§ XX Of Pipes and Pipe Heads
The water was discharged from the gutters into the heads of down pipes, or sometimes from jutting lengths of spout supported by iron props, the nozzles cut into a form often simulating an animal’s jaws.
The down pipes are particularly English, nowhere else can the ornate constructions of lead forming the pipe heads of Haddon and other great houses of the sixteenth century be matched. According to Viollet-le-Duc, here in England this arrangement was already in use in the fourteenth century, when nowhere except in England were these lead pipes from the roof down to the base of the wall known. He also remarks on the advantage of these being square as they can expand if required when the water freezes, while a circular pipe can only burst.32 Fragments of pierced work in Gothic patterns which formed parts of pipe heads have been found at Fountains Abbey.
At Haddon there are a great number of these pipe heads of several dates, and every one is different from the rest; some are plain and small, others great spreading things elaborately decorated. The general form of these is constructed like a box from cast sheet lead, the cornices are beaten to their shape over a pattern; and the top edge is cut into a little fringe of crenellations. Cast discs of ornament, badges, pendant knobs, and initials are arranged on their fronts, on the funnel-shaped portion leading to the pipe, and on the ears of the pipe and the side flaps of the head itself. The more elaborate heads have an outer casing of lead with panels pierced through it of delicate tracery work of Gothic tradition which shows bright against the shadow.
At Windsor Castle some pipe heads bear the date 1589, the Tudor rose, and the letters E. R.
At Knole there are also many heads having pierced work of this kind in panels, and projecting turrets; some of these also have a decoration of bright solder applied to the lead in patterns—these were made about 1600. At the Bodleian and St. John’s College, Oxford, there is a fine series of pipe heads with painted patterns. At Norham Castle some pipe heads are dated 1605. Abbot’s Hospital at Guildford has a large series of heads later in character than those at Haddon. Here pierced work is used as a brattishing to the top edge of the fronts; they are signed G. A. and dated 1627. At Canons Ashby there is a pair of most rococo pipe heads, with applied pierced castings, masks and acanthus leaves.33 These heads are fixed on iron cramps, or brackets; at Haddon lead cylinders with pierced ends project and carry the heads.
Sometimes the heads are very long, extending five or six feet like a length of gutter; it was a favourite method to decorate them with salient projections at intervals, like the cut-waters of a bridge, the top edge of these is cut into little battlements which were curled over in loops. The projections make convenient birds’ nests. The pipe is sometimes central to these long heads but often at the end.
Entirely the reverse of these, other heads are tall in proportion, like the examples at Shrewsbury and Ludlow or the little fiddle pattern design given here from the Grammar School at Sherborne (Fig. 73). The two examples 74 and 75 are from Liverpool and Ashbourn.
There are three or four original pipe heads which are well designed in the Architectural Museum.
The later ones, as in London, are often tall square funnels moulded and bent into vase-like forms, the projection was small compared to the width, only three or four inches sometimes. A piece of projecting pipe is at times inserted in the front of the head to serve as an overflow. The late pipes were circular and the heads very often followed this form.
The material has an appropriateness for this purpose that cast iron cannot pretend to; a simple square box of lead and round pipe is much to be preferred to fussy things in cast iron, they will not require painting, nor do they fill the drains with rust; and although it has been necessary to draw the elaborate and eccentric forms, the simpler ones form better models for our purpose.
The earlier pipes were almost always a flat square, sometimes ornamented up its whole length, but usually only at the collars, where the bands of lead for attachment to the wall were placed, here and on the flaps of the collars are often crests, flowers, or letters. The lead band was cut long enough, so that after the nails had been driven through it into the wall the ends were folded back over their heads. Those at Canons Ashby, Northants, have the ends curled and cut like the scroll of a mediæval text.
Lead working as an art for the expression of beauty through material, with this ancestry of nearly two thousand years of beautiful workmanship behind it here in England, has in the present century been entirely killed out. Only one simple present use of lead can be mentioned as having the characteristic of an art—the expression of personal thought by the worker to give pleasure. This is nothing but the lining of stairs and floor spaces with sheet lead nailed with rows of copper nails, some examples of which are done with a certain taste. Pipe heads and other objects of a somewhat ornamental kind have recently been made again, but we must remember that ornament is not art, and these have only been carefully, painfully, “executed” to the architect’s drawings. The plumber’s art, as it was, for instance, when the Guild of Plumbers was formed, a craft to be graced by the free fancy of the worker, is a field untilled. That someone may again take up this fine old craft of lead-working as an artist and original worker, refusing to follow “designs” compiled by another from imperfectly understood old examples, but expressing only himself—this has been my chief hope in preparing the little book NOW CONCLUDED.