. In Manhattan last week to assist at the opening of the new store, John Dunhill was asked the whereabouts of his founding father. Said he: “The last I heard of him he was building a yacht.”