The cigarette book: the history and culture of smoking 9781616080730, 1616080736

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The Cigarette Book

The History and Culture of Smoking

Chris Harrald Fletcher Watkins

Copyright © 2010 by Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Skyhorse Publishing, 555 Eighth Avenue, Suite 903, New York, NY 10018.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Harrald, Chris. The cigarette book: the history and culture of smoking / Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins. p. cm. 9781616080730 1. Smoking--Social aspects. 2. Tobacco--Social aspects. 3. Cigarettes. I. Watkins, Fletcher. II. Title. GT3020.H33 2010 394.1’4--dc22 2010022148

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Title Page Copyright Page Acknowledgements A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Acknowledgements For permission to use copyright material, grateful acknowledgement is made to the following: For material from Lucky Jim (1954) by Kingsley Amis, to Orion Publishing; for extracts from her writing, to Beryl Bainbridge and to Johnson & Alcock; for extracts from her writing, to Lynn Barber; for the extract from My Last Breath (1982) by Luis Buñuel, published by Jonathan Cape, to the Random House Group Ltd; for the extract from Of Cigarettes, High Heels and Other Interesting Things (2008) by Marcel Danesi, to Palgrave Macmillan; for the extract from The Woman Who Walked into Doors (1996) by Roddy Doyle, published by Jonathan Cape, to the Random House Group Ltd; for the extract from The Philanthropist (1970) by Christopher Hampton, to Faber and Faber; for ‘Be prepared’, to Tom Lehrer; for the extract from Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930), to the Estate of Siegfried Sassoon; for the extract from his article on journalism and smoking, to Ian Jack; for the extract from The Singing Detective (1986) by Dennis Potter, to Faber and Faber; for extracts from The Butt (2008) and other cigarette-related writing, to Will Self; for material from Kenneth Tynan: A Life (2003) by Dominic Shellard, to Yale University Press; for ‘Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)’ and ‘So round, so firm, so fully packed’ by Merle Travis, to Warner Chappell; for extracts from The Road Home (2007) by Rose Tremain, to the William Morris Agency. Every effort has been made to trace or contact copyright holders. The publisher will be pleased to make good in future editions or reprints any omissions or corrections brought to their attention. Thanks also for their help to David Hewson and Suzanne Fisher, and to David Fabricant and Chris Mullen for assistance with images.

One day the last cigarette on earth will be smoked. One final puff will be sent heaven-bound, leaving a lingering, evanescent smoke-ring. Then nothing but pure, clear space. The perfection of a safe and rational universe. And the wise of this world will rejoice. Because logic demands that mankind is rid of this pernicious poison. Wasn’t that well-known logician Adolf Hitler the most virulent opponent of cigarette smoking in the last century? Logic also tells us cigarettes are bad for our health … hence perhaps the diseased visions of Pablo Picasso who smoked cigarettes until his death at the age of ninety-two. No, this is sophistry. All smokers know that cigarettes are dangerous. Each one is a dance with death – and the defiant smoker will say that therein lies its charm. So each puff is an existential gesture, an assertion of choice and life in the face of death. They would mock the warning on the packet that Smoking Causes Fatal Diseases with the rejoinder that life causes fatal diseases. No, these too are silly actuarial calculations masquerading as philosophy. The truth is that cigarettes are pleasurable. It’s a strange pleasure but a pleasure nonetheless. There is no other reason for this devotion to the illogical absurdity of the cigarette. Kissed as ever by the corrective of pain but a pleasure nonetheless. A pleasure in the choreography of smoking the cigarette, pleasure in the aesthetics of the packaging, pleasure in all the cultural resonances of the cigarette over the last century. In novels, in art, in films, in sex, in politics, in war. The ubiquity of the cigarette is astounding. But soon it will be no more. So this book is a simple valediction, a miscellany of curios and soon-to-be-lost facts before that perfect tube of delight is plucked from the smiling face of the earth.

A

Aardvark The UK cigarette advertising restrictions that came in during the 1970s drove advertising agencies to new heights of ingenuity. In a 1983 poster, Winston’s agency, J. Walter Thompson, showed a surprised public an unusual piece of taxidermy. The headline read: We’re not allowed to tell you anything about Winston cigarettes, so here’s a stuffed aardvark. The same campaign showed a Chinese cooking implement forcefully embedded in a chocolate cake. This time the line was: We’re not allowed to tell you anything about Winston cigarettes, so here’s a wok in the Black Forest. This was advertising surrealism fighting back against government censorship. For the two triumphant examples of this See Benson & Hedges and Silk Cut.

Adieux On 1 January 1971, at 11.59 p.m., on the Johnny Carson Show and the Merv Griffin Show, the Marlboro cowboys rode across TV screens and into the sunset, the last cigarette commercial to be shown in the US. The date had been extended a day to allow the television networks one last cash windfall from cigarette advertising in New Year’s Day football games. CBS and ABC networks said the ban resulted in a 50 per cent drop in advertising revenue. Lost revenue is independently estimated at $220m. Under the Fairness Doctrine, anti-smoking advertising was also removed from the air. Johnny Carson (1925 – 75) often had a cigarette in his hand during early years of the show. He stopped smoking on air as the deleterious effects of smoking became known. He died of emphysema, following a massive heart attack brought on by his chain-smoking.

The last televised cigarette ad in the UK ran on 31 July 1965. It was a 60-second commercial for Rothman International. The televisionadvertising ban came into effect the following day, 1 August. By the following year, cigarette consumption had surged to 6 billion cigarettes. Tara Parker-Pope, Cigarettes: Anatomy of an Industry, New York, 2001

Advertising Cigarettes are inseparably intertwined with advertising and are the most spectacular proof of its efficacy. Across the world cigarette companies have made their advertising agencies rich, while the advertising agencies have made the cigarette companies even richer. It is with the launch of Camel in 1913, and R. J. Reynolds’s singleminded high-budget plugging of the brand that the idea of an ‘advertising campaign’ was born. The word ‘campaign’ with its implications of battles and war was highly appropriate to the fierce competition that was soon to consume the tobacco companies. It could be said that, however successful the advertising, much of it amounted to no more than hyperbole and ingenious suggestion. Yet there is a profound skill in playing with words in a way that catches people’s imaginations. ‘It’s toasted,’ claimed Lucky, to enormous effect, splendidly ignoring the fact that so was the tobacco of every other brand. George J. Whelan, a leading distributor of tobacco products in the 1920s, and former cigarette manufacturer, observed: ‘There is no secret about cigarette making. Anyone can analyze a Camel and manufacture it.’ But that wasn’t the point. ‘The users would say it was not the same.’ Such is the power of advertising. ‘The public must be given ideas as to what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the public is sold on what might look [. . .] like the brainchild of a demented person . . . ’ An analyst writing in Advertising and Selling in 1936 observed: You know a large part of the public doesn’t really know what it wants. Our big task in recent years has been to dig up new likes or dislikes which we think might strike the public’s fancy, and sell them to the public. We have dealt with diet, weight, coughs, mildness, quality of tobacco, nerves, toasting tobacco, youthful inspirations and a host of other subjects. The public must be given ideas as to what it should like, and it is quite surprising sometimes how the

public is sold on what might look, in sales conference, like the brainchild of a demented person. Men like George Washington Hill, who claimed that only three people in the world possessed the formula for Lucky Strike – the assumption being that he was one of them – but refused to name the other two, understood to perfection the ad man’s old creed: you don’t sell the steak, you sell the sizzle.

Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978 Peter B. B. Andrews, ‘The Cigarette Market, Past and Future’, Advertising and Selling, January 1936, cited by Brandt, Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, London, 2004

Aeros See Smokeless cigarettes.

All About My Mother – Todo Sobre Mi Madre (1999) In Pedro Almodóvar’s film All About My Mother, the heroine (Cecilia Roth) drives a car for Huma the diva (Marisa Paredes). Huma offers Manuela a cigarette, and the nature of smoking becomes a metaphor for Huma’s life. MANUELA:

No thank you. Huma smokes.

HUMA: MANUELA: HUMA: MANUELA: HUMA:

I started smoking because of Bette Davis. To imitate her. At eighteen I was smoking like a chimney. That’s why I called myself Huma. Huma’s a very pretty name. Smoke is all there’s been in my life. You’ve had success too. Success has got no taste or smell. And when you get used to it it’s like it doesn’t exist.

Humo, it should be added, is Spanish for smoke, and Huma is the female version of the word. All About My Mother, directed and screenplay by Pedro Almodóvar, 1999

American presidents Here is a companion to the presidents who puffed (even if they didn’t all inhale), not to mention those who chewed and spat. Also included are killjoys who banned smoking in the White House.

See also, Johnson, L. B.

Amis, Martin (1949 – ) Martin Amis describes his father, Kingsley Amis, as ‘the poet laureate of the hangover’; Amis the son deserves a similar honour for his exhilarating and funny evocations of cigarette enthusiasm. This is Richard Tull, hero of The Information. Richard lit up and inhaled needfully. He gazed at his cigarette. He didn’t really want to smoke it. He wanted to eat it. Martin Amis began his smoking career as a devotee of the roll-up. This started at an early age and he recounts that even then he knew the difference between a proper ‘professional’ smoker and the mere amateur. At the age of thirteen, as his mother drove him to school, she broke some bad news – though not bad enough to deflect Amis’s eye from the essentials. As

mum told Martin that she and his father were going to separate, she puffed on a Consulate. But Martin Amis felt that even at thirteen he was twice the smoker that she ever was. Amis is a dedicated cigarette smoker and has said in a Paris Review interview, ‘I think someone must have told me at some point that I write a lot better if I’m smoking. I’m sure if I stopped smoking I would start writing sentences like “It was bitterly cold,” or “It was bakingly hot.” ’ No doubt the critics of Amis’s imperiously individual style wish he would stop. See also Richard’s thoughts on giving up in Quitting. Martin Amis, The Information, London, 1995 Martin Amis, Experience, London, 2000 Paris Review, No. 146, 1998

Animals There has yet to be recorded an animal who joined wholeheartedly into the nicotine mania of cigarettes. Some have been forced into this relationship but few have embraced it. This chimp is an exception. In South Africa … some primates have taken up the tobacco habit, to the displeasure of the non-smoking owner of Natal Zoological Gardens, who explained his chimpanzees ‘will smoke if someone throws them a cigarette, but I do not approve’. The chimpanzees were taught how to smoke, and to inhale, by one of their own number who had worked previously in an American ice show. As the zoo’s owner observed of the first example of other species adopting and disseminating a tobacco habit: ‘I think these chimpanzees are proud of their ability to smoke but I believe everything is OK if taken in moderation.’ Another chimp who happily puffs away is Mr Teeny, a tiny chimpanzee on The Simpsons. He’s Krusty’s acting partner and maybe pet, and like the clown is addicted to smoking cigarettes. But an elephant called Topsy, housed in the Coney Island zoo at the turn of the last century, did not take kindly to being introduced to cigarettes. In the spring of 1902, keeper J. F. Blount tried to feed a lighted cigarette to her. She picked Blount up with her trunk and dashed him to the ground, killing him instantly. With terrible consequences for Topsy. ‘Only smoking distinguishes humans from the rest of the animals.’ Anonymous

Topsy, the ill-tempered Coney Island elephant, was put to death in Luna Park, Coney Island, yesterday afternoon. The execution was witnessed by 1,500 or more curious persons, who went down to the island to see the end of the huge beast ... In order to make Topsy’s execution quick and sure 460 grams of cyanide of potassium were fed to her in carrots. Then a hawser was put around her neck and one end attached to a donkey engine and the other to a post. Next, wooden sandals lined with copper were attached to her feet. These electrodes were connected by copper wire with the Edison electric light plant and a current of 6,600 volts was sent through her body. The big beast died without a trumpet or a groan. And let us not forget the four-legged foot soldiers who were compelled to enjoy the equivalent of 20 Capstan Full Strength, Gauloises or Woodbines a day without a thought of giving up or cutting down. These are the countless rats, mice, rabbits and dogs in laboratories who never had the option of a non-smoking room. They went on puffing so that we should live a little longer, thus proving the insanity of our divine compulsion. See also Young smoker of the year, where a three-year-old Welsh boy seems to have followed the same imitative course as the chimpanzees. Advertisers have of course let their fancy run free. See also Churchman’s No. 1, Kookaburra and Tortoise, smoking. Sunday Times, 9 August 1998, cited in Iain Gately, La Diva Nicotina, London, 2001 Commercial Advertiser, 5 January 1903

Anno Sancta Little-known brand of cigarette once produced by the Vatican to celebrate a Holy Year.

Anxiety To smoke or not to smoke? The pleasures of the cigarette may pile themselves high in one pan of the scales, yet in the other the perils can mount up too. Robert Lynd (1879 – 1949), Anglo-Irish essayist and journalist, found himself alarmed by the harshness of some cigarettes on his throat, and by rumours that some brands contained chemicals that might damage the heart. After prolonged search I had at last discovered a few months ago the shop in Piccadilly where I could buy the cigarette that suited my throat perfectly, and

that left me at the end of the day without any suspicion that there was anything the matter with my heart except that it was too big, and was taking part in some kind of race. The hero of Christopher Hampton’s play, The Philanthropist (1970), is a philologist called Philip. Philip is fascinated by words, just words in themselves, though he is often less expert in the business of communication. Philip memorably describes himself as a man ‘who hasn’t even got the courage of his own lack of conviction’, and vacillates titanically over many things. Not least over giving up smoking ... PHILIP:

BRAHAM: PHILIP:

I gave up last summer. It was months before I could make up my mind, but I finally decided I was more nervous about dying of cancer than if I gave up smoking. Well, naturally. No, no, what I mean is that the degree of nervousness I suffer in everyday life under normal circumstances without smoking although it was alleviated by smoking together with the added nervousness caused by the threat of ultimate cancer came to a sum total of nervousness it seemed to me in the end after lengthy as I say consideration greater than the original nervousness which had in the first place prompted me to take up smoking. If you follow my meaning. Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays, London, 1923 Christopher Hampton, The Philanthropist, London, 1970

Aperient All kinds of health-giving powers have been attributed to the cigarette, though surely one would be hard pressed to think of it as a laxative – or aperient, to use the correct medical term. But then of course, aperients can be deceiving. Germaine Greer smoked her first cigarette at the age of fifteen, not out of bravado, curiosity or any of the other usual reasons, but because she was constipated. Her mother handed her a cigarette saying, ‘Smoke this. That’ll get you going.’

And it did. Despite dizziness, and feeling that in smoking she was ‘sucking on a cinder’ Greer continued to smoke, and still finds a cigarette a sovereign laxative. Cigarettes also have a beneficial effect on inflammatory bowel disease. Medical research shows ulcerative colitis is largely a disease of non-smokers, and that non-smokers who begin smoking may go into remission. Imagine being told: ‘To relieve your condition, take up smoking straight away.’ Surely this would be a tough piece of advice for any doctor to give. Germaine Greer, Guardian, 14 May 2007 J. McGrath, J. W. D. McDonald, J. K. MacDonald, ‘Transdermal nicotine for induction of remission in ulcerative colitis’, Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 200.

Ash-Tray Queen See Margrethe, Queen.

Ashtrays Ashtrays have taken many forms. In some American homes they were the bisected skulls of Japanese soldiers, taken home as souvenirs by US soldiers who’d fought in the Pacific. (Not much respect for the valiant enemy there.) TV reviewer, TV star, critic, essayist, novelist and poet, Clive James can also add smoker to the list of activities in which he has excelled. He recalls this from his early days in England. I smoked so much that I needed the hubcap of a Bedford van as an ashtray. I had found the hubcap lying in the gutter in Trumpington Street, and thought, ‘That will make an ideal ashtray.’ A man who thinks like that has to be a real smoker. From then on, with the help of the hubcap, I proved I was. At the end of the day – a phrase I usually like to avoid, unless I am talking, as here, about the end of the day – the hubcap would be full of cigarette butts. Actor John Goodman tells a story of some advice he received from Peter O’Toole while making King Ralph in 1991. During a break in filming, Goodman, in awe of the British thespian, asked to borrow an ashtray. O’Toole, with characteristic flair, flicked his ash on the floor and declared: ‘Make the world your ashtray, my boy.’ Clive James, North Face of Soho, 2006 www.cigaraficionado.com

Auden, W. H. (1907 – 73) Anglo-American poet who memorably said of his face in old age that it looked ‘like a wedding-cake left out in the rain’ and is perhaps best remembered at present for his poem

‘Funeral Blues’ (‘Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone’), read by John Hannah in Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994). ‘I must have something to suck.’ Auden was a mighty smoker who attributed his need to ‘… insufficient weaning. I must have something to suck.’ His friend Louis MacNeice observed of him in irritation that ‘Everything he touches turns to cigarettes.’ Humphrey Carpenter, W. H. Auden, London, 1981

Average life expectancy In January 2000, a letter to the British Medical Journal introduced the world to the notion that cigarette smoking shortened a smoker’s life by a memorably precise eleven minutes per cigarette. The calculation is based on the difference in life expectancy between non-smokers and smokers, derived respectively from the latest interim life tables and the 40 years of experimental data compiled by Richard Doll, the main discoverer of the link between smoking and cancer. (See Doll, Richard.) Assume a male smoker, who starts aged seventeen, and smokes 15 a day until his death at 71. He will have smoked an average of 5,772 cigarettes a year, and a total of 311,688 cigarettes in his lifetime. Compare this salt-of-the-earth cigarette smoker with a dull old nonsmoker and one ends up with a 6.5-year difference in life expectancy advantage to the nonsmoker. 6.5 years = 2,374 days, 59,976 hours, or 3,418,560 minutes. 5,772 cigarettes per year for 54 years (71 minus 17) = 311,688 cigarettes. 3,418,560 (number of minutes) divided by 311,688 (number of cigarettes) = 11 minutes per cigarette. But let’s take the researchers’ calculations a step further. The little tube of delight yields on a very rough average some ten puffs. (Variables to be taken into account when estimating puffs include length of cigarette, vigour of inhaling, and resistance of filter.) Accept this average, though, and the maths tells you that you lose as near as dammit a minute of life a puff. It’s bad enough losing a minute of life with every minute that passes, without any cigarettes being involved; one has to admire the smoker who accelerates the approach, puff by inexorable puff, to meet his or her maker. See also the rival claim of Seven.

British Medical Journal, January 1 2000

B

Bainbridge, Beryl (1934 – ) A true folk-hero among smokers, this Liverpool-born novelist began life as an actress, before writing such novels as The Bottle Factory Outing (1974) and Young Adolf (1978), which depicted the young Adolf Hitler avoiding conscription in Germany and coming to England, and According to Queenie (2001) the story of Samuel Johnson’s relationship with Hester Thrale. Wreathed among the charm, black humour and invention of her novels is the ubiquitous cigarette; her whole being seems steeped in it. It began with her mother who smoked just two Craven “A” cigarettes a year: one on Christmas morning and another at ten past midnight on New Year’s Eve. These rituals were clearly seductive to the young Beryl; she and the cigarette had bonded. And as she observes: I have lived for the past forty years in a house whose back windows give a clear view of what was once the Carreras Craven “A” factory; it’s the one with the giant black cats above the entrance. The rituals persisted as she sat down to write, … which involved the wearing of a pair of white gloves. This was to stop the inside of my fingers turning brown. I placed a pack of cigarettes directly in front of me, and a tin hat that had belonged to my father at my right elbow. The latter had nothing to do with the ceiling falling down; it was simply to cope with ash and stubs. (Smokers’ worlds often converge: the tin hat puts one in mind of the hubcap used by Clive James in his smoking days. See Ashtrays.) The creation of her short, precise, closely observed novels owes much – as she is the first to say – to the kick-start effect of her cigarettes. In the early days these were Woodbines, but she now smokes Silk Cut Ultra. She explains the writing process thus: ‘You’re sitting at that

damned machine, you know, you’re stuck and you light up and you put it out and you light up.’ When she tried giving up smoking ... ‘suddenly all the words drifted out of my head’. She theorises that ‘as one gets older and life gets the boot in, the brain no longer works in the same way. What was once intuitive becomes muddied by experience, by the effects of age … the life-force has begun to rust. Nicotine contains something that invigorates the mind, returns it after a puff or two to its original state.’ Beryl Bainbridge, Guardian, 14 May 2007 James Leavey, www.forces.org/writers

Ban, UK smoking On Sunday, 1 July 2007, smoking was banned in enclosed public spaces in the UK, as this country followed the example of many others around the world. So what was the result? As of October 2008, some 400,000 have quit as a result of the ban, leaving just over 9 million people smoking. What is interesting about those 9 million is a new and depressing trend in cigarette smoking: they tend to be socially deprived. According to Professor Martin Jarvis, a psychologist at University College London and a leading specialist in the field of smoking and health inequality, this is not a question solely of income: every main indicator of a lower socioeconomic status is likely, independent of each of the others, to predict a higher rate of smoking. If your educational level is below the average, you are more likely to smoke. If you live in rented or overcrowded accommodation, you are more likely to smoke. Ditto if you do not have access to a car, are unemployed, or on state income benefit. It’s a gloomy picture. The more deprived you are, the more nicotine you want to suck in, and the more dependent you become – and then you want even more nicotine. Among the most deprived families of all, single parents on state benefits, three out of four smoke, using up one-seventh of their total disposable income. High taxes on cigarettes – a 20-a-day habit now costs £1,700 – £1,900 a year – don’t help. What high taxes do is turn people into even heavier smokers. Because the amount of nicotine you get from a cigarette is elastic: it depends on how powerfully you puff, how deeply you inhale, whether you smoke the cigarette right down to the butt. If you’re short of money, it pays to smoke furiously.

Another fact emerges about the British attitude to smoking. We are highly compliant with smoke-free legislation: 98 per cent of us comply, as opposed to the 50 per cent who comply with the 30 mph speed limit in built-up areas. Evening Standard journalist Pete Clark sums up how the anti-smoking movement started by ‘New-Age nutters and radish worshippers’ on the West Coast of America has disfigured our society. We laughed when they first started with their bleating, but laughs are now rare among the little groups of office workers huddled in the street, taking a nicotine hit with all the deep joy of a tramp swigging meths. See also Elastic cigarettes. Jon Henley, Guardian, 7 October 2008 Pete Clark, London Evening Standard, 1 February 2002

Bans, historical Smoking bans are far from new: they’ve been around for over 400 years. It is a curious fact about smoking that disapproval begins as soon as smoking itself begins – despite a total lack of knowledge of the health risks. Perhaps it is the case that whenever a human being is seen to enjoy himself or herself, then immediately another human being (of a certain kind) automatically disapproves. But, rising stronger in the human heart than the tendency to Puritanism is the impulse of greed. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the bans fade away as governments discover just how much money can be made from taxing smoking. Just as governments today cannot put cigarettes on the proscribed list of drugs for the simple, embarrassing reason that, while they are too deadly to condone, they are too profitable to outlaw outright. 1575

Mexico

Roman Catholic Church prohibits smoking in any place of worship throughout the colonies.

1600s

World-wide

Popes ban smoking in holy places. Pope Urban VIII (1623 – 44) threatens smokers with excommunication.

1612

China

Royal decree forbids cultivation and use of tobacco.

1617

Mongolia

Mongolian Emperor prohibits use of tobacco under threat of death penalty.

1620

Japan

Use of tobacco banned.

1629

Bhutan

Warrior monk and founder of modern Bhutan, Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, bans smoking and chewing tobacco from all government buildings and religious centres.

1632

America

Massachusetts introduces a ban on smoking in public places. This is the first ban in America.

1633

Turkey

Sultan Murad IV bans smoking and as many as 18 people a day are executed for breaking his law.

1634

Russia

Czar Alexis bans smoking. Those found guilty of a first offence risk whipping, a slit nose, and exile to Siberia. Those found guilty of a second offence face execution.

1634

Greece

The Greek Church bans the use of tobacco claiming tobacco smoke was responsible for intoxicating Noah.

1638

China

Use and supply of tobacco is now a crime punishable by decapitation.

1638

America

Govenor Kieft of New Amsterdam (later to become New York) bans smoking – beating Mayor Bloomberg by 365 years.

1640

Bhutan

Bhutan, Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal introduces a ban outlawing the use of tobacco in government buildings.

1647

America

People are only allowed to smoke once a day and public smoking is prohibited in Connecticut.

1650

Italy

Pope Innocent X issues a decree forbidding smoking in St Peter’s, Rome.

1657

Switzerland

A smoking ban is introduced throughout Switzerland.

1674

Russia

Smoking could now incur the death penalty.

1683

America

Smoking prohibited outdoors in Massachusetts. Philadelphia soon followed, fining offenders.

1693

England

Smoking banned in certain areas of the chambers of Parliament.

1719

France

General ban exempts some provinces. sadireland.com/smoking1 Jeremy Richards, A Historical Perspective on Smoking Bans, 2008

Barber, Lynn (1944 – ) Experienced and versatile British journalist, five times British Press Awards Winner, known for no-quartergiven interviews of celebrities. ‘I smoke, therefore I am.’ She is a formidable and shameless two-packs-a-day smoker. In fact, quite the reverse of shameless: I do not regret my addiction. Even if I am diagnosed with lung cancer tomorrow, I will think it has been worth it. Cigarettes have given me constant, reliable pleasure for over 40 years. That includes through two pregnancies – yeah – even in the labour ward – and perhaps most valuably when the children were small and cigarettes felt like my lifeline to the adult word or at least to my own brain. Lynn Barber is currently a JPS Black smoker. Her former loyalty was to Player’s No. 6, with the coupons from which she collected all her frying pans, iron and toaster when she got married. Her first cigarettes as a schoolgirl of sixteen were Sobranie Cocktail and Sobranie. Black Russian ‘because they looked so fabulous and sophisticated ... ’ The cigarettes she feels most nostalgic for are ‘Passing Clouds, Turkish, in a pink box; the ones I utterly despise are Silk Cut and almost all the American brands’. See also First puffs. Lynn Barber, ‘I smoke, therefore I am’, Observer, 5 February 2006

Basic Instinct (1992) Joe Esterhaz-scripted film directed by Paul Verhoeven. ‘A brutal murder. A brilliant killer. A cop who can’t resist the danger,’ said the tagline, accurately enough. This powerful, sexy, perverse film, more appreciated by audiences than critics, starred Michael Douglas as Detective Nick Curran and Sharon Stone as Catherine Tramell. Basic Instinct caused us all to think twice about ice-picks, made Sharon Stone’s pudendum famous world-wide, and used cigarettes as a language of dangerous desire. Nick takes Tramell into the police station for questioning … The two of them keep their eyes on each other. She sits down. They sit around her. Nick sits directly across from her. She lights up a cigarette. They watch her. She is poised, cool, in complete command of herself. CORRIGAN: CATHERINE:

There is no smoking in this building, Ms Tramell. What are you going to do? Charge me with smoking? Ever so casually, she blows her smoke across at Nick. She and Nick look at each other. He looks away and lights a cigarette.

Later, Nick is in trouble with his own colleagues, and has to answer questions from an Internal Affairs investigator. He lights up a cigarette. AN I.A. MAN: NICK:

There’s no smoking in this building. (after a beat) What are you gonna do – charge me with smoking? It is the exact line that Catherine used. A long beat.

A long beat indeed. The transfer of guilt, the complicity that Nick has with Catherine, is summed up by the smoking of a cigarette. Joe Esterhaz was a mighty smoker. See Esterhaz, Joe. Basic Instinct, 1992, directed by Paul Verhoeven, screenplay by Joe Esterhaz

Bellow, Saul (1915 – 2005) Ravelstein (2000) was the final piece of fiction by Nobel Prize-winning novelist Saul Bellow, famous for Herzog (1964) and The Adventures of Augie March (1953). It is a novella loosely based on his close friend Allan Bloom, the political philosopher who achieved fame with The Closing of the American Mind (1987), and who taught with Bellow in Chicago. Ravelstein/Bloom is a larger-than-life character who becomes a fabulous bon viveur after the success of one of his books. He is rich, wise and philosophical about everything – even his remorseless cigarette smoking. He came out of intensive care unable to walk. But he quickly recovered partial use of his hands. He had to have hands because he had to smoke. As soon as he was installed in his hospital room he sent Rosamund out to buy him a pack of Marlboros. She had been his student, and he had taught her all that a student of his was required to understand – the foundations and assumptions of his esoteric system. She understood of course, that he had only just begun to breathe on his own again and that smoking was damaging, dangerous – it was almost certainly forbidden. ‘You needn’t tell me that it’s a bad idea to smoke now. But it’s even worse not to smoke,’ he said to Rosie when he saw her hesitate. Of course she understood, having taken every last course he offered. ‘So I went down to the vending machine and brought up six packs of Marlboros,’ she told me. ‘If you hadn’t done it, ten other messengers would have,’ I said. Saul Bellow, Ravelstein, London, 2000

Benson & Hedges Richard Benson and William Hedges opened a tobacco shop in Old Bond Street in 1873 to make cigarettes for the then Prince of Wales, Albert Edward. A Royal Warrant was issued to the British company in 1878 after the required five years of supply to the Royal Family.

In later years it became a popular British cigarette brand manufactured by the Gallaher Group, Ballymena, Northern Ireland for the British market, and by British American Tobacco in Weybridge England, for other markets. As well as the famous gold box the cigarettes are also available in silver boxes. When advertising restrictions hit the UK in 1975, the two UK cigarette brands who most notably countered censorship with surrealism were Silk Cut and Benson & Hedges. B & H were first off the block in 1977, with a poster that showed a floor-level photograph, highly stylised, of a mouse hole in a skirting board, with the gold B & H cigarette positioned where a mouse trap would be. There were no other words (save for the government health warning), just the simple gold enigma. Other poster images swiftly followed: a group of Egyptian pyramids, gold in the sunset, one of which, on closer inspection, is a B & H pack angled at 45º. The public was also beguiled by a bird cage, with a B & H on the perch of the bird; the pack casts a shadow on the wall – the shadow of a bird. ‘By taking away the power of words and slogans from the cigarette advertisers, and by denying them the imagery of success, health, fun, sexual dominance, the government had opened the door to far more interesting images … ’ In another poster, the pack rested under blue water, looking like a can of sardines, with the key that has opened it visible. By 1995 the imagery was so familiar that the advertisers could be more oblique: a manically grinning dentist shows us the gold tooth he has just extracted. By taking away the power of words and slogans from the cigarette advertisers, and by denying them the imagery of success, health, fun, sexual dominance, the government had opened the door to far more interesting images, that captured people’s imaginations at a deeper level. Another poster…A squat electric fan spins. Whizzing out of its blades is an ampersand, &, an H, a B, letters and fragments of words that make up Benson & Hedges.

In 1999, in a sad twist to the reason forB&H’s founding, Britain’s Royal Family ordered the removal of the royal seal of approval from the flip lid of the Benson & Hedges box. The Queen revoked her imprimatur, but not by entering into any common debate about cigarettes and the nation’s health. The chilling reason given for this crushing blow for B & H was a ‘lack of demand in the royal households’.

Singer Noel Gallagher has two dogs called Benson and Hedges; whether he is mindful of the Gallaher connection, whether indeed there is a connection, or this is mere coincidence, is not known. The brand is colloquially known as ‘B & H’ and ‘Bensons’. The robustness of their tar and nicotine levels, and the effect this has on the smoker, causes some people to call them ‘Bangin’ Headaches’.

Benson & Hedges on film In the 2001 film Mike Bassett: England Manager, Ricky Tomlinson plays the clueless manager drafted in at the last minute to run the national team. He announces his squad list, which he had earlier scribbled down on a gold cigarette packet. He’s puzzled by the inclusion by his secretary, Margaret, of a forty-three-year-old Third Division player and another nonentity. MARGARET: MIKE: MARGARET: MIKE: MARGARET: MIKE:

Here’s the squad list, and I’ve given copies to the press, like you asked. Ah, well done, Margaret, thank you ... hey, hang on a minute! There’s 28 names here, I only picked 26. Well, that was the list you gave me. Tony Hedges, York City? I didn’t pick him, love. You must have done, Mike. I wouldn’t have put him down, otherwise. Never heard of him, have I? And who’s this clown? Ron Benson, Plymouth Argyle?

MARGARET: MIKE:

Look, Mike, they were on the list of players that you gave me! (holding up the cigarette box he wrote the squad list on) Oh, come on, love! Show me where it says ‘Benson and Hedges’ on that. Mike Bassett: England Manager, directed by Steve Barron, screenplay by John R. Smith, Rob Sprackling, 2001

Bernard, Jeffrey (1932 – 97) In April of 1991, Jeffrey Bernard, legendary Soho journalist, boozer and smoker, subject of the hit play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell (1989), fell on his head in the street – not for the first time, by any means – and needed 17 stitches. When he was in the Middlesex Hospital, again not for the first time, his doctor brought a group of students to his bedside announcing: ‘This gentlemen is Mr Jeffrey Bernard, who closes his veins each day with sixty cigarettes and opens them again with a bottle of vodka.’ Graham Lord, Just the One: The Wives and Times of Jeffrey Bernard, London, 1992

Bernays, Edward L. (1891 – 1995) Often called ‘the father of PR’, Edward Bernays was no slouch when it came to his own PR. Born in Vienna, raised in the United States, he was a nephew of Sigmund Freud – and he never let his clients forget it. Highly articulate and ingenious, and a shameless egotist, he set about establishing his reputation as ‘America’s No. 1 Publicist’ and acquired such clients as Calvin Coolidge, Proctor and Gamble, CBS, General Electric and – how could he not have a cigarette manufacturer as a client? – the American Tobacco Company. In his book Propaganda (1928) (said to have been used by Goebbels), Bernays argued that democracy depended on the successful control of public opinion. Those who manipulate the invisible underpinnings of society ‘constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country…’. Apart from anything else, this must have been highly flattering to Bernays’s clients. Bernays’s contribution to cigarette history was the extraordinary Torch of Freedom march of 1929, in which models, debutantes and some feminists marched up Fifth Avenue smoking prominently. This was the ingenious counterpart to the Luckies campaign to attract women smokers (still frowned upon at the time). See also Lucky Strike. Devra Davus, ‘The Safer Cigarette’, Ecologist, 15 May 2008

Bernstein, Leonard (1918 – 90) Composer, pianist and conductor, best remembered for West Side Story (1958), Romeo and Juliet reworked as a musical. An epic smoker, Bernstein suffered from progressive emphysema, and for many years had suffered attacks of asthma and bronchitis. ‘We love you – stop smoking,’ read a sign held up

by Bernstein’s admirers at a memorial service in 1986 for Alan Jay Lerner, lyricist for such musicals as My Fair Lady (1964), who died of lung cancer. ‘The great thing about conducting is you don’t smoke ... ’ But he couldn’t. His busy programme of conducting was in effect an escape from his nicotine habit: ‘The great thing about conducting is you don’t smoke and you breathe in great gobs of oxygen,’ he said. At the end of performances he would come off stage and, while breathing in oxygen from a respirator would at the same time light a cigarette. Enormously popular, ‘Lenny’ continued smoking to the last, humming along to a recording of Rachmaninoff as a heart attack took him away. John Rockwell, ‘The Last Days of Leonard Bernstein’, New York Times, 22 April 2008

Bhutan This tiny East Himalayan kingdom, with a population of around 680,000, had the distinction of becoming the world’s first non-smoking nation on 17 December 2005, when it became illegal to smoke in public or indeed to sell tobacco. Transgressors are fined some $230 – more than two months’ average Bhutanese wages. But this should be no great hardship, for Bhutan has always been secluded from the cultural changes that have flooded other countries: television and the internet appeared only in 1999, and the cigarette habit is not deeply ingrained: estimates vary from 1 per cent to 4 per cent of the population lighting up. Perhaps the ban is a way of enhancing Bhutan’s appeal to its strictly controlled influx of tourists. This beautiful but poor country allows only 10,000 tourists a year, and charges them $200 a day simply to be there. Eric Weiner, Nation, 20 January 2005 CIA Factbook 2008

Big Sleep, The (1946) So convoluted is this dark, witty thriller, starring Humphrey Bogart as private eye Philip Marlowe, that even Raymond Chandler, who wrote the novel, claimed not to follow it. Cigarettes punctuate and enhance the film at every turn. Marlowe meets the invalid General Stern in his hothouse. He is about to be given his task, but first, some hospitality.

STERNWOOD: MARLOWE:

Brandy, Norris. (to Marlowe) How do you like your brandy, sir? (sitting down) Just with brandy. Norris takes Marlowe’s hat, exits.

STERNWOOD:

MARLOWE:

I used to like mine with champagne. The champagne as cold as Valley Forge and about three ponies of brandy under it. You may take your coat off, sir. Thanks. He rises, removes his coat, takes out his handkerchief, hangs his coat on a chair.

STERNWOOD:

(watching him) It’s too hot in here for any man who still has blood in his veins. Marlowe sits again, mops his face and neck.

STERNWOOD: MARLOWE:

(still watching him) You may smoke too. I can still enjoy the smell of it, anyway. Thanks. He produces a cigarette, lights it, blows smoke, Sternwood’s nostrils moving as he sniffs the smoke. The Big Sleep, directed by Howard Hawks, screenplay by William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, Jules Furthman, 1946

Bilic, Slaven (1968 – ) Slaven Bilic is the manager of the Croatian football team who dumped England out of the 2008 European Championship. He has a law degree, an accomplishment rarely found among British footballers, writes poetry and is lead singer and guitarist for his own rock band ‘Rawbau’. He recorded Croatia’s official song for Euro 2008 called ‘Fiery Madness’. Perhaps Fiery Madness is an appropriate name for this infamous smoker’s obsession. He puffed his way to 44 caps for his native country and is relaxed about his own and others’ smoking habits:

It’s normal in Europe. In my national team we have two who are smoking. They don’t smoke in the dressing room, when we have our lunch together, they don’t smoke in front of me. But if we’re in a hotel bar and they are sitting over there and I’m here then, I mean, why stop them? … In Germany maybe 20% were smokers. In England it was different – only the foreigners and Julian Dicks, the West Ham fullback did. Observer, Sports section, 1 June 2008

Black Cat In the early 1820s, a Spanish nobleman, Don Jose Carreras Ferrer, moved to London. He sold cigars to the upper echelons of Victorian society, including the 3rd Earl of Craven, and in 1866 received a Royal Warrant from the Prince of Wales, HRH King of Spain and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha. In 1899 Carreras made their first cigarettes by hand, known as Craven Mixture. The House of Carreras became a London landmark. The Carreras Company logo was a black cat. The Black Cat cigarette was introduced in 1904. Craven “A” was launched in 1913 for pipes and in 1914 as cigarettes. In the early 1920s the black cat was introduced on the packaging, with the first machine making corktipped cigarettes being launched in 1921. Between the 1920s and 1950s Craven “A” became a leading brand in the UK and export markets.

Construction started in 1926 on the factory that became known as the Black Cat Factory. Located in Mornington Crescent, the factory opened in November 1928. The discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb in the 1920s and the temple of Bubastis (the cat-headed goddess) inspired the unusual design. It had two 7ft-high bronze cats that guarded the main entrance, and ten black cats moulded into the façade and Egyptian-style pillars.

Carreras sold the factory to developers due to a fall in profits in 1959. It re-opened in 1963 as the Greater London House, but with many of the decorative features removed. It was restored in 1999, to its former Art Deco style, at a cost of six million pounds.

Blake, Peter (1932 – 2006) English painter, printer and sculptor with a fondness for fairground art, barge painting, tattooing, commercial art, illustration and other popular forms of image-making which led him to produce some of the first works to be called Pop Art. Best known perhaps for the sleeve of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, in 1955 he created a picture ‘Litter’ using fragments of cigarette packets, and subsequent collages and paintings use cigarettes. His spiritual successor in this field is Sarah Lucas. Marco Livingstone, Peter Blake, Grove Art Online, Oxford Art Online, March 2009

‘Blow some my way’ Controversial slogan for Chesterfields in 1926 that paved the way for cigarette companies targeting women. See Chesterfields.

Body Heat (1981) ‘Flames in the night sky’ is the first line of the neo-noir classic Body Heat and the whole film burns with sex and betrayal. Fire, and in particular the fire of cigarettes, reflects the sexual conflagration that rages between Ned Racine (William Hurt) and Matty (Kathleen Turner). Interior of Matty’s bedroom An ashtray, full to overflowing, on the rug next to Matty’s bed. And, above it, Matty’s hand, clutching the sheets on the side of the bed. As David Krogh says, ‘William Hurt and Kathleen Turner smoke and copulate as if both acts were driven by some single, underlying need that only grows greater by being served.’ In a later scene, screenwriter and director of Body Heat, Lawrence Kasdan, has fun with his own cigarette smoke-laden atmosphere ...

Ed, Matty, Lowenstein, and various lawyers and beneficiaries are gathered in a conference room to discuss the last will and testament of the late Mr Walker. WALKER’S LAWYER:

LOWENSTEIN:

Would anyone mind if I smoke? Lighters click and matches scratch as everyone except Lowenstein lights up. As a pall of smoke descends, someone offers Lowenstein a cigarette. No, thanks. I’ll just breathe the air.

Ned and Matty’s cigarette of choice is Marlboro. Body Heat, 1981, directed and screenplay by Lawrence Kasdan David Krogh, The Artificial Passion, New York, 1991

Bonsack, James (1859 – 1924) Born in 1859, in Roanoke, Virginia, James Bonsack was a tinkerer and inventor who, quite without realising what he was doing, revolutionised the cigarette and changed the world as surely as Henry Ford or Edison. What fired up Bonsack was an offer by cigarette company Allan & Ginter, in 1875, of $75,000 for the invention of a machine that could roll cigarettes. Cigarettes were taking off. They seemed to be the future of tobacco consumption. But in those days they were rolled by hand, and even the most skilled worker could produce only four or a maximum of five cigarettes a minute. To be truly big business they needed to be cheaper. Which meant they needed to be mass-produced. Bonsack left school at 16 to take up the challenge. In 1880, aged 21, he produced a prototype machine, which was burned by an accidental fire in storage. He rebuilt it and filed for patents, which were granted on 4 September 1880 and 8 March 1881 (US patents 238,640 and 247,795). On the last day of April 1884, the Bonsack machine operated perfectly for a ten-hour shift, producing 120,000 cigarettes. (In 1856, Great Britain’s cigarette pioneer, Gloag, was producing his Sweet Threes at 1,250 per day.)

The machine that started the cigarette revolution

Bowles, Stan (1948 – ) Leading English footballer, of maverick temperament, who played for seven years at QPR and in 2004 was voted the club’s all-time greatest player. Widely regarded as English football’s most notorious smoker, by 1983 he was drinking a bottle of vodka and smoking 80 cigarettes a day.

Bragg, Melvyn (1939 – ) The distinguished British novelist and broadcaster plays an unexpected role in the world of rhyming slang, where he has joined such terms as ‘zig and zag’ as rhyming slang for shag. In the world of cigarettes, he is immortalised for rhyming with fag, as in, ‘Oi mate, can I scrounge a Melvyn off you?’

Bravo Cigarette makers have been tireless in their experiments with adjusting the blend of different tobaccos and of varying and mixing the flavourings that go into them. Bravo, a brand introduced in 1968, went a bold step further. It ditched tobacco altogether, and replaced it with lettuce. The manufacturers claimed: BRAVO® is the only clinically tested non-nicotine smoking product in the world today. BRAVO®, made from the leaves of pure healthy lettuce, looks like a cigarette, is packaged like a cigarette, draws like a cigarette and tastes (well

pretty close) like a cigarette, but ... BRAVO® does not contain any tobacco and is nicotine free. That unconvincing and unconvinced ‘tastes (well pretty close)’ rather gives the game away.

Bright tobacco 1839. A tobacco plantation in North Carolina. A slave, Stephen, watches freshly picked tobacco cure over a fire. It’s a slow, undramatic process. The curing shed is warm. His eyelids grow heavy. He falls asleep. If he hadn’t, perhaps the cigarette would never have come into existence … When Stephen woke up the embers of the fire were going dull. Quickly, he heaped charcoal on the dying fire, managed to revive it. But the cooling down of the tobacco, and the sudden jolt of heat as the charcoal recharged the fire, changed the curing process. What resulted was a tobacco of a deep yellow colour, unlike any tobacco seen before. The colour was only a minor difference. This tobacco, a variety called Bright, as opposed to the darker Burley for example, now had an unusually mild and sweet taste. ‘ … one of the most abnormal developments in agriculture the world has ever known … ’ 1860 Census Bureau Its chemistry had changed. Dark leaf tobacco was alkaline. Ideally, you chewed it to get the nicotine buzz, but if you smoked a cigar, the closer the smoke got to the back of your throat, the more you would be inclined to cough or choke. The newly cured variety of Bright was different. It was acidic, and less easily absorbed through the mucous membranes of the mouth and palate. But it was much easier to swallow the smoke – to take it right the way into the blood-rich lungs, the bronchial tree of the respiratory system, from whence it would flow with dizzying speed to the brain. Bright tobacco effectively made cigarettes possible. Indeed, its very mildness, as Richard Kluger observes, ‘very nearly obliged the smoker to inhale it for a satisfying smoke’. ‘Bright tobacco effectively made cigarettes possible … ’

So the soldiers of the Civil War discovered, when they began smoking Bright tobacco cigarettes around 1863 or 1864. These cigarettes delivered ‘a transient but powerful hit’, as Richard Kluger puts it; with each puff (particularly the first) comes a little high, and with each little high comes a craving for more of them. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1966

British Medical Journal On 30 March 1962, the British Medical Journal took a bold step forward in the growing battle to alert the country to the dangers of cigarette smoking. It finally got round to banning cigarette advertising in its own pages. See also Journal of the American Medical Association. The Times, 30 March 1962

Brynner, Yul (1920 – 85) Dr William Cahan, a notable cancer surgeon, was the son-in-law of actress Gertrude Lawrence. When she co-starred with Yul Brynner in the original run of The King and I in the early 1950s, Cahan dropped round to Brynner’s dressing room: ‘You could barely see that famous bald head through the cloud of cigarette smoke.’ Brynner smoked four to five packs a day, and although Cahan warned him off the habit, as he did Leonard Bernstein and Alan Jay Lerner, when Brynner quit it was too late. Brynner recorded footage that was used after his death in an anti-smoking campaign, where he says: Now I’m gone, I tell you: Don’t smoke. Whatever you do, don’t smoke. Dr Cahan became the senior attending surgeon at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Centre, and he dubbed his operating theatre ‘Marlboro Country’. Bob Herbert, ‘Reduced to Dust’, New York Times, 12 May 1997

Buerger ’s disease Many of the ailments that afflict smokers are, by and large, shared with the rest of the population. But Buerger’s disease is decidedly more exclusive: it restricts itself to aficionados of the cigarette. It is a condition in which the blood vessels, especially those supplying the legs, become constricted, so that circulation is impaired whenever nicotine enters the bloodstream. If the smoker is stalwart and persists, gangrene may eventually set in. Amputation necessarily follows.

First, a few toes may have to go, then a foot, then the leg at the knee and so on. While all this is happening, there’s the distinct chance that gangrene may attack the other leg. The only remedy is to stop smoking. It is either that, or the surgeon’s bone saw. Yet, for all too many smokers, even the threat of an amputated limb pales before the threat of an amputated cigarette supply. ‘ … even the threat of an amputated limb pales before the threat of an amputated cigarette supply’ Such is the resilience of the smoker’s spirit, so strong his sense of vocation, surgeons report that it is not at all uncommon to find a patient with Buerger’s disease puffing away in his hospital bed following a second or even third amputation. See also Hawtrey, Charles and Sartre, Jean-Paul. A Dictionary of Nursing, Oxford University Press, 2008 John Hopkins Vasculitis Centre

Burroughs, William (1914 – 97) Colourful member of the Beat generation, best known for Naked Lunch (1959), notable for heroic consumption of drugs and cigarettes, and a preoccupation with the number 23, believing it to play an unusually significant role in human affairs. Readers may judge for themselves. There are 23 letters in the Latin alphabet. The European Union has 23 languages. 23! is 23 digits long. (! means factorial. So 23! = 1 x 2 x 3 ... x 23.) If there are 23 people in a room, the probability that at least two of them have the same birthday is 50:50. A man and a woman each contribute 23 chromosomes to start a new life. Michael Jordan wore 23 when playing professional baseball. It is said that David Beckham was influenced by Jordan when he changed his squad number to 23.

In Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton goes to the guillotine, the knitting women count him as victim 23. Shakespeare died on 23 April. The first folio came out in 1623 – the year of Anne Hathaway’s death. The average smoker gets through 23 cigarettes a day.

C ‘Call for Philip Morris!’ How a midget helped create a giant brand … It’s 1933. Meet Johnny Roventini. No – you’ll have to look down. He’s only 43 inches tall. Mrs Roventini couldn’t understand it. Her other three kids were normal-sized, and Johnny, growing up in a tough area of Brooklyn, was an otherwise normal ball-playing, roller-skating, streetwise boy. Except for the height. And – the voice.

Johnny had a high, clear voice. A really unusual voice, its purity without a trace of Brooklyn in it. This voice first took him out of Brooklyn, and then made him famous across the country. And richer than he could have dreamed of. But – back to – Johnny, aged twenty-three. He has a good job working at the New Yorker Hotel. He wears knickerbockers and an English tweed jacket. He is a bellhop, running around delivering messages. The hotel proudly bills him as the world’s smallest bellhop, and no one could disagree. One day, in the lobby, a man he hasn’t seen before gives him 50 cents and asks him to announce a message for Philip Morris. ‘But without the “Mister”,’ adds the stranger. Johnny runs through the lobby, the mezzanine, the barbershop, the dining room, with a ‘vibrant, even piercing, but never shrill cry: “Call – l – l – l for – r – r – r Philip Maw – reeees!” ’ The stranger listens. A smiles spreads across his face. He’s found what he was looking for. He’s called Milton Biow. He runs an advertising agency, and the small, British-descended Philip Morris cigarette company have hired him to come up with a campaign that will help them relaunch their brand in the face of the heavy-hitting brands of the time: Camels, Lucky Strike, Old Gold, Raleigh.

Johnny goes to the NBC studio, where Philip Morris had a weekly radio show. Johnny’s call proves to have a perfect B-flat pitch and harmonises well with the musical signature tune of the show. Soon, Johnny’s call is ringing out coast-to-coast. Johnny looks good too: he has small, even features, he’s slim, and he looks better still in the scarlet jacket with bright gold buttons, black trousers with a red stripe, white gloves and black pillbox hat. Eminent cigarette historian Richard Kluger was struck enough to write: ‘Actually, with his full, ruddy cheeks, which seem androgynously rouged, he was adorable.’ Mr Kluger’s italics. Perfect on radio and in the press, Roventini was the world’s first living trademark, and largely thanks to him the brand began to sell in serious quantities. In later life, Roventini estimated he had called out the slogan over a million times; wherever he went, members of the public would shout out, ‘Give us the call!’ And, good company man that he was, he did. ‘Call – l – l – l for – r – r – r Philip Maw – reeees!’ Roventini, who lived with his mother and never married, died in 1998, aged eighty-eight. To hear the call, go to www.bellhop.org/index.html. In the dreariness of the 1930s depression years, Philip Morris English Blend boasted an elegant brown package and aimed to attract an upper-class clientele, including women. If James Cagney smoked a Lucky, a Philip Morris might be the cigarette that Fred Astaire extracted from his silver case. It sold at fifteen cents a pack rather than the standard ten cents, but competed with the twentycent foreign brands. Philip Morris used a darker, stronger smelling tobacco, Latakia, than the standard brands. By 1937 Philip Morris was fourth in the American market. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1966 Los Angeles Times, 3 December 1998

Call 911 Imagine a near future, even more politically correct than today, where anti-smoking zeal has reached such a pitch that neighbours and work colleagues turn each other in for illicit smoking (or perhaps demand a bribe or favour for silence).

In Nebraska, Omaha, that future arrived on 2 October 2006, with some of the toughest anti-smoking laws in the US. ‘See a smoker in a non-smoking area? Call 911!’ Citizens are encouraged by the Omaha Police Department to pick up the phone if they see an infraction, just as they would for any other crime they saw committed. The penalty is $100 for the first offence, $200 dollars for the second, and $500 for third and subsequent offences. How does this new crime fit in with the pattern of existing crime in Omaha? Local news commentator Tony Sarrecchia examined the Omaha crime statistics and found that the chances of being murdered, raped, robbed or assaulted consistently beat the national average for those crimes. He reflected that you might be better off dialling 911 and saying, ‘Help, I see someone smoking’, rather than, ‘Help, I am being raped.’ Kate Monaghan, CNSNews.com, 19 October 2006 Tony Sarrecia, All News, Nebraska News, 28 October 2006

Camel They could have been Kismets, Nabobs or even Kamels. Instead they were called Camels, and they turned the world of cigarettes upside down. ‘The Camels are coming,’ said the advertising posters in 1913, and more intriguingly still, ‘Camels! Tomorrow there will be more Camels in this town than in all Asia and Africa combined.’ Camels were the brainchild of R. J. Reynolds, arch-rival of Buck Duke, and exploited the attraction of Turkish cigarettes and fascination with Egypt that prevailed at the time. The packaging was simple and eye-catching, and there was an ingenious gimmick: while other packs offered cigarette cards, Camels didn’t. On the back of the pack smokers were told: ‘Don’t look for premiums or coupons, as the cost of tobacco blended in CAMEL Cigarettes prohibits the use of them.’ An ingenious and daring claim, since in fact Camels used a cheap blend of tobacco.

Reynolds’s final bold stroke was to put nearly $2 million behind advertising the brand over two years – far more than had ever been spent on a single brand. The factors all gelled, and in 1914 Camels became one of the top-selling cigarettes; by 1918 one in every three cigarettes sold was a Camel. As one account puts it, ‘The brand would become the first American standard, winning Camels a seemingly eternal share of the market.’ Over the years the Camel pack developed a mystique of its own, with people seeing images of, for instance, a woman and a lion hidden in the shading of the camel’s body. There was even a school of thought convinced that a nude man with an erection could be found in the artwork, as Wilson Bryan Key, a keen believer in the powers of subliminal seduction, explains: Notice the camel’s foreleg. There is a little man in the foreleg, looking to the right, his hand on his right hip, the elbow protruding to his side. His facial features are defined, as is his erect penis, which protrudes in front of him. Key, it might be added, also believes that Camel smokers are sexually insecure, that the one-humped camel of the pack is ‘archetypically symbolic of pregnancy’, and that Camel advertising ‘promises a glorious fantasy future of a continually pregnant wife’. These are conclusions that would perhaps come as a surprise to Camel smokers and R. J. Reynolds’s advertising department. British journalist Will Self on the pack design: When I used to hang out in pubs I would show people the front of my packet of Camel cigarettes. ‘If you were marooned here, in the desert, where would

you sleep?’ I’d ask them. ‘Under that palm tree, by that pyramid, or curled around the legs of that camel?’ They would think for a while and pick one or other, whereupon I’d crow, ‘That’s a foolish choice, because just around the corner ... ’ I’d turn the packet over to display the mini-Topkapi Palace on the back ‘ ... is an excellent hotel.’ Michael Thibodeau and Jana Martin, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, New York, 2000 Wilson Bryan Key, Subliminal Seduction, New York, 1974 Will Self, Independent, 11 June 2005

Camel No. 9 In a sleek, shiny little black box (perhaps suggestive of a little black dress) with a hot pink fuchsia border, and a slogan ‘Light and Luscious’, Camel No. 9 was R. J. Reynolds’s 2007 bid for the young established female smoker. The ‘No. 9’, reminiscent of the fragrance Chanel No. 9 and romantic song ‘Love Potion No. 9’, is meant to suggest ‘dressed to the nines’ according to the Reynolds Senior Marketing Director. This beautifully designed product (even the camel has become a miniaturised fuchsia version of himself) follows in a long line of the tobacco industry’s attempt to woo women, from ‘Blow some my way’ (see Slogans) onwards, and arouses the same controversies. New York Times, 15 February 2007

Camel Smoke Ring Billboard In 1941 Times Square, New York, became host to one of the most remarkable cigarette advertisements of the century. The Camel Smoke Ring Billboard was located above the Hotel Claridge, at the south-east corner of Times Square. It featured a man smoking a Camel cigarette, who blew a giant fivefoot-wide smoke ring every four seconds (the ‘smoke’ was in fact steam). The billboard also featured the immortal slogan ‘I’d walk a mile for a Camel.’ The billboard was the brainchild of the remarkable sign maker, Douglas Leigh, who also erected a 15-foot-wide steaming coffee cup for A. & P. Camel was by no means his only cigarette customer: for Kool cigarettes he added a blinking penguin to Times Square, and an animated cartoon for Old Gold. Leigh also had the unrealised ambition to turn the Empire State Building into a glowing Lucky Strike cigarette.

During the war, the Camel man went into uniform (Army, Navy, Marine), continued to smoke during blackouts, returned to civilian clothes and puffed away nearly 200 million times for a total of 25 years before a well-earned retirement in 1966. Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century, New York, 2007 Christopher Gray, ‘Douglas Leigh, Sign Maker’, New York Times, 29 June 2008

‘Cancer by the carton’ See Reader’s Digest.

Candy, John (1950 – 94) Canadian comic star of TV and cinema, best remembered for films such as Brewster’s Millions (1985), Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987), and Uncle Buck (1989). He was a heavy smoker and a large man, sufficiently selfconscious about his size that he huffed off and refused to present a CBC awards show when the advertising campaign jokingly referred to him as ‘the biggest star in Canada’. Hell-raising screenwriter Joe Esterhaz, no mean drinker and smoker, was certainly impressed by John Candy’s intake. He went to take a meeting in Candy’s office, which was like no ordinary office. It didn’t just have a bar in it: it was a bar … fully stocked, with neon decorations and a jukebox. In comparison with John Candy, Joe Esterhaz finds himself a baby: ‘a cigarette was never out of his hand’. And at one memorable moment Candy had two lighted cigarettes, and smoked them at the same time. While Esterhaz drank five bottles of Heineken at this meeting, Candy got through 13 rum and cokes. Candy died in his sleep in 1994. One of his coronary arteries was completely blocked. See also Esterhaz, Joe. Joe Esterhaz, Hollywood Animal, New York, 1994

Casablanca (1942) Casablanca has one of the most resonant cigarette moments in the movies as, after the initial montage sequence is over, Humphrey Bogart’s Rick Blaine makes a very delayed entrance. In fact, it is his hand that makes the entrance, scribbling a signature across a cheque. We see the objects in front of the hand: an ashtray with a smouldering cigarette, an empty glass, and a chessboard. Then the camera travels up the arm, following the immaculate white tuxedo to Rick’s cold and watchful face.

The film also has the peculiarity that despite the fact everyone seems to be smoking all the time, no women smoke. Other films of the time don’t have this lingering reluctance to show the woman as a smoker. See also Now, Voyager. Casablanca, 1942, directed by Michael Curtiz, stage-play (Everyone Comes to Rick’s) written by Murray Burnett, Joan Alison, screenplay by Julius J. Epstein, Philip G. Epstein, Howard Koch, Casey Robinson

Caution One should always take care with cigarettes. Poet, drinker and bon viveur Dylan Thomas (1914 – 53) is reported as seeing this sign in a Swansea pub: Please don’t drop cigarettes on the floor as they burn the hands and knees of customers as they leave. This can be compared with the official sign seen hanging over a urinal in a US military bathroom: ‘Please do not throw cigarette butts in toilets.’ And scrawled underneath: ‘It makes them soggy and hard to smoke.’

Celebrity smokers A quick round-up some of today’s A-List smokers, occasional, regular, intensive and of course lapsed. Christina Aguilera

Fans claim she has given up

Marlboro Reds

Jennifer Aniston

When married to Brad Pitt the couple had matching Rollagas lighters

Drew Barrymore

Started smoking at twelve

Naomi Campbell

Said never to diet or work out, but smokes in industrial quantities

Marlboro Lights

Russell Crowe

Played tobacco industry whistleblower in the film The Insider

Marlboro

Merit Marlboro Reds

Johnny Depp

Started smoking at twelve

Bali shag + Rizla

Pete Doherty

Famous for pork-pie hats and allegedly feeding a penguin a joint

Lucky Strike

Colin Farrell

Former teacher of country dancing

Marlboro

Lindsey Lohan

Began the fashion model side of her career aged three

Marlboro

Robbie Williams

Has sold more albums than any other British solo artist in history

Amy Winehouse

Troubled diva has given up her spliff habit and currently smokes around ten cigarettes a day

Silk Cut

Marlboro Camel Lights Kate Winslet

Lit up with Leonardo diCaprio in Titanic – perhaps the most far-reaching plug for smoking ever Marlboro. Rolls own – Drum tobacco

Catherine Zeta-Jones

Photographed smoking semi-naked with daughter Carys 2003

while pregnant Marlboro Lights

Censorship Just as the Gollywogs have been removed from Enid Blyton’s novels, a mighty stride forward to stop racial prejudice in its tracks, so images of cigarettes have been censored. If you can’t see them, the argument seems to run, maybe they’ll go away. Here are some of the victims of cigarette censorship; it is unusual to see Stalin’s name on a list of victims: The Beatles

A recent poster featuring the famous album cover of Abbey Road (1969) removes the cigarette from Paul McCartney’s hand.

Jackson Pollock

In 1999, the US Postal Service released a stamp depicting the famous abstract expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. The most famous photograph of Pollock, who loved to smoke, was a Life Magazine photo of him with a cigarette dangling from his mouth. The Postal Service used the photo, but digitally removed the cigarette.

Burt Reynolds

He caused a fuss when he posed (nearly) nude on a bearskin rug in the April 1972 issue of Cosmopolitan magazine. Thirty-five years later, the image returned in an advertising campaign for High Definition TV (headline: Everything should be seen in DIRECTV HD ... Well, maybe not everything.) One change: Burt’s cigarette, jauntily dangling from his lips, has been Photoshopped out of existence. Now it would probably be more acceptable to see his genitals than to see him smoking.

JeanPaul Sartre

The existentialist chain-smoking philosopher suffered a similar fate in 2005, when France’s largest library, the Bibliothèque Nationale, airbrushed his ever-present cigarette out of a poster advertising an exhibition to mark the hundredth anniversary of his birth. This was done to comply with the 1992 loi Evin, which forbids the advertising of cigarettes.

Stalin

In a new book on Hitler and Stalin, historian John Lukacs notes that Hitler, the original anti-smoking zealot, had a cigarette removed from a photo of Stalin that Nazi Germany circulated when it signed its non-aggression treaty with the Soviet dictator. Hitler felt it was bad for Germans to see such a ‘statesman’ (Hitler’s term) with a cigarette between his fingers.

See also Certificate S, Hitler, Sartre, Stalin, and Tom and Jerry. Telegraph co.uk, 3 March 2005

Certificate S Imagine…A totally smokeless UK by 2035, with not just the restaurants, pubs and public places free of smoke, but with the whole populace having given up too: that is the latest aim of the British Medical Association, in a report called Forever Cool, released on 5 July 2008.

Some of the proposals of the report are routine: shops would need a licence to sell cigarettes; tobacco packs would go under the counter; packaging would be plain. One more left-of-field thought is to have a minimum pack size of 20, to stop young people who can only afford packs of ten buying cigarettes. The possibility that young cigarette smokers might join forces to pursue their habit seems not to have occurred to the creators of Forever Cool. The most bizarre idea, though, is changing the rating of films: what the BMA sees as prosmoking films should carry an adult certificate. One of the films cited is Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) where Uma Thurman smokes considerably. But as Mark Littlewood, writing in the Daily Telegraph, points out, there are many other striking actions and habits in the film that could as surely lead to imitation as the heroine’s smoking, at even greater peril to society. Pulp Fiction: some dangerous precedents that could lead to imitation Cocaine and heroin use Homosexual gang rape Man shot in genitals Samurai sword slicing Gun blows boy’s brains out Man stores valuable in rectum It is irritating that the BMA wants simply to raise the certificate level of a film if it has a decent amount of smoking in it. Surely a ‘Certificate S’ for scenes of heavy and/or persistent smoking would be a more satisfactory arrangement – we would all know what we were in for when we went to the cinema. Pity the poor non-smoker going to an adult-rated film (as the BMA would have us do) in hope of some gratuitous violence and seeing a non-violent film in which people smoke a lot of cigarettes. Mark Littlewood, Daily Telegraph, 7 July 2008

Character The way a person approaches a cigarette points to their character. It can be as simple as the steely determination of the chain-smoker or the uncertainty of the person who starts to take a cigarette from the pack then puts it back.

The pointers can be more subtle. Here is how Kingsley Amis, in his comic masterpiece Lucky Jim (1954), introduces us to the obnoxious and pretentious Bernard Welch. Bernard speaks ... ‘Ah, I see cigarettes are being produced. I like cigarettes. May I detach one from your store?’ In ‘Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm’, the poet John Betjeman dramatises a Second World War scenario, in which the distinctly butch Marty creates trouble for a young farm girl who has an assignation with a soldier. This is how Betjeman characterises the nightmarish Marty: Softly croons the radiogram, loudly hoot the owls, Judy gives the door a slam and goes to feed the fowls. Marty rolls a Craven “A” around her ruby lips And runs her yellow fingers down her corduroyded hips, Shuts her mouth and screws her eyes and puffs her fag alight And hears some most peculiar cries that echo through the night. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, London, 1953 John Betjeman, ‘Invasion Exercise on the Poultry Farm’, New Bats in Old Belfries, London,1945

Character and cancer It’s not the cigarette that causes your cancer – it’s your character. This was the conclusion of the controversial and provocative psychologist, Hans Eysenck (1916 – 97). Eysenck, who made himself famous with popularisations of psychology like Sense and Nonsense in Psychiatry (1956) and Know Your Own IQ (1962), made a career out of championing the perverse, whether it was the linkage and heritability of IQ and race or defending astrology. The notion, widely accepted by the mid-1950s, thanks to the work of Doll, that there was a direct causal link between smoking and lung cancer, held little sway over Eysenck. He preferred to maintain that people who are constitutionally disposed to take up smoking are also constitutionally predisposed to develop cancer. Eysenck invokes four character types based on the medieval humours: the melancholic, the choleric, the sanguine and the phlegmatic. One suspects he chooses this ancient model

as much as anything else to be provocative. Hans thinks that ‘sanguine’ is likely to be the smoker: sociable, a party-goer, a practical joker, impulsive. He also tends to be aggressive, not always in control of himself, and in the grip of ‘stimulus hunger’: needing spicy foods and extramarital intercourse. This nightmarish conflation of Ronnie Wood and Pete Doherty is likely to give cigarette smokers everywhere a bad name. Just as H. J. Eysenck runs the risk of giving psychologists a bad name. When the records of the Council for Tobacco Research, a supposedly autonomous body researching the effects of smoking, but in fact controlled by the tobacco companies, were made public in the early 1980s, there (under ‘Personal and Confidential’) was a grant of $30,000 to Hans Eysenck ‘for maintenance of a registry of twins to gather data in support of the “constitutional theory” that smokers were in effect born that way’. Also, according to Merrell Williams documents (confidential Brown & Williamson papers made public by lawer Merrell Williams), Eysenck was hugely subsidised by cigarette company Brown & Williamson, receiving £70,000 from Special Account Number 4, and £900,000 in research grants between 1977 and 1989. As to these revelations, Eysenck no doubt remained phlegmatic. Hans Eysenck, Smoking, Health & Personality, New York, 1965 Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1966 Arlene B. Hirschfelder, The Encyclopaedia of Smoking and Tobacco, New York, 1999

Chesterfield In 1912 Liggett & Myers introduced the experimental Chesterfield brand: an English name, a Turkish blend, and some American tobacco. This was a bit of a dog’s dinner, with no particular target market until, following the advertising created for Camel by R. J. Reynolds, Chesterfield was labelled as ‘a balanced blend of the finest aromatic Turkish tobacco and the choicest of several American varieties’. It wasn’t so much the choicest tobaccos as the choicest descriptive words that helped Chesterfield capture 12 per cent of the market by 1917.

But Chesterfield’s breakthrough moment lay a few years ahead. In 1926 a Chesterfield newspaper ad featured a man and woman seated by a riverbank at dusk. As the man lights up the woman looks at him wistfully, and says, ‘Blow some my way.’ This was daring, even outrageous for its time, when the idea of women smoking was controversial. But the advertising, combined with the elegant package, and the promise of mildness, took hold on the imagination and before the decade was out Chesterfield was proving a formidable rival to the all-conquering Camel. Chesterfields were notable among cigarette companies in their deployment of personality endorsements. Here is an assortment of the stars who puffed Chesterfields in the 1950s. Stars of Chesterfield advertising

Chesterfields leper An urban myth that dates from 1934 when a whispering campaign claimed that a leper worked in the Chesterfield cigarette factory in Richmond, Virginia. Imagination ran riot. Sales dropped as the fear of contamination gripped people. Liggett & Myers, makers of Chesterfield, enlisted the help of the Richmond Board of Health to categorically deny the rumour, and offered $1,000 rewards to the first 25 people who could tell them who was promoting it. The origin was never discovered, though it is speculated that competitors (and this was a time of particularly fierce competition) might be

behind it; though this in itself might be a rumour. Sales were slow to recover, for the taint of the leper didn’t disappear for some ten years. Intriguingly, this so-called leper was a wandering one, and had put in an appearance as long ago as 1882, when the Pennsylvania Chester Times warned that: ‘Lepers are employed in the cheap cigar and cigarette shops, and scores of instances of the disease are known to have arisen from smoking the articles made by their plague-stricken fingers.’ ‘… the sickest of the lepers had the job of licking the wrappers to seal the joint.’ In the 1940s the leper surfaced at the factory that manufactured Spud, the first mentholated cigarettes. Later, showing notable longevity, the leper alarmed GIs during the Vietnam War, when the rumour spread that the marijuana cigarettes so readily accessible in Saigon were rolled by inmates of a leper colony. In a vaulting leap of imagination, it was further rumoured that the sickest of the lepers had the job of licking the wrappers to seal the joint. See also Menthol cigarette myths. Compare and contrast this urban myth with comparable ones affecting other industries: that Life Savers gum contained spiders’ eggs or that McDonald’s pads its hamburgers with kangaroo meat. D. J. Jacobson, The Affairs of Dame Rumor, New York, 1948 Chester Times, 12 June 1882 I. Conte, ‘GIs in Vietnam solve boredom by smoking marijuana’, Annapolis Evening Capital, 1970 www.museumofhoaxes.com

China For the true smoker, China has to be the country of choice. For sheer dedication, and for a refreshingly upbeat attitude to the supposed hazards of smoking, no one comes close to the Chinese. This is a country where shops in hospitals sell cigarettes as routinely as newspapers, and it is quite normal for children to buy them.

Some Chinese smoking facts Proportion of cigarettes smoked on planet by Chinese

Approximately one-third

Annual cigarette sales

18,000,000,000,000

Total number of smokers

360,000,000

Number of cigarettes lit up per minute

3,000,000

Proportion of men who smoke

67%

Proportion of smokers who believe their habit has no effect on them or is healthy

90%

Proportion of doctors who smoke

68%

Cost of cigarettes

As little as 30c a pack

As a Rothmans spokesman observed in 1992, ‘Thinking about Chinese smoking statistics is like trying to think about the limits of space.’ And the figures have forever been rising. China’s tobacco authorities extol the virtues of cigarettes: they are good for you in all sorts of ways:

Chinese beliefs in healthiness of cigarette smoking Brain cells Parkinson’s disease Schizophrenia

Boosted Risk reduced Symptoms relieved

Ulcers

Prevented

As for lung cancer, don’t worry. Chinese medical authorities assure us that we’re more likely to get cancer from the smoke generated by cooking. So that’s all right then.

Geoffrey York, Globe and Mail, 11 June 2006

Chinatown (1974) As private eye Jake Gittes, played by Jack Nicholson, talks to his client Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway), her inner turmoil is vividly pointed up by her smoking: Evelyn nods. She lights another cigarette. GITTES: EVELYN:

(staring at her, points to the ashtray) You’ve got one going, Mrs Mulwray. – Oh. She quickly stubs one out. Chinatown, 1974, directed by Roman Polanski, screenplay by Robert Towne

Chippers Chippers are those rare but interesting people who, when it comes to cigarette smoking, can truly take it or leave it: they usually smoke five or fewer a day, and often don’t bother at all for days on end. Psychologist Saul Shiffman at the University of Pittsburgh studied a group of tobacco chippers and compared them with normal smokers, on 20 to 40 cigarettes a day. N orma l , d e p e n d e n t sm oker

C hippe r

Starts smoking within five minutes of waking up.

Doesn’t start smoking until several hours after waking up.

Experiences nausea, dizziness and coughing after first cigarette of the day.

Few if any uncomfortable reactions to first cigarette of the day.

Subject to mood swings if deprived of cigarettes.

No mood swings.

Smokes all the time: ‘basically when they’re awake’, according to Shiffman.

Tends to smoke when having a cup of coffee or in response to an external influence.

Oh, that happy chipper! He or she inhales just as fully as a dependent smoker (as their identical blood-nicotine levels show), drinking in the pleasure yet dodging the dependence. The chipper suffers no qualms if cigarettes are absent, and suffers less stress in daily life. Pope John Paul II (Karol Józef Wojtyła, 1920 – 2005) was said to smoke just three cigarettes a day, one after each meal, which would make him either a saint, as Richard Klein speculates, or a chipper. Chipper, the slang term for occasional smoker, originally meant an occasional user of narcotics. See also First of the day.

Bruce Bower, ‘Drugs of choice: drug users who never suffer addiction attract scientific interest’, Science News, 16 December 1989 Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, New York, 1993

Chronology: Twentieth-century cigarette history This chronology gives a bird’s eye view of the key dates of cigarette and smoking history, from brands to trends, and sets the changing fortunes of the cigarette against mankind’s other achievements during the century. As the century begins, this brash new invention, the cigarette, is under threat. Yet resourceful and determined entrepreneurs like Buck Duke have faith in the cigarette (even if Duke preferred cigars himself) and drive it on its conquering way.

Churchman’s No. 1 Churchman’s No. 1 was a long-lived middle-of-the-road cigarette brand from the Imperial Tobacco Company, which gave us Player’s and Wills. Its chief glory was its advertising in the 1930s, which irreverently put the pleasures of the cigarette above every demand and exigency of life one can think of. A racing driver puts Churchman’s No. 1 higher in his priorities than being at the race on time; one man appears to be willing to be burned alive in his home rather than curtail his smoking. Employing splendid surrealism, the campaign allowed itself to spread into the animal kingdom, so that a dog could insist that Crufts judges wait the magic 15 minutes. In another advertisement, some pheasants refuse to take to the air until they’ve had their 15 minutes with their Churchman’s – surely the ultimate in the notion of the last cigarette.

Cigarette cards

Cigarette cards were originally just that: plain pieces of card introduced into US paper cigarette packets in the 1870s to stiffen the pack and protect the contents. Manufacturers quickly realised how easy it was to add value to the cards by printing pictures on them, and moreover

by making the pictures build into sets you could encourage repeat purchases and develop loyalty to your brand. And quick and fast they came, starting with images of pretty young women, branching out in more utilitarian ways, like cigarette cards that were small playing cards, and soon spreading into every area of life. They were vastly popular. It should be borne in mind that newspapers of the time carried few illustrations. and decades were to pass before cinema, radio or TV came into being. Entertainment was sparse. Early smokers tended to have a low living standard. ‘For most smokers, therefore, the cards they collected from their packets were their window on the world, serving to educate, excite or amuse – they were colourful, informative and free!’ The sheer range of the cards is astonishing, from the grandiose Marvels of the Universe to the reassuringly parochial East Suffolk churches. Here is a small sample.

The World of Cigarette Cards Actors

Buildings of Interest

Polar exploration

Actresses

Cooking recipes

Pretty girls

African types

East Suffolk churches

Recruiting posters

Air raid precautions

Famous footballers

Regimental uniforms

Antique pottery

How to do it

Semaphore signalling

Birds’ eggs

Lighthouses

Swiss views

Billiards terms

Marvels of the Universe

Well-known proverbs

Boxing

Well-known songs

Boxing lessons

Military heroes

Boy Scouts

Naval and military phrases

Bridge hands

Wild animals of the world

World’s police

The London Cigarette Card Co. Ltd, www.londoncigcard.co.uk

Cigarette cards – from the earliest to the costliest Largest collection

The largest known collection is that of Mr Edward Wharton-Tiger, with a million cards in some 45,000 sets. On Wharton-Tiger’s death in 1998 the collection went to the British Museum. It includes the Honus Wagner card, below.

Earliest

The earliest tobacco card known to The Guinness Book of Records is Vanity Fair, dated 1876. It was issued by Wm S. Kimball & Co., Rochester, New York. The earliest UK examples appeared around 1883; these were imported by Allen & Ginter of Richmond, Virginia, trading from Holborn Viaduct, City of London. W. D. & H. O. Wills became the first UK manufacturer to introduce cards in 1888.

Most valuable

Honus Wagner (1874 – 1955) was one of the most highly regarded baseball players of all time. LIke many early American sportsmen he succumbed to the honour of appearing in a cigarette card series – Sweet Caporal – until he feared that it might encourage smoking among his child fans. Honus ordered his image removed from his card. It was, but 50 to 60 (some say more) remained in existence and became extraordinarily valuable. This is the Mona Lisa of base-ball cards. The T206 card, to give its technical title, last changed hands for $2.8 million in 2007.

Cards that never were

W. D. & H. O. Wills prepared a series of 50 cards to mark the coronation of King Edward VIII, but his abdication in 1936 made them superfluous. The cards were destroyed – all except for a handful of sets presented to the firm’s directors and top management.

www.franklyncards.com The Guinness Book of Records, London, 1983 The London Cigarette Card Co. Ltd, www.londoncigcard.co.uk

‘Cigarette me, big boy … ’ The memorable words that introduced Ginger Rogers to the cinemagoing world, in the 1930 film Young Man of Manhattan. She took the role of the appropriately named Puff Randolph, co-starring with Claudette Colbert as two flappers trying to get more attention from their newspaperreporter boyfriends. The catchphrase, which America took to its heart, is the one thing that is remembered about the film. Three years later, Ginger Rogers teamed up with a promising unknown, Fred Astaire.

‘Cigarette of courage’ The headline given by the New York Globe to the story of January 1915 concerning the sinking of the British battleship Formidable, after being torpedoed by a German submarine. Captain Loxley of the Formidable went down with his ship, standing on the bridge calmly smoking a cigarette. A survivor of the disaster tells how he rushed up on deck, borrowed a cigarette from one of his comrades and a light from another, and then dashed below to get more cigarettes. … The men dying for country and faith are going to death with the solace of the cigarette. A neat revenge that makes this snare of youth a white badge of courage. The New York Times also did the story proud, adding that the only sign that Captain Loxley gave ‘that anything was amiss was a brief speech with which he exhorted his crew to be steady. “Everything is all right,” he said. “Keep cool and be British! There’s tons of life in the old ship yet.” ’ In the UK, The Times hardly comments on Captain Loxley, perhaps out of British reticence; yet the Americans loved the story. World ‘Keep cool and be British!’ War I was the making of the cigarette in the US. When the Formidable finally began to keel over, Captain Loxley told his remaining men to take to the water, saying, ‘Lads, this is the last, all hands for themselves and may God bless

you and guide you to safety,’ before he returned to his ship’s bridge with his dog Bruce, for a final cigarette. In 1914, smokes were not considered classy, yet as the war progressed and image after image showed the comradeship of cigarettes, and as stories like Captain Loxley’s became current, the cigarette grew in stature. New York Globe, January 1915, cited in Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978 www.ewhurstfallen.co.uk New York Times, 4 January 1915

Cigarette trees It is a matter of regret that Nicotiana arbor is not in fact a species known to science. It is best remembered as sung by Burl Ives in 1949: Oh, the buzzin’ of the bees and the cigarette trees The soda water fountain Where the lemonade springs and the bluebird sings In that Big Rock Candy Mountain. This song is a sanitised version of the original, by US country music composer Harry McClintock (1882 – 1957), which is a hobo’s dream of Eden ‘where the handouts grow on bushes’ (compare and contrast with the UK today) – In the Big Rock Candy Mountains you never change your socks And the little streams of alcohol come a tricklin’ down the rocks … In the Big Rock Candy Mountains the jails are made of tin And you can walk right out again as soon as you are in. Everything a hobo would fear is neutralised. Just as in Gulliver’s Travels, the surreal appeal of the Big Rock Candy Mountain overwhelms the satire: something conceived for adults has been taken over by children. Lakes of gin and whiskey became lakes of soda pop. In some versions, even the cigarette trees become the far less desirable peppermint trees. lyricsplayground.com

Cocarettes In the 1920s, American cigarette makers started their pursuit of women. The mildness of the smoke was often the theme. James Bull, a Milwaukee firm, had a different twist on this theme, and introduced ‘Cocarettes’, ‘a soothing blend of refreshing Colombian coca-leaf and the lightest Virginian tobacco, specially blended for the Lady’s need’. These cocaine cigarettes are believed to be unique. Here are the ten reasons given on the back of the packet why you should smoke them. For coca read of course cocaine.

1st

They are not injurious.

2nd

They are the most agreeable and pleasant ‘Smoke’.

3rd

They are made of the finest Sun cured Virginia tobacco.

4th

They have the exact proportion of genuine Bolivian Coca leaf combined with the finest flavoured Tobacco, to produce the most delicious flavour.

5th

The Coca neutralises the depressing effects of the Nicotine in the tobacco.

6th

Coca is the finest nerve tonic and exhilarator ever discovered.

7th

Coca stimulates the brain to great activity and gives tone and vigor to the entire system.

8th

Coca and Tobacco combined, is the greatest boon ever offered to smokers.

9th

Cocarettes can be freely used by persons in delicate health without injury, and with positively beneficial results.

10th

The Rice Paper used in wrapping Cocarettes ... burns completely away ... the smoker inhales only the smoke of the Cocarette.

Cocteau, Jean (1889 – 1963) Poet, playwright and maker of such dream-like films as La Belle et la Bête (1946) and Orphée (1949) celebrates the power of cigarettes thus: One must not forget that the pack of cigarettes, the ceremony that extracts them, lights the lighter, and that strange cloud which penetrates us and which our nostrils puff, have with powerful charms seduced and conquered the world. Jean Cocteau, Preface to Le tabac dans l’art, l’histoire et la vie, Paris, 1961, cited by Richard Kline, Cigarettes are Sublime, 1993

Confessions of a Tobacco Addict (1963) A literary curiosity, by Ben Joseph Petmecky (1922 – ), this novel examines over 200 pages its hero’s attempts to give up cigarettes. Bizarrely, this is almost the whole subject matter of the novel: relationships, work, all the stuff of life, are mere shadows compared to the blazing intensity of the cigarette preoccupation. Suddenly, at the thought of giving up smoking, I felt panicky ... My mind began to spin. I asked myself why I was there waiting to have my smoking habit executed, my dear friend murdered. It was a dirty trick to play on old buddy cigarette, who had been by my side, through thick and thin, for half my life. After setbacks and uncertainties, the drama reaches a climax when Dr Porter, over a series of afternoon therapy sessions, finally cures the hero. ‘Not only had he cured me of the smoking habit, but he had also restored my faith in myself, given me back my reason for living ... ’ Rarely has a climax been so anti-climactic:

‘… old buddy cigarette … ’

I went to the front office and told the secretary she could stop holding every other Thursday afternoon open for me because Dr Porter had taken care of all my troubles. This is Confessions of Zeno lite – but it has to be said a good deal shorter. Ben Petmecky, Confession of a Tobacco Addict, London, 1963

Confessions of Zeno (1923) Italian novelist Italo Svevo worked in his wife’s family firm, a successful manufacturer of marine paint, over the years publishing at his own expense a series of novels completely ignored for most of his lifetime. Confessions of Zeno, the ultimate cigarette novel, was published in 1923, once again at the author’s expense. The novel was greeted by what Svevo, according to Stanislaus Joyce, James Joyce’s brother, called ‘perfect unanimity’: ‘There is no unanimity so perfect as the unanimity of silence.’ James Joyce admired Confessions of Zeno, saw that it became translated into other languages, and supervised a reassessment of Svevo’s reputation. The starting point of Confessions is its hero, Zeno’s attempt to unearth the origins of his cigarette-smoking habit for his psychoanalyst. The novel is a long and leisurely re-examination, a ‘fumo-analysis’ Zeno calls it, of a life enthralled by the business of stopping smoking, by the endlessness of having a ‘last cigarette’, which of course proves to be no such thing. Just when Svevo was beginning to enjoy a delayed but much deserved success, he suffered a broken femur in a car accident and died unexpectedly a few days later in September of 1928. He had been ailing for many years with a heart condition, aggravated by his excessive smoking; the immediate cause of Svevo’s death is thought to be shock from the accident. According to his daughter’s account in Iconografia Sveviana, when Svevo knew that he was about to die, he asked for a cigarette. When it was refused, he said, ‘This one would definitely have been the last cigarette.’ A friend recalled that when Svevo became aware that he had already smoked his very last cigarette, he stopped being afraid of death. ‘Dying,’ he said to his family, ‘is far easier than writing a novel.’

Consolation In 1916, the explorer Ernest Shackleton and his men made their incredible escape from their ship Endurance which was trapped in ice and finally crushed, deep inside the Antarctic. They sledged and rowed for hundreds of miles to reach Elephant Island, which was still 800 miles from the nearest whaling station. Shackleton left most of his men here, and in one rowing boat he and his companions made their way to the island of South Georgia through the worst seas on earth, to try to fetch help. The men left behind on Elephant Island suffered horribly; they survived by eating seals and the occasional albatross. The appalling cold led to frostbite. One of the men, Blackboro, developed frostbite in his toes. The toes had to go. McIlroy was the surgeon. Then one at a time he cut them off. Each dropped with a metallic clatter into the empty tin can below … Finally it was done; Blackboro’s foot had been neatly trimmed off just at the ball-joint. Altogether it had taken fiftyfive minutes. Before long Blackboro began to moan and in a little while he opened his eyes. He was groggy for a time, but then he smiled up at the doctors. ‘I’d like a cigarette,’ he said. So McIlroy tore a page out of the Encyclopedia Britannica, rubbed up some plug tobacco and rolled a cigarette for his patient. The tension in the hut eased. Three months later, Shackleton returned to Elephant Island on an epic rescue voyage. A Chilean ship brought him close to the shore. Filthy bearded men stumbled down to face the sea. Before he could land he threw ashore handfuls of cigarettes and tobacco; and these smokers who for two months had been trying to find solace in such substitutes as seaweed, finely chopped pipe-bowls, seal meat, and sennegrass [Arctic sedge], grasped greedily. Alfred Lansing, Endurance, 1959 Ernest Shackleton, South, 1919

Constipation See Aperient.

Coronation Street Coronation Street is Britain’s longest-running television soap opera (and one of the longestrunning in the world), having aired over 6,000 episodes since the very first on Friday, 9 December 1960. It features some of Britain’s most famous fictional characters, including Britain’s most famous smoker, the legendary Bet Lynch, played by Julie Goodyear, herself a heavy smoker. When Bet Lynch finally left the show, the Manchester Evening News calculated that in 26 years the fictional character smoked 569,400 cigarettes. As the real-life, Julie Goodyear decided to give up, it was calculated that over 46 years she had smoked 1,007,000 cigarettes. At a current cost of £5.50 a packet, she would be saving herself £115 a week. The Rover’s Return, Coronation Street’s famous fictional pub, has recently moved with the times, and now features an outdoor smoking annex. Manchester Evening News, 16 July 2007

Counting Totting up all the agents of our ultimate annihilation is a popular pastime. How often have we worked out the bottles of beer, wine or spirits that we consume in a year? Then there are journalistic features where an errant family’s typical unhealthy food intake is piled up around them. Thousands of burgers compete with columns of disgusting sliced white loaves and sticky buns. The obese family grins as it surveys this avalanche of cholesterol. ‘Cigarettes, like factory-farmed chickens, are born to die ... ’

Not so the cigarette smoker. He is a mathematician and an aesthete. This is the beautiful curve of his calculus, as described by Luc Santé, Belgian-born, New York-raised critic and cigarette connoisseur. He pictured a scene from an alternative Last Judgement when all the cigarettes he had ever smoked had been resurrected and made whole again, piled up in a spacious hangar. Let’s see, 30 years approximately at an average of two packs a day, that would be 438,000 give or take a few thousand. Nearly half a million, filtered and un-

filtered, more than half of them hand-rolled, all but a handful whitepapered. All of them passed through my mouth, my throat, my lungs. Santé has given the world other no less striking perceptions, such as, ‘Cigarettes, like factory-farmed chickens, are born to die.’ See Average life expectancy and Epiphanies. Luc Santé, No Smoking, London, 2004

Coupons Cigarette coupons, which could be redeemed against merchandise or which offered, like a lottery ticket, the chance of a prize, were first given away in the UK with Kinnear’s Handicap Cigarettes, around 1901. If you chose a winning coupon you were entitled to a free week in Paris. The first firm to give merchandise in exchange for coupons was Ogden’s. An overheard exchange in South Wales in the 1950s: WOMAN: I’m collecting my cigarette coupons for a three-piece suite. HUSBAND: I’m collecting mine for a coffin. Cigarette coupons ceased during World War I, were revived by Black Cat in 1926, banned in 1933, and brought back by Kensitas in 1956. The 1978 Kensitas Gift Catalogue promised: ‘There’s something for every member of the family.’ If a housewife smoked 20 cigarettes a day for 30 years – the average time it takes to develop lung cancer – she could collect an electric sewing machine, along with a cot and a mattress for her baby. The slogan was: ‘You get more out of life with a Kensitas.’ Death, perhaps? Bobbie Jacobson, The Lady Killers, London,1981 James Leavey, A History of Tobacco, www.forces.org/writers/james/files/history.htm

Coward, Noël (1899 – 1973) Noël Coward started smoking by his early twenties, ‘partly because everybody did it, and partly because it was at least an aid to outward nonchalance’. Basil Dean directed Coward in an early film, The Second Man, 1928, and noted:

There were no accidentals. Every effect was sharp and clear as a diamond. By way of minor example he had already learned – no one more effectively – how to use the cigarette as an instrument of mood, punctuating witticisms with a snap of his lighter, and ill-temper with a vicious stabbing-out in a nearby ashtray. Coward and his cigarette in its long holder are inseparable. Top-hatted, outside Buckingham Palace, having been knighted in 1970, Coward puffs away, just as image after image of him in old age shows him as content with his cigarette as a cat is with cream. Smoking was part of life, and in his last years, despite health threats, ‘he elected to smoke rather than face senility’. The sentiment is splendid, even if the logic is lacking, ‘ ... he elected to smoke rather than face senility ... ’ Clive Fisher, Noël Coward, London, 1992 Basil Dean, Mind’s Eye: An Autobiography, 1927 – 1972, 1973, cited by Fisher, 1992

Crack nicotine Forget crack cocaine: that’s yesterday’s rush. The new thing is what some scientists have dubbed ‘crack nicotine’: a freebase form of nicotine that vaporises easily, works is way quickly into the lungs before heading towards the brain to deliver a mighty kick. A recent study by scientists at the Oregon Health & Science University, Portland, Oregon found that some cigarette brands contain 10 to 20 times higher percentages of nicotine in its freebase form than hitherto believed. Here’s a quick round-up of the champions:

Percentage of freebase nicotine delivered in first three puffs Marlboro

10%

Gauloises Blondes

7½%

Winston

6%

Camel

3%

Have fun! Mark Capper, Metro, 28 July 2003 www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/3999.php

Craving The physiological aspects and causes of addiction need not detain us at this point – though of course they will at other points. It is the various psychological manifestations, glorious and tragic, of man’s obsessive love affair with nicotine and in particular the cigarette that command our interest. Norman Mailer, the Great American Novelist, pugilist on paper and in the ring, and serial monogamist (he once observed that ‘alimony is the curse of the writing class’) has, as one would expect, addressed with graphic power the cigarette’s own power. Tim Madden is the hero of Mailer’s noir-style novel, Tough Guys Don’t Dance. He has given up smoking – but smoking hasn’t given him up. In his dreams, he finds, inescapably, ‘ ... impaled on desire itself ... ’

… I struck a match, brought flame to the tip, then took in all my hunger for existence with the first puff. I felt impaled on desire itself – those fiends trapped in my chest and screaming for one drag. Norman Mailer, Tough Guys Don’t Dance, New York, 1992

Currency, cigarettes as After the D-Day invasion in 1944, a new and unexpected threat faced Europe: uncertainty about the value of money. An Allied victory could make some currencies valueless; if the Germans had a resurgence, American scrip (stand-in money) could go the same way.

Heroically to the rescue came the one form of currency everyone could trust: Luckies, Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes. ‘They were uniform, easily recognised, universally accepted, almost impossible to counterfeit … the cigarette currency … had as its foundation a product with intrinsic value, and one that was self-liquidating.’ ‘ ... the one form of currency everyone could trust: Luckies, Camel and Chesterfield cigarettes.’ The cigarette was an elegant economic tool. At first they were rare, and a couple of cartons would buy a good camera. As they became more common, and inflation threatened, the owner of the pack would be tempted to smoke it – thus automatically cutting down the supply of currency, and rendering unnecessary any interference from the authorities. The opportunities for abuse were endless. Soldiers got relatives and friends to send them cigarettes to add to their official ration. At one point, it is estimated, some 2.5 million pounds of tobacco products a month were being sent to Germany alone, while a stream of fine china, silverware, artworks and cameras flowed the other way – often to be turned into hard dollars in the US. It was a huge phenomenon while it lasted. When the Hamburg police offered a reward for information regarding the murder of a young man, ‘real’ money wouldn’t do, and the reward was set at 1,000 standard American cigarettes. Cigarettes were ‘clipped’ just as coins have been, and had small amounts of tobacco removed to make further cigarettes. Germans even took to attempting to grow their own tobacco in flowerpots. By 1949 the cigarette bubble had burst, but in its time it had been ‘the noisiest coin in the realm’, as one observer commented. Tobacco itself was used as currency as early as the beginning of the eighteenth century in America. ‘Tobacco notes’, indicating that the owner possessed the quantity of tobacco indicated on the note (and that it was a certified quality), soon took over, being of course far more convenient. See also POW camps. Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978

D

Dakota A brand of cigarettes introduced by R. J. Reynolds in 1990, targeted towards the alarmingly named market of ‘virile females’. These were in fact young, downmarket, blue-collar white females. Anti-smoking advocates denounced R. J. Reynolds for targeting what they saw as ‘vulnerable populations’. And North and South Dakotans united to form a group called Dakotans against Dakota cigarettes, collecting 25,000 signatures. ‘Dakota ... Da Cough ... Da Cancer ... Da Coffin.’ Dakota also faced opposition from Alan Blum’s anti-cigarette organisation DOC, who parodied the brand with its anti-slogan ‘Dakota ... Da Cough ... Da Cancer ... Da Coffin’. See also DOC. multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/issues/1992

Davis, Bette (1908 – 89) On 9 June 1983, Bette Davis, veteran star who smoked her distinctive way through films such as The Letter (1940), Now, Voyager (1942), All About Eve (1950), and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (1966), had a mastectomy, which was followed nine days later by a stroke. Her doctors, she felt, doubted she would pull through; they underestimated her. One good outcome: the experience prompted her to a book of reminiscence. Her recovery wasn’t easy. In addition to daily therapy to help me learn to walk again and straighten out my left hand, my doctors told me no smoking and no drinking. Me, who had always enjoyed the cocktail hour. As for smoking, only Sir Walter Raleigh is identified as closely with tobacco as I am.

She didn’t give up; she switched to low – tar cigarettes. In her reminiscence, Bette Davis explains how when she arrived in Hollywood she was a very proper Yankee girl, as innocent of make-up as of sex. To offset her social weaknesses, she turned to smoking, ‘which made me feel very sophisticated’. She then discovered the cigarette’s usefulness as an acting prop: ‘What emotions you can covey merely by putting one out.’ ‘As for smoking, only Sir Walter Raleigh is identified as closely with tobacco as I am.’ In 1979 Dean Martin held a roast for her. Henry Fonda made the first speech: ‘I’ve been close to Bette Davis for thirty-eight years, and I have the cigarette burns to prove it.’ The American Tobacco Institute also sent a telegram thanking her for her contribution to that industry: ‘No one swings her butt the way Bette Davis does.’ See Now, Voyager. Bette Davis, with Michael Hesskowitz, This ‘N That, New York, 1987

Death Cigarettes and death go hand in hand. Not just in the simple sense that smoking cigarettes has a strong tendency to kill us, but in the more complex sense that this very fact is a substantial part of what makes cigarettes attractive. There is an unbreakable and perverse connection between the danger posed by smoking cigarettes and our willingness to smoke them. Indeed, if they didn’t pose any danger, it could be argued they wouldn’t be nearly so enticing a proposition. As Lynn Barber succinctly puts it, ‘We know smoking kills – that is part of its attraction.’ ‘A classy way to commit suicide ... ’ Kurt Vonnegut ‘I don’t feel as if I’m living unless I’m killing myself,’ observes a smoker in Russell Hoban’s novel Turtle Diary (1975), who conversely feels scarcely alive when not smoking. See also Hirst, Damien. Russell Hoban, Turtle Diary, London, 1975 Lynn Barber, ‘I smoke, therefore I am’, Observer, 5 February 2006

Death cigarettes Death cigarettes, a Dutch brand, were introduced to the UK by the Enlightened Tobacco Company in 1990. They were like normal cigarettes in every way save that they arrived in their own coffin: a bleak black package bearing a white skull and crossbones. The text on the back of the pack was equally uncompromising: Smoking does not make you sexy, stylish or sophisticated. It kills you. We are not selling a pack of lies, we are selling a pack of cigarettes. DEATH is a responsible way to market a legally available consumer product which kills people when used exactly as intended.

UK customers could buy Death cigarettes by mail order from Luxembourg, thus paying the Luxembourg tobacco tax rate, which was cheaper than the UK rates. Customs and Excise eventually put a stop to this. This seems to be an early instance of ‘it does what it says on the packet’. Death cigarettes may seem to head the stakes for the most off-putting brand name, but Cancer may take the lead. Less well known, though equally striking, was another US brand, Black Death, introduced in 1991, and featuring a grinning skull sporting a top hat.

Death Row Prisoner No. 640, Larry White, was executed on 22 May 1997 in Huntsville, Texas, after many years on death row. His crime was the stabbing with a screwdriver and strangling of Elizabeth St John during a robbery of her Houston apartment. That year, 1997, was a good one for executions in Texas: there were 37 in all. This zeal might have had something to do

with the then Governor of Texas – George W. Bush. There was no escape for Larry White, Execution No. 122. This was his last-meal request: liver and onions, cottage cheese, red tomatoes and a single cigarette. He got exactly the meal he asked for. He was however refused his last cigarette because it would be bad for his health. He was then executed by lethal injection. Larry’s fate was only the beginning of a trend. On 1 July 1975 Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger introduced 1975 Governement ArnoldSchawarzenegger introduced a smoking ban throughout California’s prisons that he hoped would bring in $265 million a year in healthcare. Being caught with cigarettes, a prisoner could face extra work duty, loss of privileges or an increase to their sentence. ‘Liver and onions, cottage cheese, red tomatoes and a single cigarette.’ Quite what deterrent was offered to the prisoners on Death Row, at Folsom State Prison, east of Sacramento, to deter them from smoking before being led to the gas chamber has never been made clear. Texan State Papers, 1997 Tex News/Associated Press, 22 December 1997 Chris Ayres, The Times, 1 July 2005

Defiance There are smokers who will smoke come what may. Their passion will never be extinguished by political correctness, health warnings or indeed the prospect of imminent death. They exult in swimming against the tide of opinion. Here are some of the defiant ones in this book: Martin Amis; Beryl Bainbridge; Lynn Barber; Simon Gray†; Maggi Hambling; David Hockney; Sarah Lucas (pictured here); Dennis Potter†; Auberon Waugh†.

‘Fighting Fire with Fire’, 1966 © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ, London

Definitely, Maybe (2008) In this pleasant rom-com movie Will and April, played by Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher, bump into one another in a convenience store and flirtatiously debate the merits of Marlboro Reds versus American Spirits. Will can’t believe April pays a couple dollars more per pack for ‘natural’ cigarettes. April has a powerful riposte: Marlboros contain additives to make them burn faster, so, although she pays more per pack, each of her cigarettes lasts longer and she ends up paying less money in the long run. Outside the store the two characters unleash their brands against each other, flirting all the while. The Marlboro Red burns down before the American Spirit, but – as you’ve guessed – romance springs from the competition. It is profoundly refreshing to see a scene in a modern film with cigarettes giving the same sort of supporting role as they gave to the cinema of old. Definitely, Maybe, 2008, directed and screenplay by Adam Brooks

Depression The psychologist Oliver James is a lifelong smoker, and believes smoking can be seen as a symptom of our chemical make-up. ‘A raft of new studies shows that you don’t have to be mad to smoke, but it jolly well helps,’ he says. Apparently some 50 per cent of smokers are depressed, and others fall into different categories. It is said that clinically depressed people are four times more likely to smoke than the mentally healthy. Smokers’ depression, by proportion

Journalist Kate Saunders agrees, seeing herself in the depressive category with anxiety thrown in for good measure. A cigarette is a speedy way to climb out of the trough of gloom.

Oliver James cites a study by American psychologist David Gilbert, who found in a study of female smokers that the more depressed a smoker had been before quitting, the greater the increase in her symptoms afterwards. ‘Smoke or go bonkers,’ is how Oliver James summarises this. Kate Saunders, Independent, March 2005

Diehards This is a short assortment of the people who keep the actuaries awake at night: mighty smokers who defy all odds to live extended lives. Some of the very high age figures may in the sceptical mind arouse a doubt, but it is not within the scope of this book to allay it.

Methuselahs of the smoking world Ivy Leighton – 100 in 1997

Smoked 20 a day for 84 years.

Jeanne Calment died at 122 in 1995

Started young. Quit at 117, resumed at 118, because not smoking made her miserable.

Claimed smoking was key to her long life.

She observed to her doctor: ‘Once you’ve lived as long as me, only then can you tell me not to smoke.’ George Cook died at 108 in 1997

Smoked heavily for 85 years before giving up at ninety- seven.

Winnie Langley – 100 in 2007

Lit up her 170,000th cigarette for 100th birthday. Started smoking at seven.

Oli Mohammed Hussein – 135 in 1997

A Lebanese gentleman who smoked like a chimney, although his birth date has not been confirmed.

Naryan Chaudhari – 141 in 1998

Smoke as much as you like – but no alcohol, is his tip.

Film mogul Adolph Zukor (1873 – 1976) offered up this comment late in life: ‘Happy 103rd birthday, Mr Zukor. What is the secret of your long life?’ ‘I gave up smoking two years ago.’

See also Young smoker of the year. Scottish Daily Record, 15 December 1997 ‘Way to go, champ’, USA Today, 18 October 1995 World Briefs, Houston Chronicle, 29 September 1997 Daily Mail, 8 August 2007 ‘Born in 1862’, CNN World News, 13 May 1997 Nando net, Agence France-Press, 12 February 1998

Divorce Smokers are apparently 53 per cent more likely to undergo divorce than non-smokers, according to a 1990s study by Eric Doherty and William J. Doherty of the University of Minnesota. It’s not that smoking causes divorce, but that those who smoke have characteristics – like higher levels of depression and anxiety – that make them more prone to divorce than nonsmokers. Smoking, as psychologists would have it, is a predictor of divorce. Separated and divorced people are less likely to quit smoking than married people: it seems that if you’re married the support offered by a spouse can help the would-be quitter give up. How very different are the conclusions of modern research from the instinct of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 – 94) who, at the end of the nineteenth century, advised his women readers never to marry a ‘teetotaller, or a man who does not smoke’. Smokers, he assured them, make the most contented husbands. A historical perspective on smoking and divorce … Juan Michelet (1798 – 1874), French historian, observed that ‘Tobacco separates man from woman and is the most dangerous obstacle to conjugal happiness.’ Dr John Lizars (1787 – 1860) of Edinburgh advised that women who ‘sufficiently value their own happiness, and the health and happiness of their families … ought not to marry smokers; nor should they trust the promises of reformation which [the smoker] may make, as they are very seldom kept.’

E. W. Doherty & W. J. Doherty, ‘Smoke gets in your eyes: cigarette smoking and divorce in a national sample of adults’, Families, Systems & Health, 1998 medicolegal.tripod.com John Lizars, The Use and Abuse of Tobacco, Edinburgh, 1859

DOC – Doctors Ought to Care This voluntary organisation founded in 1977 by Houston physician Alan Blum, with the aim of opposing the cigarette manufacturers and their advertising, had a refreshing twist: the idea was to laugh the cigarette pushers out of town. As Blum said: ‘Emphysema Slims: you’ve coughed up long enough baby.’

When you can get people to lighten up and laugh at Marlboro, and ridicule the whole nature of the industry – don’t take it so damned seriously – I think you’ve got a much better way to go about it than the moral outrage approach. The Devil can’t stand to be mocked. Blum’s technique was to use counter-advertising against the cigarette advertisers, so the Newport brand became parodied as Newcorpse, and Virginia Slims became ‘Emphysema Slims: you’ve coughed up long enough baby.’ Jacob Sullum, For Your Own Good, New York, 1999

Dog Day Afternoon (1975) Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon, based on true events, features a compelling, unusually warm performance from Al Pacino as Sonny, the street-wise bank robber who is committing a bank robbery to get money for his homosexual lover to have a sex-change operation. He and his fellow robber Sal bungle the robbery, and end up trapped with their unwitting hostages in a siege they never wanted. The cigarette moment is funny, and significant: this may be the first time the movies joked about the cancer link. We drift towards the back conference room where Sal is seated at the conference table, rifle on the table. Edna and Sylvia are also seated there. Maria enters.

SYLVIA:

Somebody give me a cigarette. Maria walks over to her, offering her one, then remembers:

MARIA:

Sylvia, you don’t smoke.

SYLVIA:

I never smoked before in my life but I got a right to start now if I want to.

SAL: SYLVIA: SAL: SYLVIA: SAL: SYLVIA:

You don’t smoke ... why do you want to start now? Because I’m scared, that’s why. You never smoked? I used to, but I stopped. You stopped? Why? Because I don’t want cancer. You don’t want cancer? You’re about to get your head blown off, you’re worried about cancer. (to Maria) Gimme the cigarette. Dog Day Afternoon, 1975, directed by Sidney Lumet, screenplay by Frank Pierson

Doll, Richard (1912 – 2005) Britain’s distinguished smoking kill-joy, the equivalent of Surgeon Koop in the US. With Austin Hill in 1950 he studied a group of lung cancer patients, thinking that the increasing incidence of the disease might owe something to the hundreds of tonnes of tarmac being laid down across Britain at this time. He soon discovered that in 649 lung-cancer cases there were only two non-smokers; smoking was the one thing the members of the group had in common. A year later they asked 40,000 doctors about their smoking habits and continued researching their mortality for the next 20 years. The results were so spectacular and unambiguous that Doll gave up smoking halfway through the experiment. In 1959, Iain Macleod, the health minister, called a press conference where he announced: ‘It must be regarded as established that there is a relationship between smoking and cancer of the lung.’

Almost everyone at the meeting was smoking, including Iain Macleod, who went one better by chain-smoking. And, of course, 80 per cent of the population was smoking. Apart from his smoking habit, Iain Macleod should be remembered as the man who coined the phrase ‘the nanny state’, meaning a state in which there was too much interference from Whitehall in day-to-day life. Co-incidentally, this is now the phrase most used to disparage the government’s recent attempts to restrict people’s smoking. Oddly, the phrase is never used of the government’s willingness through the NHS to help those who have damaged themselves through smoking. BBC News 24, 22 June 2004 The Times, 25 July 2005

‘Don’t forget the cigarettes for Tommy’ The perfect solace for young conscripts facing death, the cigarette was as essential a part of the materiel of conflict as food or bullets. This heartbreaking music-hall song from World War I speaks or, rather, sobs for itself. When we sing of Tommy at the Front And the brave deeds he has done, Tommy always bears the battle’s brunt And thro’ him the victory won.

Chorus

Don’t forget the cigarettes for Tommy, Who is fighting day by day. Don’t forget the cigarettes for Tommy, They will cheer him in the fray. When the shot and shell are thickly flying, And with gas his eyes grow dim, Just a thought of you he’ll get

As he lights his cigarette, So don’t forget a few of the best for him. See also War. Plan Crocker, words and music, Don’t Forget the Cigarettes for Tommy, West & Co. Vocal Music 1910 – 19

Dr Kildare In 1961, in the first minute of the first episode of Dr Kildare, the handsome hero played by Richard Chamberlain dashed up the stairs of a hospital and, far from resuscitating a patient, diagnosing a tricky case, or even chatting up a nurse – slotted quarters into a cigarette machine in the lobby. Dr Kildare smoked, with a righteous American enthusiasm for the act. He would hand a cigarette to a patient with a problem. They would light up together, and bond in smoke. He would mark a thoughtful moment – whether to follow this course of medical action, or that – with a cigarette. The hawkish-faced Raymond Massey played his mentor, Dr Leonard Gillespie. Did he smoke, too? Of course he did. This very popular TV show ran to 190 episodes, finishing in 1968. Richard Klein, New York Times, 24 February 2008

Drop it … Just say no ... That kind of colloquial, manly advice to leave cigarettes or other tempting substances alone has a long history. Here is J. L. Sullivan, world heavyweight champion boxer in the 1890s. Smoke cigarettes? Not on your tut-tut. Drop it … You can’t suck coffin nails and be a ring champion … You never heard of a strong arm, a porch climber [a house burglar], or a bank burglar using a cigarette, did you? They couldn’t do it and attend to biz. Why, even drunkards don’t use the things. That man Corbett, what licked me, smoked ‘em, but then I had the booze … Who smokes ‘em? Dudes and college stiffs – fellows who’d be wiped out by a single jab or a quick undercut. It isn’t natural to smoke cigarettes. An American ought to smoke cigars, an Englishman a briar, a Harp a clay pipe and a Dutchy a Meerschaum.

It’s the Dutchmen, Italians, Russians, Turks and Egyptians who smoke cigarettes and they’re no good anyhow. J. L. Sullivan (1858 – 1918) was an American pugilist who won the world heavyweight championship in 1882. But finally lost it to ‘Gentleman Jim’ Corbett in 1892. Corbett smoked cigarettes. Need more be said? Brooks, Jerome E., The Mighty Leaf, London, 1953

Drop it … (2) Almost half a century later, another pugilist inveighed against cigarettes. In 1941, Gene Tunney (1897 – 1978) heavyweight champ between 1926 and 1928, was running the US Navy’s physical fitness programme. He pointed out with heavyweight irony the advantages of smoking to his errant ratings, observing that they would smell so strong that dogs would never bite them, and that ‘You will cough in your sleep so robbers will not try to steal your belongings.’ The concluding benefit was ‘You will have many diseases and die young.’ Nicotine Knockout, Reader’s Digest, 1941

Drummond, Bulldog The end of World WarI…Surely a time, even in a victorious Britain, to mourn the lost, and to vow ‘never again’. But some returning heroes found the conflict a thoroughly thrilling and rewarding experience; what were they to do with themselves? This one placed an advertisement in the papers. Demobilised officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential. Thus the arrival in the world of Bulldog Drummond, created by H. C. McNeile (1888 – 1937), who used the pen-name Sapper. Drummond was a heavy smoker, a stalwart defender of women, and something of a sadist. Does he remind you of anyone? Ian Fleming devoured the Sapper books as a youth, but fortunately Bond was less preoccupied with Bolsheviks, Anarchists or Jews than his antecedent.

Drummond has a vigorous way with his enemies, which makes Bond seem lily-livered. This is how he deals with a hunchback working for his arch-enemy Carl Peterson (Drummond’s Blofeld, as it were): So he flogged him with a rhinoceros-hide whip till his arm ached and then flung him into a corner, gasping, cursing and scarcely human. Drummond’s cigarette case contains ‘Turkish this side – gaspers the other’. Gaspers being probably cigarettes made from the Virginia tobacco that Bond is less than fond of. Cigarettes and an ingenious cigarette case feature in a powerful scene in a previous novel which combines both sadism and cigarettes. In Bulldog Drummond (1920), Drummond and his companions are tied up in a country house where they are visited at dawn by a German guard. Drummond taunts the guard: ‘Why, you poor fool. I’ve got a thousand pounds in notes in my cigarette case.’ For a moment the German stared at him; then a look of greed came into his pig-eyes. Drummond tricks the German into freeing him. He grabs the German by the wrist and twists the arm – Then at last there was a dull crack as the arm broke, and a scream of pain, as he lurched around the chair and stood helpless in front of the soldier who still held the cigarette case in his left hand. They saw Drummond open the cigarette case and take from it what looked like a tube of wood. Then he felt in his pocket and took out a matchbox containing a number of long thin splinters. And having fitted one of the splinters into the tube he put the other end in his mouth … There was a sharp whistling noise and the splinter flew from the tube into the German’s face. ‘I have broken your arm, Boche,’ said Drummond at length, ‘and now I’ve killed you.’ The blow-pipe and poisoned dart used by Drummond were in turn used on him in a Paris hotel bedroom, a night earlier, by a midget crouched on top of the wardrobe. ‘Excitement essential’: Bulldog Drummond got what he asked for.

Dry drinking In the late sixteenth century, English smokers, to the dismay of non-partakers, tended to smoke themselves into a stupefaction resembling drunkenness; thus, the practice of smoking tobacco was termed ‘dry drinking’. The metaphor is a natural one, and has persisted across the centuries: in Moonraker (1955), Ian Fleming’s James Bond ‘drinks the smoke deep into his lungs’.

Duke, James Buchanan (Buck) (1856 – 1925) If there was one thing that Buck Duke, the father of the American cigarette industry, detested, it was cigarettes.

He was a cigar man, through and through, born into a world where (in 1881) chewing tobacco accounted for 58 per cent of the total of the quantity of tobacco consumed in the USA, 19 per cent each on cigars and pipes and snuff 3 per cent. Chewing tobacco was a relic of the time when an American could ‘stand in his doorway, bite his morning chaw and spit eighteen feet without trespassing on his neighbour’. The visiting Charles Dickens said that Americans were so addicted to their tobacco that ‘they could expectorate in their dreams’. In this manly context, cigarette usage represented barely 1 per cent of the nation’s smokers. Their use was considered morally suspect; a New York Times editorial of 1884 warned that ‘the decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes, and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand’. ‘Walk when you’re young, so you can ride when you’re old ... ’ Buck Duke’s business philosophy Buck Duke was a macho man. In his home town of Durham he was scolded about his liaison with an infamous paramour: ‘That woman has slept with every man in Durham!’ To which Duke replied, ‘Well, Durham’s not such a big town.’

Fierce competition in the pipe and cigar market from competitors in his home town, principally Bull Durham, pushed him to take cigarettes more seriously. The potency of the rival brand alarmed him. So in 1881 Duke joined battle with the Duke line of cigarettes, brightly coloured packages which had a sliding drawer. They were more expensive to make than ordinary soft packages but protected the cigarettes and distinguished them from their rivals. Duke’s first coup was to pioneer the mechanisation of cigarette production, and once he had secured a quasi-monopoly on the mass production of cigarettes (see Bonsack, James) his way was clear totally to dominate a market which doubled to 2 billion cigarettes a year by 1890. Over the next decade Duke drew all his rivals into his fold, forming the American Tobacco Company. His marketing methods were never less than flamboyant: in 1907 the company signed a contract with the operator of a horse-drawn stage line in New York to lease advertising space. An ad appeared for ‘Bull’ Durham, the nation’s leading tobacco brand, featuring – not very surprisingly – a bull. But no ordinary bull.

Onlookers were shocked at the sight of the bull’s well-endowed maleness so graphically rendered, and had the driver of the first stage that appeared on the street arrested. Ironically, this case ruling took place the day after the same court handed down a historic verdict ordering the dissolution of Buck Duke’s $240-million-a-year American Tobacco Company monopoly, which the court deemed in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act. Cassandra Tate, The Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of ‘The Little White Slaver’, New York, 1999

Dunhill, Alfred (1872 – 1959) Alfred Dunhill was a tobacco pioneer by accident. His father made accessories for horse-drawn vehicles, running his business from the Euston Road, London. When young Alfred acquired the business in 1893 he showed his business acumen by catering for the needs of the embryonic motor industry. Much of his business in motoring accessories was mail order, but Alfred was determined to secure a more prestigious part of the market, and opened a shop in Conduit Street, Mayfair and here, by chance, his introduction of the ‘windshield pipe’, designed to protect sportsmen from the danger of flying sparks, propelled him into a new world, the tobacco world. He opened a tobacconist’s shop in St James’s in 1907, which had the atmosphere of a gentleman’s club and offered all kinds of tobaccos and smokers’ requisites; by the 1920s he had shops in New York, Toronto and Paris. The first Dunhill cigarette came out in 1908, and was, less than glamorously, called the Absorbal. It was designed to counter any perceived health risk from cigarettes and had – a world first – a cotton wool filter-tip. Its slogan was the ‘Hygienic Cigarette’. But the more worldly Dunhill brand was soon to follow, and then in the early 1920s the Unique lighter, the first one-handed pocket lighter and perhaps Alfred’s Dunhill’s most notable contribution to smoking. Distinguished Dunhill smokers include Hunter S. Thompson, creator of Gonzo journalism. Barbara Trompeter, Alfred Dunhill, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, OUP, 2004 Michael Balfour, Alfred Dunhill: One Hundred Years and More, London, 1992

Dutch fuck Vivid if semantically obscure slang term for (among other things) lighting a cigarette from another person’s cigarette. Julian Barnes dramatises the term in his novel Talking It Over (1991). The creepy Oliver puts another cigarette in his mouth and finds he has run out of matches, and asks the narrator for a Dutch fuck. Oliver lights his cigarette from the narrator’s and ‘There was something repulsive in the way he did it.’ Where could this nightmarish term have come from? Slang expert Jonathan Green tells us the term dates from the 1950s, and suggests that the implication is one of meanness. Someone too stingy to carry matches or a lighter would employ this technique, and would also have a Dutch bath (a very cursory bath), transact a Dutch bargain (in which only one person benefits) and give a Dutch feast (where the host gets drunk ahead of the guests, having monopolised the booze). Julian Barnes, Talking It Over, London, 1991 Jonathan Green, The Cassell Dictionary of Slang, London, 1998

E

Early-grave defence The name given to an argument made by lawyers for Philip Morris in 1987, at a Minnesota tobacco trial. It was claimed that because smokers died early, the state saved on medical expenses. This line of argument, although not without truth, was not pursued. See Selfish smokers.

Earning a cigarette How much earning time goes to pay for the habit of smoking? These are the minutes of labour needed to earn the average price of a pack of cigarettes (based on the average industrial wage by country).

Tara Parker-Pope, Cigarettes, New York, 2001, citing World Health Organisation estimates

Edward VII (1841 – 1910) Queen Victoria abhorred any form of smoking in her presence. When the Prince of Wales succeeded her as Edward VII in 1901 his courtiers awaited his reaction. When the first royal banquet was held, the male guests gathered afterwards in the coffee room. ‘Gentlemen, you may smoke.’ He looked out at their enquiring, restrained faces, the pick of ambassadorial and court society. There was a tacit appeal in their polite silence. ‘Gentlemen,’ he announced blandly, ‘you may smoke.’

Where Edward VII went, the country followed: private homes, country houses, meeting halls, music halls, theatres … Great Britain had permission to smoke.

Edward VIII (1894 – 1972) The uncrowned King of England, who exchanged his crown for the charms of Mrs Wallis Simpson and wandered the world after his abdication, always looking slightly wistful about fascism, was invariably photographed with a cigarette dangling from his fingers. The admen had him in their sights immediately. Bruce Fairchild Barton, one of the founders of the American BBDO ad agency behind the Light a Lucky Strike and Feel like a Millionaire campaigns proposed a new pitch to his client, based on ‘every man a king’. How much more potent this pitch would be if a real king smoked Luckies! Why not hire the Duke of Windsor to say, ‘I have tried all your brands since I have been here and I like Lucky Strike the best.’ The Duke was not to be persuaded. But Wallis Simpson did leave a cigarette advertisement behind her in America. During World War II the ad features her reclining on a chair in the Nassau Canteen in the Bahamas, and smoking a Chesterfield. This seemed to be the extent of her war effort; we can assume that this was not a canteen as we understand it. It was once thought that the Duke’s sympathy towards Naziism (he met Hitler several times and gave him the Nazi salute) was merely a manifestation of a certain unworldly naivety on his part; but more recently, historians think that he was serious in his intent, and was waiting in readiness to be a new, alternative king if Britain – as so nearly happened – was defeated. He could have been Britain’s first modern-day cigarette-smoking king: a world-wide ambassador for the little tube of delight. David T. Courtwright, Forces of Habit: Drugs and the Making of the Modern World, Harvard, 2001

Elastic cigarettes An elastic cigarette is the term for a cigarette that produces a larger than expected hit of nicotine when the smoker takes a puff. Elasticity means the smoke, rather than the smoker, works harder. Elastic cigarettes, argue anti-smokers, are more dangerous than nonelastic cigarettes because the elasticity encourages the smoker to take more smoke into their lungs.

Embra See Virginia Slims.

Emin, Tracy (1963 – ) There’s no one we’d rather be shocked by than this much-loved British artist for whom the term ‘private life’ has no meaning. In her first solo show in 1994 she exhibited, among other memorabilia, a vial containing tissue from one of her aborted foetuses and a package of cigarettes that her uncle had been holding when he was decapitated in a car crash. That’s an impressive start to a career. (The brand of cigarettes was Benson & Hedges.) Her work My Bed attracted critical controversy in 1999. This was indeed Emin’s own bed, in which she had lain for four days contemplating suicide, complete with soiled sheets, a filthy rug strewn with bloodied underwear, stuffed animals, a tube of KY jelly and empty vodka bottles. A memorable combination. Beside the bed was a table bearing an ashtray overflowing with cigarette butts – the corpses, perhaps, of the cigarettes that had helped her through this long dark night of the soul. A forty-a-day smoker, Tracy has given up. Long may she continue to shock us and make us see art as not merely pictures hanging on walls in art galleries. Tracy Emin does like to party. Here is her splendid account of the after-effects of a night out while on holiday on Spain: ‘I suddenly came over so hot I thought I was going to spontaneously combust. My heart was pounding. I couldn’t see properly ... I staggered to the bathroom and violently threw up. Acid balls of foam made their way up through my windpipe. I started to suffocate. My body started to convulse. I fell to the floor and white fizz poured out my open mouth. My body jerked so violently that I wet myself. My eyes rolled back and I thought I was going to die.’ Tracy Emin, ‘My Life in a Column’, Independent, 17 August 2007

Epiphanies An epiphany is a sudden, as it might be, religious revelation into the heart of something – in this case, the heart of a packet of cigarettes. Luis Buñuel’s epiphany was this: What lovelier sight is there than that double row of white cigarettes, lined up like soldiers on parade and wrapped in silver paper. If I were blindfolded and a lighted cigarette placed between my lips, I’d refuse to smoke it. I love to touch the pack in my pocket, open it, savour the feel of the cigarette between my fingers, the paper on my lips, the taste of tobacco on my tongue. I love to watch

the flame spurt up, love to watch the flame come closer and closer, filling me with its warmth. Luis Buñuel (1900 – 83), the surrealist and satirical filmmaker, created many timeless images in his career: a razor-blade slices an unblinking woman’s eyeball in Un Chien Andalou (1930) (actually, a dead donkey’s eyeball and some neat editing), the blasphemous parody of the Last Supper in Viridiana (1961), the priests trapped in their church in The Exterminating Angel (1962). His lyrical cigarette imagery is as memorable as any of these. Cigarette connoisseur and philosopher Richard Klein writes of ‘the darkly beautiful, inevitably painful pleasure that arises from some intimation of eternity; the taste of infinity in a cigarette resides precisely in the “bad” taste the smoker quickly learns to love. Being sublime, cigarettes, in principle, resist all arguments directed against them from the perspective of health and utility.’ Luis Buñuel, My Last Breath, London, 1984 Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, New York, 1993

Eponymous cigarettes Some cigarettes named after their creators or celebrities: Benson & Hedges

Richard Benson and William Hedges opened a tobacco shop in Old Bond Street in 1873.

De Reszke

Polish operatic tenor (1850 – 1925). Very popular: a Pavarotti of his time.

Du Maurier

Sir Gerald Du Maurier (1873 – 1915). Actor and theatre manager who with no formal training achieved huge success with a highly stylised naturalistic approach to stage acting. Made four bad films to pay off his income tax.

Lambert & Butler

The company founded by Charles Lambert and Charles Butler in 1834, at St John Street, Clerkenwell, London. Moved to Drury Lane in 1836. Merged with Imperial Tobacco. Relaunched successfully in 1979 as a king-sized cigarette.

Mona Lisa

La Gioconda once lent her enigmatic half-smile to a packet of twenty. (She also advertised T-shirts, dishtowels, depilatories, cheese and oranges.)

Philip Morris

The giant American tobacco company started with an Englishman, Philip Morris, who opened a cigar shop in Oxford in 1847. The company was taken over in 1894, appointed tobacconist to Edward VII, and incorporated in New York in 1902. The Marlboro brand name came from the Morris catalogue.

Olivier

A handsomely packaged brand produced by Gallahers in the 1950s, which earned Olivier some useful money. See Olivier, Laurence.

Omar Sharif

A Korean cigarette introduced in 1995. The elegant pack shows the actor’s signature; Omar Sharif’s significance to the Koreans can only be speculated on.

Player’s

John Player (1839 – 1884), a Nottingham shopkeeper, added tobacco to his wares and very early on pre-packed his blends. He grasped his customers’ loyalties to certain blends and turned it into brand loyalty.

Raleigh

Introduced in the US in 1928, the pack featured an ascetic-looking Sir Walter Raleigh (1554 – 1618), adventurer, explorer, poet and statesman, who reputedly introduced tobacco from Virginia to the court of Elizabeth I.

Rothmans

Louis Rothman (1889 – 1926), Jewish Ukrainian émigré. When he moved from Fleet St to Pall Mall the brand became Rothmans of Pall Mall. Granted Royal Warrant by Edward VII in 1906.

Peter Stuyvesant

Peter Stuyvesant (1610 – 82) was the Dutch governor of New Amsterdam, as New York was first known. The brand is currently part of the Imperial Tobacco roster. There is also a Dutch cigarette brand named Pieter Stuyvesant.

Tolstoi

The distinguished author of War and Peace had his name and face borrowed for a Russian-looking brand of cigarettes that were in fact American. Not inappropriately: Tolstoy was a keen cigarette smoker.

W. D. & H. O. Wills

William Day Wills (1797 – 1865) and Henry Overton Wills (1800 – 71), sons of Henry Wills, partner in a Bristol tobacco business. They produced Woodbine cigarettes in 1888, understanding like Player the importance of brands, and went on to become the biggest cigarette manufacturer in Britain.

Yves Saint Laurent

Named after the iconic French fashion designer (1936 – 2008) bearing his trademark intertwined initials.

Eponymous cigarette accessories Rizla

Derives its name from a brand of cigarette paper manufactured by a Frenchman, Lacroix, in 1796. From this came ‘rice-paper’ used for roll-ups. Name comprises French riz, rice, plus the first two letters of Lacroix, followed by a small cross (croix in French).

Ronson

US lighter company founded by Louis V. Aronson, from whose surname the brand name derives.

Esterhaz, Joe (1944 – ) Top-earning Hollywood screenwriter, famous and infamous for Flashdance (1983), Basic Instinct (1992), Showgirls (1995), comes from Hungarian stock – a race of mighty smokers. He had a passion for smoking that infuses his films: see Basic Instinct in particular. He describes his young self as ‘a militant, fanatical smoker’, who started at twelve years old, wanting to look as cool as Jerry Lee Lewis in High School Confidential!, and ending up on three to four packs of Salem Lights a day. He promised his wife that he would be ‘the little old guy’ who’s still smoking at a hundred and two. But such promises are easier to make than to keep and in later life Esterhaz found himself in hospital, where he had to give up cigarettes, drink and 80 per cent of his larynx. He felt a huge never-ending craving for a cigarette ‘centred almost exactly at the spot where the surgery had been done’. He describes the feeling of the smoke sliding into his lungs as ‘nearly sexual’.

Esterhaz found himself having vivid dreams of smoking and drinking, discovered God, and began to proselytise against smoking, and in particular Hollywood’s love affair with the cigarette. But the raw power of the habit he had left behind could still hit him hard. As he walks through a smoking area at Jacobs Field the stink of smoke is horrible. But when he takes a big breath it feels‘…orgasmic’. Joe Esterhaz, Hollywood Animal, London, 2004

Esty, William (1895 – 1954) A devious-minded advertising copywriter who left the J. Walter Thompson agency in 1932 to start his own advertising business, armed with the belief that ‘If you succeed you’re a genius. If not, you’re a fool.’ Success came early, when Esty landed the R. J. Reynolds account, which was then spending $15,000,000 on advertising Camels and Prince Albert. Esty, a man with a fascination for magic tricks and abnormal psychology, targeted Camels’ main rival, Lucky Strike, which had risen to prominence on the back of outlandish and cheeky claims, like ‘Don’t Rasp Your Throat with Harsh Irritants … Consider Your Adam’s Apple.’ ‘Do you inhale?’ enquired another Lucky Strike ad, before pointing out that everyone does, ‘whether they realise it or not’, and then moving on to the reassuring news that ‘Luckies’ famous purifying process removes certain impurities concealed in every tobacco leaf’. This was a claim as full of malarkey as the famous ‘They’re toasted!’ slogan, and Bill Esty decided to fight malarkey with malarkey. He started modestly, with the ingenious claim that Camels possessed sedative qualities, of particular use to those in risky occupations. The picture in the advertisement showed a Camel-smoking pilot, while the headline claimed ‘It Takes Steady Nerves to Fly the Mail at Night!’ The pilot expanded on this, claiming splendidly: ‘That’s why I smoke Camels. And I smoke plenty!’ Big-game hunters, bridge champions and horse breakers soon joined in the endorsements. But what Esty really wanted was the equivalent of Luckies’ ‘toasted’, and after an exhaustive trawl through scientific literature happened upon some highly ambiguous research from Swedish scientists, suggesting that cigarettes might stimulate the adrenal glands and trigger the release of blood sugars. From these few straws Esty built a bold advertising campaign that positioned Camels as a potent tonic. ‘You get a lift with a Camel,’ said the advertisements, adding ‘A FACT: Science advances new data that may completely change your ideas of cigarettes.’

‘Whizz and Whoozle … ’ Later, Esty, who came to be known as the ‘Whizz and Whoozle Man’, pulled off another coup by persuading sports stars to claim that Camels were ‘So mild … you can SMOKE ALL YOU WANT.’ He capped this in 1936 by exhorting smokers ‘For Digestion’s sake, smoke Camels!’ Sedative, tonic, antacid: was there nothing Camels could not do for a smoker? By the end of 1937 they were outselling Luckies and Chesterfield by 40 per cent. Whizz and whoozle had won the day.

ETS The abbreviation stands for environmental tobacco smoke – the stuff of passive smoking. It is fear of ETS that has changed the way society smokes across the world. Kip S. Viscusi, Professor of Law, Economics, and Management at Vanderbilt University, has made many studies of risk and our attitude to it, and after analysing the available evidence concerning ETS comes to a startling conclusion. People’s perceptions of the risks of ETS are biased by their perceptions of the risk of firsthand smoking. Cigarette smoking is a provenly dangerous habit, and its dangers warp and exaggerate our perception of the dangers of secondary smoking. This is what some psychologists have called ‘availability error’; that we judge information on the basis of what information is available to us. For example, if someone is asked to estimate the current divorce rate, their estimate will be affected by the number of people they know who have got divorced; the more they know of, the more they will exaggerate the divorce rate. ‘Availability’ is the ease with which instances can be brought to mind. It has a kind of gravitational pull on our thinking. So the more we read of the deadliness of cigarette smoking, and there is plenty of material to read, the more easy it is to transfer our fear to passive smoking. ‘I think passive smoking is outrageous. They should buy their own.’ Jenny Abrams

So, perhaps the smoking huts outside public houses, the gaggles of smokers outside offices, the clinical smoke-free restaurants, have all been to appease an exaggerated fear rather than to genuinely build a healthier society. Novelist Howard Jacobson offers quite another angle on the phenomenon, for while he has given up puffing his own cigarettes he still enjoys puffing vicariously on other people’s. He observes: ‘Why they call it “passive smoking” I don’t know, when I for one am never more active than when I’m hunting down smoke in public places, demanding I be given a table where the cumulus of nicotine is thickest …’ W. Kip Viscusi, Smoked-filled Rooms, Chicago, 2002 Howard Jacobson, Independent, 19 May 2007

European smoking habits Just over 9 million people in the UK smoke cigarettes. When surveys started in 1948 eight out of ten British males smoked. This was the highest level recorded and has fallen ever since. About one in four Britons now smokes. The average male smoker gets through 14 cigarettes a day, the average female smoker 13 cigarettes. In Sweden, under one in five smokes, and the country has the lowest smoking rate. In Greece over half the population smokes and the country has the highest smoking rate. In the UK, twenty- to twenty-four-year-olds are the keenest smokers; about a third of them do it. As people age, they tend to drop the habit: after sixty, the smoking rate drops to 14 per cent. Manual workers smoke nearly twice as much as people with managerial or ‘professional’ jobs. ‘A curious statistic: people who live together are twice as likely to smoke as those who are married ... ’ A curious statistic: people who live together are twice as likely to smoke as those who are married. cited BBC News Channel, June 2007 as those who are married. ONS, cited BBC News Channel, June 2007

Eve Eve was Liggett &Myers’ contender in the overcrowded market bidding for liberated women in the early 1970s. ‘Smoke pretty Eve – a cigarette as feminine as the ring you wear’, and the pack was as thronged with pretty flowers as a pre-Raphaelite painting. But prettiness wasn’t

enough, and Eve was a failure compared to Virginia Slims, but did well enough to be going strong today.

F

Fancy that Was there ever a time when politicians could be trusted? Mr Vaughan-Morgan, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Health said: ‘The government feels that it is right to ensure that this latest authoritative opinion is brought effectively to public notice, so that everyone may know the risks involved.’ But he made it clear that people, armed with the facts, would be able to make up their own minds and smoking would not be banned. The prohibition of smoking in theatres, cinemas and public transport is not on the agenda, he added. The Times, 27 June 1957

Favourite cigarette of the day What’s your favourite? The first of the day? Or the last? Four curious researchers in Los Angeles surveyed 5,124 smokers to discover what their favourite cigarette of the day was. The choice varied considerably and was related to nicotine dependence and lifestyles. Overall, the after-dinner cigarette was chosen as the cigarette which they would miss most, while the next largest proportion of smokers (33 per cent) said that they would miss the first cigarette of the morning most. The latter group scored highest on tests of nicotine dependence. In contrast, infrequent smokers (chippers) chose the after-dinner cigarette. ‘ ... Now the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterward ... ’ One category of smoking-occasion seems to have escaped the researchers. Florence King (1936 – ), outspoken American novelist, essayist and columnist, doyenne of pro-smoking

writers, observes that ‘the only thing I miss about sex is the cigarette afterwards’, which, second only to the first one in the morning, is the best of all. King claims that even if she were frigid she would pretend otherwise just to be able to have that allpleasurable cigarette. See First of the day. Murray Jarvik, Joel D. Killen, Ann Varady and Stephen P. Fortmann, Journal of Behavioral Medicine, 28 December 2004

Femmes fatales In the very earliest days of the cigarette, the simplest of strategies was used to encourage people to take up the new-fangled habit: seduction. Cigarette cards featured ‘Sporting Girls’, sporting rather more leg than was usually seen in the 1890s; packs featured young women in all kinds of alluring poses and situations. A clear reflection of the simple truth that 99 per cent of smokers at this time were male.

Fictional cigarettes It doesn’t seem to be enough that cigarette brands reach into the tens of thousands. We have to invent them too. In Lolita (1955), Vladimir Nabokov gives us a unique vision of smalltown America. Even the cigarettes are reimagined: they are Dromes, picking up on the famous dromedary who adorns and gives his name to the Camel packs. Here are some more:

Some fictional cigarettes

Dromes

Vladimir Nabokov

$ (the cigarette packs bore only a dollar sign)

Ayn Rand

Gasperettes, Puffins and Whifflets

Dorothy Sayers

Lolita Atlas Shrugged

Murder Must Advertise Kentucky Slims Chicken-Flavoured

Matt Groening

Futurama

Laramie Cigarettes

Matt Groening

The Simpsons

Moonmist

Kurt Vonnegut

The Sirens of Titan

Morley

Chris Carter

New Testament Cigarettes

Woody Allen

Victory

George Orwell

The X-Files Bananas Nineteen Eighty-Four

Morley must be the world’s most popular fictional cigarette. With a typeface and design resembling Marlboro, Morleys have featured in everything from the original Mission Impossible TV series to Malcolm in the Middle and Prison Break to E.R. And Orwell’s invention was less fictional than he thought. See Victory.

Filters There are many paradoxes in the cigarette business. When they were introduced, the US government-mandated warnings on packs did little to hurt the cigarette makers. On the contrary, as their lawyers realised, the warnings provided them with a powerful shield against liability suits from the very people the government was trying to warn. Let the smoker beware.

Likewise, growing awareness of the dangers of the cigarette in the early 1950s was turned into a marketing opportunity. If there were dangers – and the manufacturers remained uncommitted about this – then the filter-tip could come to the rescue.

The filter-tip breathed new life into the market, with Viceroy offering ‘Double-Barreled Health Protection’, and Kent assuring consumers that ‘your voice of wisdom says SMOKE KENT’. In 1954, filters made up 10 per cent of the cigarette market; by the mid-1970s the figure was approaching 90 per cent. See Kent.

First of the day The poet Valéry believed that the Romans, with their enormous collection of gods, would have made a little goddess of the first cigarette of the morning. ‘They would have called it, had they known it, “Fumata Matutina”.’

So just when do you enjoy your first of the day?

The British Government has been kind enough to help answer this question. Marc Alyn, Célébration du Tabac, France, 1962 Office for National Statistics, ‘Smoking-Related Behaviour and Attitudes 2006’, © Crown Copyright, 2006

First puffs There is the strange pleasure, often a nauseous pleasure, of the first cigarette of the day. But this is nothing compared to what must be the ultimate first cigarette: the first cigarette of your life. Famous for the Rabbit novels and for Couples (1968), novelist John Updike (1932 – 2009) believed in giving ‘the mundane its beautiful due’. He recalls his teenage smoking years in characteristically iridescent phrases: ‘the sleek cellophane-wrapped rectitude of the pack’, ‘the airy pluming gesturingness of it all’, and of course ‘the chalky raspy initial inhale’. Playwright Simon Gray (1936 – 2008), master chronicler of the anguishes of the professional and academic classes in plays from Butley (1971) through Otherwise Engaged (1975) to The Old Masters (2004), remained dedicated to cigarettes (Silk Cut) to the last, even though alcohol was denied him. He writes particularly evocatively of : … the deep dark swirling pleasures of the smoke being sucked into fresh, pink welcoming lungs … the first suckings-in, the slow leachings-out … Of the cigarettes one enjoys after sex, after a meal, or with the first cup of coffee in the morning Gray astutely notes that these are ‘context smokes’, lacking the relish of childhood smokes, ‘which carried with them most of all the whiff of smoking experiences to come’. John O’Hara (1905 – 70) achieved fame with his first novel, Appointment in Samarra (1934). ‘Brash as a young man,’ wrote John Updike, ‘he became with success a slightly desperate braggart.’ Whatever the reputation of his other big successes, Butterfield 8 (1935) and Pal Joey (1940), he remains very sound on his first cigarette. ‘ ... fresh, pink, welcoming lungs ... ’

When I first inhaled a cigarette I knew I was not taking a Horlick’s malted milk tablet. Although I was only twelve years old or maybe thirteen, I knew that smoking was not good for me. Nevertheless I boldly put a match to my Condax

(or maybe it was a Melachrino Number 9), somewhat less boldly pulled the smoke into my lungs, and I’ve been at it ever since. For fifty years I’ve been at it. Before I started to inhale Turkish cigarettes I had learned to blow smoke through my nostrils, the smoke of Cubebs, of corn silk, of Sweet Caporals. … I smoked in the beginning because it was forbidden, and I kept smoking because I liked it. Obviously it had not stunted my growth; I was six feet tall when I was fifteen years old, and I could ride a horse thirty-five miles in a day. In prep school they measured my lung capacity and it was second to that of the captain of the track team, who was also taller than I. (And who incidentally smoked as much as I did.) Journalist Lynn Barber, an unrepentant smoker, writes that – Smoking is again seen as transgressive, louche, irresponsible and daring, which is what I felt I was being as a schoolgirl when I lit my first cigarette. It was against the rules, therefore it was glamorous, irresistible, really. If they had banned lacrosse perhaps I would have become a dedicated player, but thank God it was smoking. John Updike, Self – Consciousness: Memoirs, New York, 1989 Simon Gray, The Smoking Diaries, London, 2004 John O’Hara, ‘My Turn’ , Newsday Essays, New York, 1964 Lynn Barber, Observer, 5 February 2006

Flappers In the years after the Great War, a new woman emerged. She smoked cigarettes, drank and danced. She cut her hair, wore make-up, and went to petting parties. She was giddy and took risks. She was a flapper – and not everybody approved. As described in the May 1920 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, flappers ‘trot like foxes, limp like lame ducks, one-step like cripples, and all to the barbaric yawp of strange instruments which transform the whole scene into a moving-picture of a fancy ball in bedlam’. I was sure my girls had never experimented with a hip-pocket flask, flirted with other women’s husbands, or smoked cigarettes. My wife entertained the same

smug delusion, and was saying something like that out loud at the dinner table one day. And then she began to talk about other girls. ‘They tell me that that Purvis girl has cigarette parties at her home,’ remarked my wife. She was saying it for the benefit of Elizabeth, who runs somewhat with the Purvis girl. Elizabeth was regarding her mother with curious eyes. She made no reply to her mother, but turning to me, right there at the table, she said: ‘Dad, let’s see your cigarettes.’ Without the slightest suspicion of what was forthcoming, I threw Elizabeth my cigarettes. She withdrew a fag from the package, tapped it on the back of her left hand, inserted it between her lips, reached over and took my lighted cigarette from my mouth, lit her own cigarette and blew airy rings toward the ceiling. My wife nearly fell out of her chair, and I might have fallen out of mine if I hadn’t been momentarily stunned. ‘Me and my Flapper daughters’ by W. O. Saunders, American Magazine, August 1927

Flower, Rousseau H. (1913 – 88) This big-smoking American paleontologist, prolific author of many monographs with titles like ‘Structure and Relationship of Cincinnatian Cyrtocerina’ and ‘Holochoanites are Endoceroids’, described more than 100 new genera and 400 new species. His main subject was Palaeozoic cephalopods (prehistoric molluscs), but he also wrote about corals, early vertebrates and even worked on modern insects. A man of many interests, Flower was a skilled self-taught cellist, wore cowboy clothes and carried a pistol and bullwhips, which he claimed he would use on outcrops he disliked. He was such a dedicated smoker that he indulged this pleasure even in the shower. By what means is sadly unknown. Richard Fortey, Life: An Unauthorised Biography, London, 1997 New Mexico Bureau of Geology & Mineral Resources, geoifo.nmt.edu/publications/memoirs/44

Football: cigarette-smoking dream teams When cigarette smoking was still in the age of innocence, the football stars could puff away without an avalanche of opprobrium descending on them. Roy of the Rovers was a normal human being sharing all the attendant weaknesses and pleasures of the rest of mankind. Indeed, there are more than enough footballing smokers to make up a British XI which could take on the rest of the world, as this team diagram shows. An exciting team, but not quite so mouthwatering when one realises that it is made up almost entirely of attackers/midfielders with just two genuine defenders: the goalie, obviously, and Jackie Charlton. British All-Star Smokers v. World All-Star Smokers

Any true football fanatic is invited to perm the positions to see how the players might make the best of their unfamiliar roles.

Should this British team take on the rest of the world, the problem remains. The puffers in this hypothetical world team are also all attackers, whether from the front or midfield, with the exception of Dino Zoff and Roberto Carlos. What is the psychology that makes so few defenders smokers? Some kind of innate caution? Or is it that the psychology of the attackers is more ready to embrace the dangers of the cigarette?

Foote, Emerson (1906 – 92) A founder of the Foote, Cone and Belding advertising agency, who handled the Lucky Strike account. He was a chain-smoker who became a reformed smoker, and campaigned to curb the very advertising he had helped create. Foote was entertainingly sceptical about the cigarette industry’s claims that advertising was about competition between brands and had little to do with total sales. I am always amused by the suggestion that advertising, a function that has been shown to increase consumption of virtually every other product, somehow miraculously fails to work for tobacco products. Emerson Foote, ‘Advertising and Tobacco’, JAMA, 24 April 1981 Susan Wagner, Cigarette Country, New York, 1971

Ford, Henry (1863 – 1947) In 1914 Henry Ford outraged the tobacco industry by publishing a widely publicised booklet condemning smoking. The pamphlet, entitled The Case Against the Little White Slaver, contained testimonials from doctors, lawyers, ministers and employers, among others, on the deleterious effects of smoking. Ford prefaced his attack on cigarettes by soliciting a letter from Thomas Edison that read: The injurious agent in cigarettes comes principally from the burning paper wrapper. The substance thereby formed is called ‘acrolein’. It has a violent action on the nerve centers, producing degeneration of the cells of the brain, which is quite rapid among boys. Unlike most narcotics, this degeneration is permanent and uncontrollable. I employ no person who smokes cigarettes. Packed with testimonials of no scientific value, the book ‘traced every known human affliction to the cigarette: palsy, juvenile delinquency, crime, death, muddy thinking and feeblemindedness’.

Henry Ford was a complex personality. Away from the shop floor he exhibited a variety of enthusiasms and prejudices and, from time to time, startling ignorance. His dictum that ‘history is more or less bunk’ was widely publicised, as was his deficiency in that field, revealed during cross examination in his million-dollar libel suit against the Chicago Tribune in 1919. A Tribune editorial had called him an ‘ignorant idealist’ because of his opposition to US involvement in World War I. The jury found for Ford, but awarded him only six cents. ‘If you study the history of almost any criminal you will find he is an inveterate cigarette smoker.’ Henry Ford The Ford Motor Co. was one of the few businesses that forbade smoking on its premises. Not only were factory workers prohibited from lighting up, but Ford dealerships, all 7,000 around the world, banned smoking by employees, customers or visitors. It was considered a victory for the workers when smoking was finally permitted by Henry Ford II after his grandfather’s death in 1947. Keith Sward, The Legend of Henry Ford, New York, 1948

Fowles, John (1926 – 2005) His novels The Collector (1963), The Magus (1966) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969) had a huge influence on a whole generation of 1960s readers. Fowles ‘was the thinking person’s popular novelist, or the light reader’s serious one’ and his books were enormously successful, transforming him swiftly from schoolmaster to literary superstar. ‘Nictotine is undoubtedly a concentrative drug.’ Fowles was haunted by recurrent depression, his inability to truly enjoy the fruits of his labours (every huge royalty cheque that came caused him anguish) and a life-long addiction to cigarettes. His work desk bore the blackened scars of the many cigarettes that had been allowed to burn themselves out. In his diary for 20 January 1970, he records he has been writing about the United States – a piece called ‘America I Weep for Thee’. But the effort of writing has cost him his fight with Satan, and he is now back on 60 a day or more. ‘My mind runs so much more freely and inventively. Nicotine is undoubtedly a concentrative drug.’

Compare Beryl Bainbridge, and her observation that ‘Nicotine contains something that invigorates the mind.’ James Campbell, Review: John Fowles, The Journals: Volume 2, International Herald Tribune, 27 October 2006 John Fowles, The Journals: Volume 2, London, 2006

Freud, Sigmund (1856 – 1939) The father of psychoanalysis believed that sexuality begins not at puberty but in the year zero, as the baby sucks first on its mother’s teat and then on its own thumb. Some babies and children get more pleasure than others from this erotogenic sucking, and find a special significance in this enjoyment. If that significance persists, these same children when they are grown up will become epicures in kissing, will be inclined to perverse kissing, or, if males, will have a powerful motive for drinking and smoking. For Freud himself the cigar had a special significance and was, as one might say, much more than just a cigar. He smoked 15 to 20 a day and believed that he owed ‘to the cigar a great intensification of my capacity to work and a facilitation of my self-control’. Being without a cigar, he complained in startling terms, ‘was an act of selfmutilation such as the fox performs in a snare when it bites off its own leg’. ‘ ... the rich man’s cancer ... ’ Freud died of cancer of the hard palate (the pain of which is said to exceed childbirth), at the time nicknamed ‘the rich man’s cancer’ because of the cost of purchasing the cigars necessary to incite the disease. See also Auden, W. H. Sigmund Freud, ‘Three Essays on Sexuality, Infantile Sexuality’, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Vol. 7, 1978 Max Schur, Freud: Living and Dying, New York, 1972 Michael Molnar, editor, The Diary of Sigmund Freud, 1929 – 1939: A Record of the Final Decade, New York, 1992 Sander L. Gilman, ‘Jews and Smoking’, Smoke: A Global History of Smoking, London, 2004

G

Gauloises Created in 1910, at the same time as the other archetypal French cigarette, Gitanes, Gauloises were originally called Hollondaises, until a rival pack of the same name caused the manufacturer to find a new name. The pack was blue, the same colour – bleu poilou – as a French foot soldier’s uniform. A little later, the winged helmet of ancient Gallic warriors was added, surrounded by a continuous ring of chain links. Gauloises became the ultimate in patriotic cigarettes. It was the French cigarette of the Great War. It was the cigarette of the Resistance – and the cigarette that symbolised ordinary French people’s resistance – in World War II.

Absurdly, but charmingly, the same chain metaphorically links the pack and the proud country seamlessly to the strip-cartoon character Asterix, who many decades later wears the Gauloises helmet. A helmet we associate not with history but with the cigarette. But what of the smoke itself? The tobacco that went into Gauloises was caporal – ‘black’ French tobacco. André Citroën, father of the eponymous car, wrote in 1925, extolling Gauloises –

Our ordinary caporal, crackling, bracing, male, healthy, a comrade, a good kid, a pal, what a personality it has! Unlike most exotic tobaccos, with their blond stringiness that supinely goes limp, soft, tasteless angel’s hair, soaked in perfume for sentimental neurotics ... ‘Soaked in perfume’ – a tough but accurate critique of the cocktail-like blending of tobaccos in US and – less so – UK cigarettes. Smoke a Gauloise and you’re smoking the unadulterated real thing. Notable Gauloises smokers include the actor Sean Bean, and Walt Disney. See also Gitanes. Will Self on the magic of French cigarettes: ‘In La Belle France, such artistry! The Gaullist helmet on the pack of Gauloises, M. Ponty’s mysterious gypsy girl wavering on the pack of Gitanes. A state monopoly on tobacco manufacture may inhibit design differentiation, but can we not hypothesise that it’s also helped to preserve the French smoking culture? For here the smoker still looks ineffably cool or smoulderingly sexy, while anywhere else in the world they simply look like unhealthy fools.’ Michael Thibodeau and Jana Martin, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, New York, 2000 Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, New York, 1993 Will Self, Independent, 11 June 2005

Genetically engineered cigarettes In March 2008 Philip Morris-funded researchers announced that they had genetically modified tobacco plants to reduce the levels of some carcinogens in their cured leaves. But does this really count for anything? The FDA’s former director of the Office of Tobacco Programs, Mitch Zeller, observes that even if you bring reductions of toxicity in 15 or 20 of the 69 known carcinogens in smoke, this isn’t going significantly to affect public health. But, he says, ‘ ... imagine a world, however many decades from now, in which the cigarette remains as deadly and toxic as it is today, but it’s not addictive because there’s no nicotine in it’. A difficult thought experiment, surely: Hamlet without the Prince. A whorehouse where you can be beaten up and robbed – but there are no whores to lure you there in the first place. See also Safe cigarettes. Alexis Madrigal, Wired, 25 March 2008

Girl called Cigarette, A Carmen, in Prosper Merimée’s novel and Bizet’s opera, introduced the cigarette into popular culture. But another heroine went even further in the tobacco stakes. She was actually called Cigarette and was the boyish, desert-army soldier-girl in the nineteenth-century novel Under Two Flags by Ouida. ‘Cigarette’ was a smoker of both cigars and her namesake, and would drink, fight and swear with the best of them in the regiment. She was played in a 1936 film version of the book by Claudette Colbert opposite Ronald Colman as a Foreign Legion soldier. Cigarette’s masculine attributes did not unsex her though: Her voice rang clear as a clarion; the warm blood burned in her bright cheeks; the swift, fiery, pathetic eloquence of her nation moved her, and moved strangely the hearts of her hearers; for though she could neither read nor write, there was in Cigarette the germ of that power which the world mistily calls genius. One can only hope that her constant drinking and smoking did not tarnish ‘the delicious fragrance of youth’ which she carries about her in the novel. Ouida (Louise de Ramée), Under Two Flags, London, 1867 Under Two Flags, directed by Frank Lloyd, 1936

Gitanes If Gauloises are the cigarette of the people, then Gitanes are their upmarket companion, boasting elegant pack designs and a slidingdrawer-type pack. Introduced like Gauloises in 1910, it wasn’t until the early 1930s that Gitanes acquired its dancing gypsy, holding a tambourine above her head (gitan is French for gypsy).

Like Gauloises, Gitanes evolved over the decades to offer cigarette types to match current smoking tastes, so Gitanes blondes of today would be unrecognisable to a 1910 smoker. Chris Mullen, Cigarette Pack Art, London, 1979

Giving up The ever-growing cigarette habit in the early decades of the last century soon created a secondary growth industry: advice on how to give up the habit. Here are some of the more colourful instances of advice from the past, which vary in the extreme. In his 1927 book, The Smoking Habit: Its Dangers and Cure, J. Henry Wodehouse offers up ‘10 Master Rules’, of which a key one is: Cultivate a feeling of superiority over all who smoke. This will come automatically when you have been without tobacco for a week or so. The Wodehouse tone can be combative and aggressive. Seek as many ‘challenges’ from your friends as possible. (By challenges we mean such remarks as: ‘You won’t do it, old man’; we all like to be challenged, and to win.) Wodehouse encourages the would-be giver-upper to ‘welcome the mischievous “friends” who offer you cigarettes’. It’s a pleasure, he argues, to refuse them. This arm-wrestling-like approach to giving up takes a decidedly odd turn when it comes to the tenth master rule: Be absolutely sure that you obtain at least one complete bowel movement daily; two would be better. This seems an equally or indeed more demanding proposition than giving up itself. Apparently, cigarette poisons are stored in the bowels, and the sooner the bowels are emptied the less the body demands more of those poisons. ‘Cultivate a feeling of superiority over all who smoke.‘ A short tract by J. C. Romer in 1949 takes a wholly different line on giving up, which makes no bones of the discomforts that the smoker will endure, and indeed encourages him to embrace them, in an almost masochistic way.

Romer tells the reader that: ... you will remember, in spasms and without warning, that you can no longer look forward to the relaxing comfort of ‘baccy’. With an ache of depression and frustration you will know you have lost the excuse, which smoking can give you, for not facing up to and getting on with the tasks that await you ... The ‘in spasms’ is particularly evocative. Romer encourages you to seek out treats, so that the ‘hankering for tobacco will be forgotten’. This sounds reassuring, but it is not long before he goes to work to chill the reader’s blood. Make up your mind before you start that these three weeks are going to be hell. Choose a time when life bids fair to be quiet and normal … Do not, for instance, start the experiment when your wife is going to have a baby; or at Christmas time; or just before a visit to the dentist! Kurt Salzer, in a 1959 book, dishes up a smorgasbord of techniques to break the habit. Choose from the Health, Aesthetics, Economy or Authoritarian approach. Or there’s the Brake method, where you’re allowed 40 cigarettes on the first day, 39 on the second, and so on. Or try the Clean-Cut technique of simply stopping without further thought about the matter – it might work for you. This is eccentric but intelligent: try out the techniques, until you find one that works for you, rather than putting all your faith in a method that may not suit you at all. With the Authoritarian method, one looks up to a notable authority for guidance. Salzer cites the poet and playwright Goethe, who lived an admirably long, healthy, productive life and observed of smoking: Smoking makes you dull; it prevents you from clear thinking and writing poetry. It is only for lazy people, for people who are bored, people who spend one third of their lives sleeping, one third eating, drinking and doodling and then don’t know what to do with the remaining third although they always complain that ‘life is too short’.

‘Be absolutely sure that you obtain at least one complete bowel movement daily; two would be better.’

This no-nonsense tone, offensive though it would be to many in today’s world of handouts, whingeing, and compensation, where people really do think that their smoking – if they come to dislike it or it harms them – is somehow the fault of cigarette companies, or anybody or anything else at all except themselves, makes refreshing reading. ‘ ... Make up your mind before you start that these three weeks are going to be hell ... ’ Perhaps cartoonist and humourist Willie Rushton (1937 – 96) had the simplest take on the problem: The easiest way to stop smoking is to stop putting cigarettes in your mouth and lighting them. J. Henry Wodehouse, The Smoking Habit: Its Dangers and Cure, London, 1927 J. C. Romer, How to Give up Smoking, London, 1949 Kurt Salzer, 13 Ways to Break the Smoking Habit, London, 1959

Gloag, Robert (1825 – 91) Robert Peacock Gloag, a resourceful and roving Scot whose family originally came from Perth, is the man generally credited with introducing the cigarette to the UK. While serving in the Crimean War as Paymaster General to the Turks (no one knows quite how he acquired this position), he observed both Turks and Russians smoking crude cigarettes made by enclosing tobacco in tubes of paper. Suitably inspired, he returned to Britain and set to work. The first ‘factory made’ cigarette produced by Gloag was a rough and ready affair. Cylinders of straw-coloured paper had a cane tip inserted in one end and the tobacco filled in through a funnel. Latakia was the favoured leaf, a dark gutsy tobacco which would bring people to their knees these days.

Gloag went from strength to strength. Soon he was employing over a hundred people from his base in Walworth, south-east London, where he christened his tall terrace house: ‘The Oldest and the Original Turkey Tobacco and Cigarette Manufactory in England’. Gloag was a Scot through and through and it showed in the names of some of his cigarettes. His Cantilever brand marked the cantilever construction of the Forth Bridge and Standfast 92nd derived from the 2nd Battalion Gordon Highlanders. But he wasn’t popular with his neighbours, being not welcome in an area that was then thought of as posh. He was seen as an uncultured man, given to ‘coarse reproofs’. Was it his accent and his rough ways? Or simply that people did not like a stinking cigarette factory on their doorsteps? Whatever the reason he declared piously: ‘I forgive them for they know no better.’ Such Calvinist forbearance drew a veil over what was an early form of nimbyism shot through by issues of class. And Gloag could not foresee the profound effect he was to have in years to come, as A. N. Wilson points out: ‘When the Turkish, Russian, and British empires are now as obsolete as the Bonapartist dynasty, the British working class, 146 years after the treaty of Paris, are still addicts of what Gloag brought home – though in other classes the custom, like its adherents, is dying.’ Eric Gurd, Prologue to Cigarettes, London, 1942 A. N. Wilson, The Victorians, London, 2002

Global warming The cigarette has had many crimes laid at its door, from its straightforward health dangers to the rather harder-to-prove dangers of secondary smoking. It has been accused of everything from undermining moral fibre to giving habitual smokers a characteristic ‘cigarette face’. Could anything be added to the list? Of course it could … Now the cigarette meets its ultimate charge: that of contributing to global warming. At a meeting of UN diplomats and staff in September 2006, Al Gore, introduced by SecretaryGeneral Kofi Annan, said in his understated way that the world faces a ‘full-scale climate emergency that threatens the future of civilisation on earth’. He added that cigarette smoking was a ‘significant contributor’ to this full-scale climate emergency. ‘ ... cigarette smoking was a “significant contributor” to this full-scale climate emergency’. Note that this is the same Al Gore who in 1988 campaigned as a tobacco farmer, telling would-be voters that ‘all of my life I hoed it, chopped it, shredded it, put it in the barn and

stripped it and sold it’. The year that his sister Nancy died of lung cancer (1984) Al Gore fought against efforts to put words like ‘death’ and ‘addiction’ on cigarette warning labels. Perhaps Gore’s conviction in this matter could lead to the ultimate in cigarette-pack warnings. moonbattery.com/archives/2006/09

Go to Hell Brand of cigarette launched in 1987. Each pack came with two messages, first, ‘I like ’em and I’m going to smoke ’em’, second, ‘Cheaper than psychiatry, better than a nervous breakdown’. There was also a Go to Hell brand recorded in 1924, which featured the motto ‘If you don’t like these – Go to Hell and buy your own!’ Tobacco International, 1987 trinketsandtrash.org

Mr Gold and Mr Flake These two top-hatted gentlemen started to appear in English press advertisements in 1927, promoting W. D. & H. O. Wills’ Gold Flake cigarettes. They would conduct dialogues like this – Mr Gold:

Why are Wills’ Gold Flake like a pretty girl, Mr Flake?

Mr Flake:

I know, Mr Gold. Because they never get left on the shelf. They’re always fresh.

They anticipate an English ‘upstairs downstairs’ fascination with toffs and servants, and anticipate the double act of Lambert and Butler. See also Kensitas. Here is a short selection of other English toffs and servants on cigarette packs from the 1920s:

M a n u f a c t u re r

B rand

P ack design

Ogden

Gentleman

Monocled toff with beard

Wix

Page Boy

White-suited page boy. Slogan: It’s a pleasure, sir!

Unknown

Hallo

Bertie Wooster type peers at us idiotically through a monocle while making a phone call

Unknown

Bobby

Monocled bulldog wearing top hat

Ronne

Buttons

Variant on the page-boy theme

Barnett

Statesman

Top-hatted monocled man with smug smile

Compare with ‘Call for Philip Morris!’ Chris Mullen, Cigarette Pack Art, London, 1979

Gorbachev, Mikhail S. (1931 – ) Gorbachev sidles into cigarette history not by being a significant smoker in his own right, but by his active support of Soviet smokers. In 1990 he dismissed a high-ranking official Vladilen V. Nikitin, blaming him not for corruption or any of the usual political sins, but for an acute shortage of cigarettes that caused demonstrations in Moscow and other cities. As a stop-gap measure the Soviet authorities imported Bulgarian cigarettes. New York Times, 31 August 1990

Grammar How could the grammar of a sentence help send the sales of a cigarette brand soaring? Just take a word that is properly a conjunction, in this instance the word ‘like’, and use it as a preposition and suddenly, lo and behold – Winston tastes good like a cigarette should. – sales soared. See Tareyton, Virginia Slims, Winston.

Gray, Simon (1936 – 2008) Playwright Simon Gray, acidic conscience of the English professional classes, and writer of such bitingly funny black comedies as Butley (1971) and Otherwise Engaged (1975), had an overwhelming and lifelong dedication to cigarettes. This he commemorated, perhaps more thoroughly than any other smoker to date, in his four volumes of memoirs, The Smoking Diaries (2004). They end with Coda (2008), published posthumously, after lung cancer took him. The Smoking Diaries of course chart other Simon Grayish themes: adultery, platonic love between men, drunkenness – a habit he managed to put behind him after passing out and having several yards of intestine removed. But he stayed faithful to cigarettes to the end, and created a notable character who smokes himself to death, more or less on stage, in Nick in The Common Pursuit (1984). NICK:

Look, could you hold on the incisive questions, just for a moment? I’m about to do something exceptionally difficult. (He takes out a cigarette, lights it, and inhales.) Oh, yes, there they come, the little buggers, bob-

bing from iris to pupil and back again. Now the ripples of giddiness – turning into tidal bloody waves of nausea. (He groans. Coughs.) MARTIN: NICK: HUMPHRY:

Is it always like this when you smoke a cigarette? Only the first. Why have it then?

NICK:

So I can go on to my next. By the third or fourth I won’t even notice I’m smoking.

MARTIN:

But if the first are so ghastly, and you don’t even notice the rest of them, why don’t you just give up?

NICK: HUMPHRY: NICK:

What for? For one thing you might live longer. Oh you don’t live longer it just seems longer. As Sam Goldwyn said. (To Humphry.) Or one of the poets anyway.

See First puffs. Simon Gray, The Common Pursuit, London, 1984

H

Hair on your chest If it’s a good strong lungful you’re in need of, these are the boys to go for. Top twenty cigarettes by tar, nicotine and carbon dioxide content

The standard Cambridge test was used to measure CO2, nicotine and tar as milligrams per cigarette. CO2 measurement not applicable to unfiltered cigarettes. Federal Trade Commission

Hambling, Maggi (1945 – ) British artist Maggi Hambling has enjoyed a controversial career. She’s had an auction of paintings at Sotheby’s that featured cans of Special Brew, and unveiled a statue of Oscar Wilde that shows him rising from his own tomb, cigarette in hand. (The brass cigarette keeps being stolen.) She’s openly gay, although, ‘I always say queer – I hate the word “gay”. I quite like “Lesbionic”.’ An unusual day for this gifted and Lesbionic artist was 4 October 2001. It was the first time she had allowed herself to be photographed in public without a cigarette.

I never allow myself to be photographed if I’m not smoking. It’s a strict policy I’ve adhered to for a long time. I initiated it when it became politically correct not to smoke. Saga Magazine, August 2003 Daily Express, 4 October 2001

Hawtrey, Charles (1914 – 88) Charles Hawtrey was the mincing wide-eyed stooge of 23 of the 29 Carry On films, perhaps best remembered for his role as Private Widdle of the Queen’s Own Third Foot and Mouth Regiment in Carry On up the Khyber (1968). Like Kenneth Williams, Hawtrey felt a glittering career had been unfairly snatched from him by the popularity of the Carry On films, and that his true talents were overshadowed by his absurd and memorably funny appearances in the films. For most of his life Hawtrey lived at 217 Cromwell Road, Hounslow, with his mother. He chain-smoked Weights cigarettes, and drank supermarket gin decanted into quart-sized R. Whites lemonade bottles. He shared the gin with his cat. Finally, the cigarettes and the lifestyle got to him, and Hawtrey was diagnosed with peripheral vascular disease; one possible way of prolonging his life, the doctors diagnosed, was by cutting off both legs – a stratagem that was also put to Gauloises-smoking existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. But as Barbara Windsor commented, He may have been a bit of an oddball, Charlie, but he was a brave one. When he was dying and his doctors told him they would have to amputate his legs, he lit a fag and said, ‘No, I want to die with my boots on!’ And that’s what he did. Jean-Paul Sartre, on the other hand, was made of feebler stuff. In his later years, shunned by stage and screen, Hawtrey moved to a house in Deal. In August 1984 he made the headlines by setting fire to it, by leaving a lit cigarette on a sofa. He and his boyfriend were helped out of the place by firemen, to the delight of the press. He was a difficult, sad man, banned at one time or another from every pub in Deal for his drunkenness. He craved recognition, but often told strangers who greeted him with smiling recognition to fuck off.

See also Player’s Weights. Roger Lewis, Charles Hawtrey: 1914 – 1988: The Man Who was Private Widdle, Faber, 2001

Head Play Head Play was the creation of Woodford Fitch Axton, the largest privately controlled cigarette company in America in the 1930s, whose leading light was Colonel Woodward Fitch Axton, a man of jocular sensibility, who also gave the world Spud cigarettes. The tax laws of the 1930s required each cigarette pack to bear its own tax stamp, the tax to be paid by the smoker. Head Play cigarettes came in a pack eleven inches tall, but still needed only one tax stamp. The ingenious twist was the pack could be separated, using the perforations provided, into four normally sized packs, so just one tax was imposed on four packs. On each pack, as cigarette historians Michael Thibodeau and Jana Martin put it, ‘Head Play the race horse (a real winner of the Kentucky Derby) eyes his coconspirator, with an in-the-know expression, framed by a lucky horseshoe’. See Spud. Michael Thibodeau and Jana Martin, Smoke Gets in Your Eyes, New York, 2000

Heavy smoking Everyone is familiar with the idea of the heavy smoker. But what exactly is heavy smoking? A pleasing answer comes from a psychologist’s report on smokers’ attitudes to the risks of smoking: … the common view that only heavy smoking is dangerous, with heavy smoking being defined as a level of consumption one step higher than one’s own. Very much like the heavy drinker, in short. Cited in Matthew Hilton, Smoking in Popular English Culture, London, 2000

Hepburn, Audrey (1929 – 93) Both tomboyish and ladylike, the supremely elegant Audrey Hepburn was addicted to cigarettes from the age of fifteen. Like her famous character Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, she used a cigarette holder, filtered. Her favourite brand was Gold Flake. When this was taken off the market because of its excessively high tar content she switched to Kent. Ignoring her mother’s beauty tip to smoke no more than six cigarettes a day, she plateaued on three packs a day.

Dressed in her nun’s habit, she would indulge her nicotine habit between takes in The Nun’s Story; when the camera stopped turning, her Eliza Dolittle would light up on the set of My Fair Lady.

Hirst, Damien The most prominent of the new Brit-pop artists has observed, ‘Every time I finish a cigarette I think about death.’ Although fellow artists such as Sarah Lucas and Tracy Emin have celebrated the cigarette in their different ways, Damien Hirst has made a more practical contribution to the cause, designing a beautiful Camel pack, butterflies on a pinkish-purple background, for R. J. Reynolds. ‘Every time I finish a cigarette I think about death.’

Hitler, Adolf (1889 – 1945) In Vienna, the young Hitler smoked 25 to 40 cigarettes a day, until he realised how much money he was wasting and ‘tossed his cigarettes into the Danube and never reached for them again’. He was convinced that Germany would never have reached the glory it enjoyed during the Third Reich if he hadn’t stopped smoking; ‘perhaps it was to this, then, that we owe the salvation of the German people’, observed a loyal commentator of the time.

He doesn’t devour it – it devours him. Hitler went on to be a fanatical anti-smoker: what he had achieved by 1940 – cigarettes banned in cinemas and theatres, on public transport, in public places, taxed and frowned on, it took over 60 years for other governments to catch up with.

Hitler not only eschewed tobacco; he never drank and was for the most part a vegetarian. He was also an animal rights activist – a collection of attributes that would have him hailed today as a liberal. A Nazi-era cartoon depicts liberated lab animals giving the Nazi salute to Hermann Göring after he outlawed animal experimentation (not that the Germans were so fastidious about experimenting on humans). On the credit side, it was Nazi medicine that first strongly identified smoking with cancer, perceived the risks of passive smoking, and encouraged women to check themselves for breast cancer. Even his lover, Eva Braun, wasn’t allowed to smoke in Hitler’s presence, though Hitler did relax this rule for Mussolini. When Hitler finally killed himself, the first thing the other occupants of his Berlin bunker did was to light up ... ‘now the headmaster had gone and the boys could break the rules’. See Passive smoking. Robert N. Proctor, The Nazi War on Cancer, London, 1999 Hugh Trevor-Roper, The Last Days of Hitler, London, 1962

Hitler ’s cigarette cards Hitler, it is widely acknowledged, had many faults. Here is a new one: double standards. Despite his condemnation of cigarettes he was happy to encourage a scheme whereby smokers collected coupons featuring his image from cigarette packs, with the aim of buying a handsomely designed album into which to paste these images. The company behind this was German cigarette manufacturer ‘Cigaretten Bildendienst’ who approached him in 1935; he readily agreed. The book is said to be something of a collectors’ item – surely a substantial understatement. Hitler appears in various guises: in civilian clothes, enjoying the company of happy children in his Obersalzberg retreat, and in his more familiar uniformed self, mesmerising the Nuremberg rallies. Candace Scott, Adolf Hitler,1931 – 1935: Pictures from the Life of the Führer, a new edition of the 1935 version, 2004

Hockney, David (1937 – ) A popular and lively artist whose colourful, strongly graphic style has made him world-famous. His fame began in the 1960s with his ‘A Bigger Splash’ series of paintings which featured hunky, gay men amid the dazzling blue swimming pools of California – now one of the most rabidly anti-smoking places on earth.

This hardly seemed the right milieu for a devoted cigarette smoker but Hockney was certainly that. A happy puffer on 25 Camel Lights a day, he is an impassioned defender of smokers’ rights. He loathes the bossiness of the anti-smokers. When asked if he’d visit 10 Downing Street during the Blairs’ occupation if Cherie Blair said he couldn’t smoke, he replied, ‘No … Smoking is my affair, not the Blairs’. It’s nothing to do with them.’ The Royal Family on the other hand knows how to behave properly. Hockney read that the Queen allows smoking at lunch and thought, ‘Well of course the Queen wouldn’t be telling people not to smoke. She’s far too polite.’ ‘Oh, I like smoking. I do. I smoke for my health, my mental health. Tobacco gives you little pauses, a rest from life.’ Likewise the inhabitants of Clarence House, where he was invited for a dinner hosted by the Prince of Wales. When he asked if he could smoke they brought an ashtray at the end of the meal and he lit up. The agreeable tolerance of Clarence House was no doubt due to the lingering spirit of the Queen Mother, who once lived there. She loved horse racing, and plenty of gin and cigarettes. It was probably the latter that saw her off though – at the age of one hundred and one. David Hockney, quoted from an interview with Marion Finlay, Toronto Star, ‘Forest Online’, 2004 David Hockney, Daily Telegraph, July 1999

Holder, double-barrelled In the 1920s and 1930s, America was largely rural. Even city dwellers had farming origins, and people were used to making their own goods and repairing their own equipment. Modern Mechanix & Inventions was one of many magazines for the tinkerer of this period, and was full of designs for everything from a simple radio to a dirigible airfield, and indeed a doublebarrelled cigarette holder.

Holder, finger This was essentially a cigarette holder attached to the finger. The abstract for this, United States 20060266374, read as follows: A finger-attached cigarette holder has a finger ring for attaching to a person’s finger and a cigarette ring sized to hold a cigarette therein. The cigarette ring is affixedly attached to the finger ring so that a person wearing the finger ring and having the cigarette attached in the cigarette ring can smoke the cigarette while using both hands. Both the cigarette ring and the finger ring are partial circles made of a bendable material to allow adjustments for fitting different fingers or cigarettes. The cigarette ring is fixedly attached to the finger ring with its center axis 90 degrees from the center axis of the finger ring.

Holders The world of cigarette holders is where the humble cigarette meets the exhibitionist, the lover of the bizarre, or just a plain show-off. Noël Coward clearly fits into this category, as does the English comedian Terry-Thomas (1911 – 90), the foxy-faced, mustachioed, gap-toothed bounder who was devoted to his long trademark holder.

Of his collection of 40 cigarette holders, Terry-Thomas’s most precious one was made by Dunhill: seven inches of black lacquered whangee (a bamboo-like plant) with an 18-carat gold spiral band and 42 diamonds set along its length. Its theft on 11 March 1960 from T-T’s dressing room at the Odeon in Liverpool, where he was compèring a variety show, reached the national newspapers, such was the public’s affection for both the actor and his smoking paraphernalia. ‘Mr Terry-Thomas’s £2,000 cigarette holder’ was The Times ’s, headline, as it revealed that a young twenty-year-old comedian was accused of stealing the holder and passing it on to an unemployed salesman. Two months later, the thief was put on probation for two years after pleading guilty. He took the holder in a moment of pique, rather than with dishonest intent, having pestered Terry-Thomas for a part in the show. Though the only appearance he got was in court, the young James Joseph Tarbuck’s career went on to flourish. A more glamorous wielder of a cigarette holder was Holly Golightly played by Audrey Hepburn in the film of Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961). Strangely enough, the author of the book, Truman Capote, did not seem to be a fan of this particular smoking accessory. While rejecting an invitation to a production of A Streetcar Named Desire, Truman sneered at the transformation of his fellow Southern writer, Tennessee Williams, particularly the new affectation of his smoking. Come with me, he said, I’ve got a dinner date with Old Streetcar himself – you’ll see his new character: pepper and salt tweeds, a brand new voice. Can you imagine an Oxford drawl? A long black cigarette holder to finish off the tout ensemble! Interestingly, in the original book Holly Golightly does not actually use a holder. She smoked constantly but never with a holder. I discover, from observing the trash basket outside her door that her regular reading consisted of tabloids and travel folders and astrological charts; that she smoked an esoteric cigarette called Picayunes ... Later when in hospital recovering from a collapse Holly smokes a cigarette, she comments: ‘Tastes bum, but divine.’

John Malcolm Brinnin, Truman Capote, London,1987 Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, New York, 1958

Holy Smoke The Catholic Church has often turned a blind eye to human frailty. The TV series Father Ted (1995) is a monument to the somewhat relaxed behaviour of priests in private: just take a look at Father Jack Hackett. But Catholics were not always so lax. In 1957 Pope Pius XII suggested that the Jesuit order give up smoking. Why not all priests you may ask? A cynic comments: ‘There were only 33,000 Jesuits in the world at that point, so the industry was not worried about losing this handful of smokers. They feared that the Pope or other church leaders might ask, as a magazine headline once put it, “When are Cigs a Sin?” ’ ‘We are probably the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal.’ But even the censorious Pope Pius XII had a soft spot for cigarettes when smoked by the civilians. A friendly human being, Pius XII greeted everyone with a smile in his eyes and spoke to each one as a friend. Always a gentleman, he tried to save people from embarrassment. One American congressman asked him to bless a package of medals. He accidentally pulled out of his pocket a pack of cigarettes. The Pope blessed it. In 1987 a high-ranking Catholic went even further by blessing Philip Morris executives at a special ceremony. For the Treasures of the Vatican exhibit, Terence Cardinal Cooke, then the Roman Catholic Archbishop of New York, led a prayer for former Philip Morris CEO George Weissman and his Philip Morris colleagues. After the benediction, Frank Saunders, Philip Morris VP, said, ‘We are probably the only cigarette company on this earth to be blessed by a cardinal.’ E. Whelan, A Smoking Gun, London, 1984 Sister Marchione, Inside the Vatican magazine, January 2003

How many? About 1.3 billion men in the world smoke, about 35% of men in developed countries and 50% of men in developing countries. About 250 million women in the world smoke daily, 22% in developed countries and 9% in developing countries. A re a

C igarettes sm oked pe r day, pe r smok e r

World

15

Africa

0

Asia

14

Europe

18

Australia

15

South America

16 World Health Organisation

Hypocrisy As comic novelist Howard Jacobson (1942 – ) has observed, writing of the unnecessary nature of the cigarette ban, ‘The world is full of places where the air you breathe is clean, and all you need inhale is the odour of sanctity.’

The apparent concern of the anti-smoker for the smoker’s physical health often seems overshadowed by a concern for the smoker’s soul, so that a habit once praised as a comfort in times of distress, an aid to concentration, a stimulus to conviviality, is now seen as ‘sick, sinful and anti-social’, as Jacob Sullum has it. There is hypocrisy at work, of the kind once written about by Lord Macaulay (1800 – 59): ‘The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators.’

The Puritan hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators. And fertilised by hypocrisy the myths mushroom … The undoubted dangers of smoking have been kept secret by cigarette makers. But as far back as the seventeenth century these dangers were commented on. Cigarette makers may have been reticent about the risk of their product but, since – to pick one of a hundred possible instances – ‘Coffin nails’ was slang for cigarettes as early as the 1870s, the general public hasn’t been as gullible as it is often given credit for.

Smoking imposes costs on society. But as several entries in this book point out, much evidence points to smokers giving far more to society in taxes than they take in health care costs. See Selfish smokers and Risk.

Second-hand smoke poses a grave threat. Unproven. See ETS.

Advertising prompts people to smoke. Advertising may affect brand choice, but even Surgeon Koop admitted in1989 that there was no evidence it actually increased levels of consumption. Howard Jacobson, Independent, May 2007 Lord Macaulay, History of England, London, 1849 Jacob Sullum, For Your Own Good, New York, 1999

I

I am a cigarette Will Self’s novel The Butt (2008) is suffused with the Essence of Cigarette. A cigarette becomes the engine of the story when a traveller in a distant fictional country (a bizarre conflation of Australia and Iraq) flicks his last butt out from a hotel balcony: The cigarette was finished. All that remained was a fang of ash curling up from its speckled gum. The cigarette was finished – his last – and Tom also felt overwhelmed by the loss of that thing he had never possessed: some deep and primordial sense of healing satiety, a patch on his ruptured heart. Vainly, he cast about once more for the ashtray that wasn’t there; and in a moment of utter unthinking, he flipped the butt into the sodden air. The butt lands on the bald head of a man on the terrace below. His head now has a small blister on it. For this heinous crime which transgresses the crazed anti-smoking laws of this land, the traveller is sent deep into the parched interior of this land to seek expiation. Now his nightmare begins, as nicotine-withdrawal plus clashes with an atavistic bureaucracy drive him crazy. On his travels he even dreams that he has become a cigarette himself: He lay in bed smoking; or rather, he himself was made of dry golden shreds, sheathed in the papery cylinder of his skin. He exhaled, and his mouth burned terribly as the smoke jetted out. Out in a hot, stinking Swiftian landscape, inhabited by freaks, he weakens and buys a pack of cigarettes: He fumbled with his fingertips for the little cellophane ripcord, desperate now for the smoky parachute to open over his head. Then stopped.

What would be the point? It wasn’t as if he’d only have one – he’d have another twenty or thirty thousand, a world-girdling belt of braided tobacco strands. He resists the temptation and travels on deeper into his living nightmare. A journey into the Heart of Darkness. And here he meets his own Kurtz – Erich von Sasser, a neuro-anthropologist with a special line in lobotomies. Von Sasser is the reason why this sloppy smoker ends up years later as a brain-curdled bum. An old wino was shuffling along the arc of the sixteen metre line, bending down to pick up butt after butt, then lifting each in turn up to the sky and scrutinising it before letting it fall. Every time he bent down he displayed the back of his cropped head to the three spectators, and the white trough of a scar that bisected it from nape to crown. Will Self, The Butt, London, 2008

Imitation In the endless quest to unlock the riddle of why we smoke, one partial answer seems to be imitation. In an experiment organised by Dutch researchers, several groups of participants thought they were evaluating TV advertisements. In fact, it was they who were being evaluated. In a warm social situation participants followed the lead of the first person to light up. The more people smoked, the more they continued to smoke. Light up, in other words, and the world lights up with you. Zeena Harakeh, Rutger C. M. E. Engels, Rick B. Van Baaren and Ron H. J. Scholte, ‘Imitation of cigarette smoking: An experimental study on smoking in a naturalistic setting’, Drug and Alcohol Dependence, Volume 86, Issues 2 – 3, 12 January 2007, pp. 199 – 206

Ingredients What goes into a cigarette? More than you might think. There’s nutrition, for one thing. Forget the simple pieties of five pieces of fruit and vegetables a day, as recommended by the health experts. Try cigarettes instead. When you smoke a cigarette you inhale from a cornucopia of exotic treats. In this deceptively simple cylinder lie fruits, herbs, spices and vegetables in abundance: from

apricot to alfalfa, apple to anise, bay-leaf to balsam, cinnamon to celery, fenugreek to fennel, pine-needle oil to pineapple, raisin juice to rosemary, vanilla to violet and walnut extract to wheat. These are a handful of the 599 additives approved by the US Government for use in cigarettes – not necessarily all at once, it should be said – and the list was for a long time a secret. The list was submitted to the Department of Health and Human Services in April 1994, by the five major US cigarette companies: American Tobacco Company, Brown and Williamson, Liggett Group, Inc., Philip Morris Inc. and R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. Here, there is truly something for everyone. If you’re a lover of the whale, you’ll be glad to know that you can get your daily dose of ambergris in a cigarette. A cigarette complements your cup of coffee or tea, for caffeine comes built in. There’s calcium carbonate – good for bones. Not to mention more robust chemicals like ammonia and urea – an essential component of urine and used to add flavour to cigarettes. One striking thing about these additives is that they are in no way exclusive to cigarettes: they appear in every kind of processed foodstuff. On a more serious note, what this list demonstrates is that a cigarette is like an expertly blended cocktail. Any competent cigarette manufacturer can mimic another manufacturer’s cigarette. This is what White Burley tobacco gave to the world, with its ability to absorb flavourings. If cigarettes tasted of plain tobacco, it can be argued that people just wouldn’t smoke them.

Inventions The cigarette is beguilingly simple in appearance and use. This is a special part of its charm. The simplicity hardly prepares one for the ingenuity that has gone into cigarette-related inventions.

See also Smoker’s Hat.

‘I smoke ‘em because my name’s on ‘em.’ As regulations governing advertising grew tougher in the UK, so Silk Cut and Gallaher responded with campaigns of ingenious subtlety and surrealism. One brand, Regal cigarettes, sister brand to Embassy No. 1, from Imperial Tobacco, decided to go a quite different route, and so in the early 1990s Reg burst on to the world. There was no subtlety about Reg. No enigmatic imagery. He was a fat, balding man, with a unique line in bar-room philosophy. Poster after poster celebrated his insights. The first poster was simple enough, featuring Reg, holding a pack of Regal, saying, ‘I smoke ’em because my name’s on ’em.’ His fingers cunningly obscured the ‘al’ of ‘Regal’. But soon he had more to say. There was Reg on the meaning of life: ‘Depends if you get time off for good behaviour.’ Reg on train-spotting: ‘There’s one’. Reg on party politics: ‘If you drop ash on the carpet you won’t get invited again.’ Then, in a stroke of great ingenuity, the advertisers introduced Reg’s twin brother Al, whose fingers this time obscured the ‘Reg’ of Regal. Reg was popular with the public, and for a while avoided the tobacco watchdogs, as his creators, the Lowe Howard-Spink agency, argued he was repulsive and far from cool, and thus wouldn’t appeal to young people.

But British Medical Journal research indicated that ‘the Reg campaign was getting through to children more effectively than to adults and held most appeal for teenagers, particularly

fourteen/fifteen-year-old smokers’, and so Reg (and his twin) eventually disappeared from the billboards. ‘I smoke ‘em because I’m clinically addicted to the nicotine.’ Viz magazine parodied the campaign with the line: ‘I smoke ’em because I’m clinically addicted to the nicotine.’ tv.cream.org/extras/tobacco/index.htm www.bmj.com/cgi/content/abstract/309/6959/933

J

JAMA See Journal of the American Medical Association.

James I (1566 – 1625) One of the very first to attack smoking, he described it in A Counterblaste to Tobacco as – A custom loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain, dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the horrible Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless. It should be noted that at the same time as A Counterblaste was published James established the first tax on tobacco in this country – arguing that it was in the interests of his subjects’ health. This deeply disingenuous argument has been much used since. Why Counterblaste, incidentally? It’s not as though anyone had written a blaste in favour of tobacco. James I, A Counterblaste to Tobacco, 1604

Japan Like the citizens of its western neighbour China, the Japanese have always felt that smoking their cigarettes was a patriotic duty. And it really is ‘their’ cigarettes: up until 1965 there was a state monopoly of all cigarette production. Japan Tobacco still provides 70 per cent of the cigarettes in a country where 50 per cent of males smoke – so the government’s attitude towards cigarette consumption is laissez-faire to say the least. And if they ever had dreams of world domination they’ve done it when it comes to consumption. In 2004, Japan produced and imported 2,190 cigarettes per person, the highest ratio in the world. For this is the country where, in 1964, Emperor Hirohito began the tradition of giving out cigarettes to his staff on his birthday. This largesse was ended by Emperor Arkihito only in the year 2000.

One noble tradition persists: the handing out of free cigarettes by Japan Tobacco on ‘Respect for the Aged Day’. Ten free packs are given to each of their senior citizens in residential homes, but not everyone agrees that this is wise.

The Smokin’ Clean campaign began in 1964, transforming the act into something healthy Hirobumi Hayashi, an anti-tobacco activist, has protested that since the spirit of the holiday is to celebrate and pay respect to the longevity of the aged, handing out cigarettes is more in the spirit of encouraging the aged to hurry up and die. But this Pecksniff is fighting a losing battle in a country where the health warning on cigarette packets isn’t ‘Smoking Kills’ but a timid and apologetic: ‘Be sure not to smoke too much.’ The public service advertisements are equally reticent. Strange stick figure drawings are accompanied by elusive haiku-like injunctions such as: I threw my cigarette butt into the drain. That is to say, I hid it in the drain. Cigarette smoke is wider than a human body. In summertime, the arms that pass near my lit cigarette are bare. Stand ashtrays. Disposing of a lit cigarette in one just creates more smoke. There are even TV shows dedicated to cigarette knowledge where contestants who are popular TV personalities have to smoke 20 different cigarette brands in a tobacco-tasting competition. Whoever correctly distinguishes all 20 receives 200,000 yen. And we are worried about Big Brother! ‘Be sure not to smoke too much.’

And finally, for people who wish to smoke 40 cigarettes with their morning coffee, Japan is the perfect destination. You can now buy a combo pack of Marlboro cigarettes with a can of Emblem Black Georgia coffee – the leading coffee brand of Coca-Cola Japan. What a change of image, as Times journalist Leo Lewis notes, from 1971, when the kids on the hilltop sang, ‘I’d like to buy the world a Coke.’ Hoover’s business report, 2006, on Japan Tobacco Inc. Japan Times, 14 September 1999 Leo Lewis, Times on line, 21 January 2008

Jerome K. Jerome (1859 – 1927) Jerome K. Jerome, best known for writing Three Men in a Boat (1889), drove an ambulance in WWI, and discovered that parcels from home were often opened and stolen from. And he found quite a difference between the English and the French cigarette. Out of every three boxes of cigarettes that my wife sent me, I reckon I got one. The French cigarettes that one bought at the canteens were ten per cent poison and the rest dirt. The pain would go out of a wounded soldier’s face when you showed him an English cigarette. Jerome K. Jerome, My Life and Times, 1926, p. 226

Jesus Would Jesus Christ, had he had the opportunity, have been a cigarette smoker? This is not a question that readily springs to mind, except to the wayward mind of Samuel Butler (1835 – 1902). Butler was a painter, essayist and novelist, whose most notable work, The Way of All Flesh, an eccentric autobiographical novel, was published posthumously in 1903. Ernest Pontifex, the hero, undergoes a religious conversion while studying at Cambridge, and wrestles with whether or not he should smoke. Tobacco had nowhere been forbidden in the Bible, but then it had not yet been discovered, and had probably only escaped proscription for this reason. We can conceive of St Paul or even our Lord Himself as drinking a cup of tea, but we cannot imagine either of them as smoking a cigarette … Butler was no stranger to thoughts that run outside the common way of thinking. As he observes in one of his notebooks, ‘The three most important things a man has are, briefly, his private parts, his money, and his religious convictions.’

Samuel Butler, The Way of All Flesh, 1903

Johnson, Lyndon Baines (1908 – 73) A wily power-broker and two-ashtray man, he was the 36th President of the United States, who took office after President Kennedy’s assassination. He successfully oversaw the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Voting Right Act, 1965. The escalation of the Vietnam War led to unpopularity for Johnson and in 1968 he announced his decision not to stand for another presidential term of office. But, as we will see, it is amazing that he got so far as to be President. Johnson’s biographer, Robert A. Caro, has written three volumes of a planned four that give a riveting thriller-like account of Lyndon Johnson’s quest for power. Just as in any good thriller, cigarettes play a vital supporting role. Johnson manipulates the Senate, playing the senators and committees like a chess game, behind his closed door, sometimes seated, sometimes standing, always with a phone in one hand and a cigarette in another. His face hunched in concentration as he spoke and listened, he would light one cigarette from the end of another. He had one ashtray on his desk and another standing ashtray, and they overflowed with butts, some still glowing. Johnson would listen with total concentration as the man on the other end of the wire talked, preparing his own arguments and solicitations; his only movements ‘were to raise the cigarette to his mouth and take a long, deep drag’. ‘ ... chain-smoking one cigarette on top of another and pouring down Scotch whiskey like a man who had a date with a firing squad’. An observer describes him at a dinner ‘chain-smoking one cigarette on top of another and pouring down Scotch whiskey like a man who had a date with a firing squad’. The mark of a true enthusiast, he would often stub a cigarette out in his food, so that he could without the least delay sprint on to the next one. ‘ … he would often stub a cigarette out in his food … ’ In 1955 Johnson had a massive heart attack, and was told that the smoking must stop immediately and completely. His willpower when he stopped was as remarkable as his lack of control when he smoked. He opened the pack, and pulled a cigarette halfway out. Then he put the opened pack on the table by his hospital bed, and there it remained for the rest of his stay. The pack went home with him to his ranch, and lay untouched by his bedside table.

He didn’t smoke again until he had retired from the presidency in 1970. During his time in the non-smoking wilderness, a secretary asked if he didn’t miss smoking. ‘Every minute of every day,’ was the poignant reply. Robert A. Caro, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, III: Master of the State, London, 2002

Jokes, cigarette Try these – 1 Three soldiers, an Englishman, an Irishman and a Scotsman, slog through the desert, having been separated from the rest of their troop. Totally disorientated by day three, their nerves are ragged. A terrible thing happens: the Englishman begins to hear, with each step they take, a little voice that says, ‘One, Two, One, Two.’ Does that voice have a slightly Scottish ring to it? Eventually the Englishman snaps, ‘For goodness sake Jock, put a sock in it.’ Jock looks bemused. They march on. And the counting continues, ‘One, Two, One, Two.’ Suddenly, the Englishman can’t take it any more. He swings around and shoots Jock dead. The Englishman and Shaun, the Irishman, march on. And the counting continues, ‘One, Two, One, Two.’ The Englishman is enraged. He’s shot the wrong man. It must have been Shaun all along. Now he shoots Shaun dead. The Englishman walks on alone. And after a minute or two, the little voice starts up again. The Englishman decides he has fallen into madness. There is only one thing for it: to shoot himself. He decides to have a final cigarette, and pulls out from his pocket a packet of Player’s Navy Cut. He looks in amazement and shock at the words written on the packet: ‘Player’s – It’s the Tobacco that Counts.’ 2 An elderly man stops a small boy who is smoking a cigarette in the street. MAN: What would your mother think if she saw you now? BOY: She’d be very annoyed. I’m smoking one of her cigarettes.

Journal of the American Medical Association The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) carried its first cigarette advertisement in 1933, stating that it had done so only ‘after careful consideration of the extent to

which cigarettes were used by physicians in practice’. These advertisements continued for twenty years. The same year, Chesterfield began running ads in the New York State Journal of Medicine, with the claim that its cigarettes were ‘Just as pure as the water you drink ... and practically untouched by human hands.’ In 1948, the JAMA observed: ‘More can be said on behalf of smoking as a form of escape from tension than against it ... ’

More can be said on behalf of smoking as a form of escape from tension than against it ... There does not seem to be any preponderance of evidence that would indicate the abolition of the use of tobacco as a substance contrary to the public health. Such was the monumental power of cigarette smoking, the universal habit, to bedazzle those who we expect to guard us from it. The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), 1948, cited by Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1996

Just what the doctor ordered Many happy claims have been made for the health-giving properties of cigarettes. Here are some of the more notable examples. Slogans promoting health-giving properties of cigarettes Just what the doctor ordered

L&M

1954

For digestion’s sake, smoke Camel

Camel

1946

More doctors smoke Camel than any other cigarette*

Camel

1946

Camels soothe your ‘T’ zone

Camel

1942

Chesterfield

1940s

Cause no ills

For your throat’s sake Not a cough in a carload Health tip! Doctors Recommend Philip Morris

Craven “A”

1945

Old Gold

1926

Abdulla Cooltipt

1945

Philip Morris

1940s

* This campaign ran eight years. The ads included this message: ‘Family physicians, surgeons, diagnosticians, nose and throat specialists, doctors in every branch of medicine ... a total of 113,597 doctors ... were asked the question: “What cigarette do you smoke?” And more of them named Camel as their smoke than any other cigarette! Three independent research groups found this to be a fact. You see, doctors too smoke for pleasure. That full Camel flavor is just as appealing to a doctor’s taste as to yours ... that marvelous Camel mildness means just as much to his throat as to yours.’ At the American Medicine Association’s 1948 convention, the largest booth was for Camel cigarettes.

K

Kellogg, John Harvey (1852 – 1943) Michigan-born John Kellogg, co-father of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, was much concerned with the efficacy and cleanliness of the human bowels. He ran the Battle Creek Sanitarium with his brother, Will Keith, encouraging patients to exercise, diet and take enemas. He campaigned zealously against masturbation, and while married for forty years it is said he never had intercourse with his wife. There is a certain consistency here, and consistency is always to be admired. He believed that tobacco ‘in its various forms, is one of the most mischievous of all drugs’, and in a short book called Tobaccoism (1922) laid a comprehensive case against it, under a whole variety of headings: Women smoke less and live longer than men. When women do smoke, they are led into undesirable habits. (Kellogg cites a UK newspaper image of young women in loose trousers.) The death rate among breast-fed babies is increasing because of nicotine in the milk of mothers who work in tobacco factories. Tobacco is as much a drug as opium or cocaine. Tobacco is a camouflage. It may make a man indifferent to tiredness, worry, or hunger – but it doesn’t make the man less tired, remove the cause of the worry, or fill his stomach. As might be expected, he had little time for the cigarette: ‘Many a young man finds himself as old at twenty or twenty-five years of age as he ought to be at sixty or seventy. His constitution has been dissipated in smoke at the end of a cigarette.’ With his brother (though they later fell out) he invented what eventually became Kellogg’s Corn Flakes. In their Battle Creek sanitarium the Kellogg brothers fed their patients on all kinds of grains which they rolled into long sheets of dough before cooking and processing. One batch of cooked wheat became stale, but they rolled it anyway,

and instead of coming out as dough each wheat berry was flattened into a thin, surprisingly tasty flake. Thus the birth of world’s most famous breakfast food. Cassandra Tate, The Little White Slaver, 1999 Tobacco.org 2000 John Harvey Kellogg, Tobaccoism: or How Tobacco Kills, 1922

Kennedy, Geoffrey Studdert See Woodbine Willie.

Kensitas This English brand, brought into being by the J. Wix company in 1920, had as its pack design a dignified butler offering a Kensitas pack on a silver tray. The butler’s name, later advertising revealed, was Jenkyns. P. G. Wodehouse had introduced the world to Bertie Wooster and the indispensable Jeeves three years earlier, so perhaps Jeeves is the inspiration for Jenkyns.

At the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 there was a Kensitas stand, with a real-life Jenkyns standing there – an actor looking like and dressed like the drawing on the pack. In 1930, Kensitas advertising followed a route established by Lucky Strikes in the US with their ‘Don’t reach for a sweet – reach for a Lucky’ campaign, and emphasised the slimming powers of the cigarette.

A typical ad showed a man standing sideways. He is youthful and trim. But he casts a shadow of his future self; the shadow has a large stomach and a double chin. But the copy reassures the reader that Kensitas will help to avoid that future shadow: Men … realize the harm of over-indulgence – eating between meals which causes excess weight. Active men decline to lose the invigorating glow of energy by undergoing harsh dieting and drastic reducing … They accept the guidance of moderation which advocates sensible nourishment and no excess, even in smoking. They eat healthfully but not immoderately. When tempted to overindulge – to eat between meals, they say, ‘No thanks, I’ll smoke a Kensitas instead.’ Other Kensitas ads showed, for example, a woman at her dressing table, using the same shadow technique. Matthew Hilton, Smoking in Popular English Culture, London, 2000 Auberon Waugh (ed.), Crash the Ash, Quiller Press, London, 1994

Kent In March 1952, the Lorillard Tobacco Company introduced Kent cigarettes with its new ‘Micronite filter’ that was ‘developed by researchers in atomic energy plants’. Lorillard ad copy stressed that the new filter removed seven times more tar and nicotine than any other brand. Furthermore, Lorillard gave the Journal of the American Medical Association as the source for this information. After strenuous objections from the AMA, Kent dropped this claim but continued to use the ‘health protection’ theme in both print and television ads. But here is the double irony of the story. The filter was in all truth very effective. And the claim, for example, that the substance of the filter was used to help filter the air in operating theatres was true too, even if it sounded like advertising overstatement. The trouble was that the substance in question was crocidolite, or African Blue – a form of asbestos: one of the most dangerous lung carcinogens known.

As the dangers of asbestos became apparent, the company quietly and without any announcement replaced the asbestos with cellulose in 1957. Kent struggled initially. For so effective were the miracle filters that the cigarettes were very hard to draw on, and when you could get a puff it was almost flavourless. ‘Do you like a good smoke but not what smoking does to you?’ Kent advertisement headline, 1953 But the brand grew, and inspired imitations: the filter bandwagon was rolling. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1996

Kookaburra A rare example of a cigarette-pack designer showing animals smoking: these two kookaburras puff away happily to promote this Australian brand.

Kool Launched in 1933, Kool was Brown & Williamson’s answer to Spud. Kool was a more appropriate name for a mentholated cigarette, and was backed by catchy advertising featuring a penguin. (The bird was stolen from B & W’s own Penguin brand.) Originally known as Mr Kool, the penguin was seen, with a cigarette in his beak, piloting a ship, floating in the sea in a rubber emergency ring, and ice-skating round the pack. As the years passed, the Kool penguin, at first realistically depicted (well, if one accepts a smoking penguin) became more cartoonish in appearance, and also more aristocratic, sporting a top hat and even a monocle. (Rather as Spud’s potato spokesman did.)

At a point in the 1940s that eludes cigarette historians, he became known as Willie. He also acquired a female partner, Millie. His head was rounder, and his eyes larger, just as Mickey Mouse’s eyes grew larger as they borrowed the special appeal of human babies.

Kool smokers include the founder of scientology, L. Ron Hubbard.

The brand also puts in several appearances as a poster on a wall in the movie Body Heat (1981). Kool has long had a reputation for being popular with marijuana smokers. A memo by Philip Morris researcher Al Udow said that Kool had the highest nicotine ‘delivery’ of any king-size on the market: This ties in with the information we have from focus group sessions and other sources that suggest that Kool is considered to be good for ‘after marijuana’ to maintain the ‘high’ or for mixing with marijuana … Although more people talk about ‘taste’ it is likely that greater numbers smoke for the narcotic value that comes from the nicotine.

www.geocities.com/~jimlowe/kool/history.html The Cigarette Papers, UC Press, 1996 http://tobaccodocuments.org/landman/1003285388 – 5389.html

Koop, C. Everett (1916 – ) Fierce and bearded US Surgeon General from 1981 to 1989 who challenged the tobacco companies, and compared nicotine with heroin. ‘I believe the ultimate goal should be a smokefree society by the year 2000,’ he said. A devout evangelical, Koop was firmly opposed to euthanasia and abortion, and was notable for his lack of reticence. One film shows him surveying a sea of naked dolls, intended to symbolise aborted foetuses, and saying, ‘I am standing on the site of Sodom, the place of evil and death.’ Interestingly, he also said, ‘Smoking is a voluntary act; one does not have to smoke if one does not want to,’ a sentiment that could be endorsed by the pro-smoker.

Kretek Indonesia’s indigenous cigarette. Cloves are blended with tobacco, giving the smoke a distinctive and enchanting aroma. The word kretek is thought to derive from the crackling sounds the cigarettes make as they smoulder. A unique cigarette, surely: it gives pleasure to the ear as well as the nose, palate and lungs.

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Lambert & Butler Charles Lambert and Charles Butler opened their first cigar and tobacco store in St John St, Clerkenwell in 1834 and were one of the earliest UK cigar manufacturers. They expanded their range to include cigarettes, and in 1901 merged with Imperial Tobacco. The brand largely disappeared from view, until a major relaunch of Lambert & Butler cigarettes in 1979. In the late 1990s, some very English advertising swelled the success of the brand still further. The campaign featured a modern-day toff, Lambert, and his unflappable butler called, as you will have guessed, Butler. They would have exchanges in the manner of Mr Gold and Mr Flake half a century before them. As the price of the brand dropped, for example:

Lambert: Butler: And –

They’ve gone down. But not in my estimation, Sir.

Lambert: Butler:

The price is frozen. Looks pretty hot to me.

In January 2003, as the lights went out, and the maps were rolled up on all UK tobacco advertising, the characters Lambert and Butler enjoyed their final exchange, appearing with their faces blurred as if in a crime report. Butler observed, ‘It seems we’ve been outlawed, sir.’ www.imperial-tobacco.com/tv.cream.org/extras/tobacco/index.htm

Last gasps The last cigarette is a cultural icon, a collision of the banal with the ineffable, whether offered to the dying man, the condemned man or, as in this fictional instance from Joseph Conrad, the man up against insuperable odds. D’Alcacer is captured by tribesmen and expects death. There’s only one thing to do in this situation. He resolves to ration his supply of cigarettes. A cigarette was only to be lighted on special occasions; and now there were only three left and they had to be made to last till the end of life. They calmed, they soothed, they made an attitude. And only three left! One had to be kept for the morning before going through the gate of doom – the gate of Belarab’s stockade ... Here, the novelist Stephen King’s mother is on her death bed, comforted by King and his brother. When I got into the master bedroom he was sitting beside her on the bed and holding a Kool for her to smoke. This she did between harsh gasps for breath. She was only semi-conscious, her eyes going from Dave to me and then back to Dave again. I sat next to Dave, took the cigarette and held it to her mouth. Her lips stretched out to clamp on the filter. Beside her bed reflected over and over again in a cluster of glasses was an early bound galley of Carrie … We took turns holding the cigarette for her, and when it was down to the filter I put it out. ‘My boys,’ she said then lapsed into what might have been sleep or unconsciousness.

In Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (see Sharing) one of the killers, Dick Hickcock, is on Death Row and discusses last cigarettes: Hickcock slipped another cigarette away from a package of Pall Malls, wrinkled his nose and said, ‘I’ve tried to give up smoking. Then I figure what difference does it make under the circumstances. With a little luck maybe I’ll get cancer and beat the state at its own game. For a while there I was smoking cigars. Andy’s. The morning after they hanged him, I woke up and called to him, “Andy?” – the way I usually did. Then I remembered … His cell had been cleaned out, and all his junk was piled there, and this box of Macbeth cigars. I told the guard Andy wanted me to have them, left them to me in his will. I never smoked them all. Maybe it was the idea of Andy, but somehow they gave me indigestion.’ Joseph Conrad, The Rescue, 1926 Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, 2000 Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1965

Leary, Denis (1957 – ) Anarchic American comic, with a particularly strong line in cigarette satire. We tried to be nice to you non-smokers. We fucking tried. OK? You wanted your own sections in the restaurants. We gave you that, huh. But that wasn’t enough for you. Then you wanted the airplanes. We gave you the whole godamn plane! You happy now? I will guarantee you if the plane is going down, the first announcement you’re gonna hear is: ‘Folks, this is your Captain speaking. Look, uhm, light ‘em up, ‘cause we’re going down, OK. I got a carton of Camel non-filters, I’ll see you on the ground.’ ‘The filter’s the best part. That’s where they put the heroin.’ It doesn’t matter how big the warnings on the cigarettes are; you could have a black pack, with a skull and crossbones on the front, called TUMORS, and smokers would be around the block going, ‘I can’t wait to get my hands on these fucking things! I bet ya get a tumor as soon as you light up!’ See Wayne, John.

IMDb, No Cure for Cancer (1992), written by Denis Leary

Lehrer, Tom (1928 – ) Tom Lehrer was an astringent satirist who sang during the 1950s and 1960s, remembered for ‘Poisoning Pigeons in the Park’. This was his alternative take on scouts and cigarettes and sex in his song ‘Be Prepared’. Be prepared! To hide that pack of cigarettes. Don’t make book if you cannot cover bets. Keep those reefers hidden where you’re sure that they will not be found, And be careful not to smoke them when the scoutmaster’s around, For he only will insist that they be shared, be prepared!

Be prepared! That’s the Boy Scouts’ solemn creed, Be prepared! And be clean in word and deed. Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice, Unless you get a good percentage of her price. Tom Lehrer Revisited, Album, 1959

Lewis, C. S. (1898 – 1963) The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’, the third of C. S. Lewis’s books set in Narnia, introduces the initially odious Eustace Scrubb. His odiousness is easily explained by the fact, as Lewis tells us, that his parents are ‘up to date and advanced people … vegetarians, non – smokers and teetotallers’. These were three things quite alien to Lewis, whose own smoking embraced 60 cigarettes a day, slotted in between pipes, and who believed that tobacco ash was a good way of refreshing carpets.

Life itself Life, old life itself, has been described in many ways: as a cabaret, as a hereditary disease, as one long process of getting tired, as a game at which everyone loses, as a meaningless comma in the sentence of time and, rather beautifully – as a cigarette. La vida es un cigarillo,

Life is a cigarette,

Hierno, ceniza y candela,

Cinder, ash and fire,

Unas la fuman de prisa,

Some smoke it in a hurry,

Y algunos la saborean.

Others savour it. Manuel Machado Chants Andalous

Manuel Machado (1874 – 1947) was a Spanish poet and playwright, a bohemian in his youth, a librarian and journalist in later years. See also Poetry. Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, 1993

Lighter, cigarette From the battlefields of World War I came the cigarette smoker’s indispensable companion: the cigarette lighter. Two English engineers, Wise and Greenwood, came up with the first design for a compact lighter, prompted by the fact that one of them, Greenwood, had lost an arm in the war and it was impossible to light a cigarette one-handed with matches. Their petrol lighter featured a wheel, fitted horizontally instead of vertically, which could be operated with ease with one hand. Wise and Greenwood sold the design to the Dunhill company, who produced a prototype using a Colman’s mustard tin, and went on in 1924 to market the finished product as ‘the Unique’ – the world’s first luxury lighter that could be held and operated in one hand. It was a huge success, and the forerunner of the famous Dunhill Rollagas butane lighters. See also Dunhill, Zippo. www.dunhill.com

Little Girl and the Cigarette, The (2007) A French satirical novel by Benoît Duteurtre, published in the month – February 2007 – when France banned all smoking in public buildings, including bars and cafés.

In a futuristic world which has turned insanely health-conscious, two smokers, a death-row inmate and a government worker, find themselves acting out the dilemma of where the right to light up ends and the right to breathe clean air begins. The condemned man invokes Article 47 of the Code of Application of Punishments, which authorises him to have one last smoke before execution. On the other hand, the warden of the penitentiary strictly applies paragraph 1765 of the prison policies, which prohibits the condemned man from lighting his cigarette. However, real life anticipated this satire in some ways. See Death Row. Benoît Duteurtre, The Little Girl and the Cigarette, France, 2007 David Ng, Village Voice, 8 February 2007

Lucas, Sarah (1962 – ) British artist of the same generation as Damien Hirst (with whom she once had a relationship) and Tracy Emin (with whom she once had a shop). They shared an intense, almost pathological relationship with cigarettes: an early Damien Hirst sculpture was a gigantic, Brobdingnagian ashtray where curious spectators could peer over the edge and find the revelation of a myriad of ordinary-sized empty cigarette packs and dead butts. But these neo-Duchamp fancies, inspired by cigarettes, found their apotheosis in the work of Sarah Lucas. Her fecundity with cigarettes had been there from the beginning: ‘There is this obsessive activity of me sticking all these cigarettes on the sculptures, and obsessive activity could be viewed as a form of masturbation. It is a form of sex … When you make something completely covered in cigarettes and see it as solid it looks incredibly busy and it’s a bit like sperm or genes under the microscope.’

‘Nature abhores a vacuum’, 1998, © Sarah Lucas, courtesy Sadie Coles HQ London

Sarah Lucas made her intentions clear from the beginning. She took her own photograph with a defiant cigarette in the corner of her mouth and entitled it ‘Fighting Fire with Fire’. Then in 1998, a work called ‘You Know What’ featured a naked female torso with one sad cigarette inserted in the vagina. But the thrust of her work from now on would be a fullthroated hymn to the cigarette, culminating, appropriately enough, in the 2000 exhibition The Fag Show where her obsession took full flight. In this witty but sinister exhibition could be found cigarette-coated garden gnomes with phallic names, a brassiere stuffed with cigarettes, a marrow, sheathed yet again in cigarettes, even a vacuum cleaner covered from its nozzle to its plug in cigarettes. This vacuum sculpture inspired by her smoking was called ‘It Sucks’ – so perhaps she was already having doubts about her two-pack-a-day habit. The Fag Show in the year 2000 seemed to be the pinnacle of this sub-Freudian obsession. In that year she had given up smoking her beloved Marlboro Lights which also adorned the art works so profligately; so what she had lost personally, her art gained. But what if she had persisted? Might there have been an addition to the giant-ism of modern sculpture? ‘The Angel of the North’ and ‘The Big Horse’ could have been accompanied by ‘The Big Fag’ – a huge artefact discovered a thousand years from now which a future civilisation could puzzle over for ever. Charles Darwent, ‘No Smoking’, New Statesman, 20 March 2000

Lucky Strike Lucky Strike had a long way to go before becoming one of the most famous brands ever, a brand of such authority it could and can, for example, stand in for currency in almost any country in the world. It started as plug tobacco in the 1850s, sold by R. A. Patterson & Co. in Richmond, Virginia, although the Lucky Strike name – a reference to the days of the Gold Rush – wasn’t registered until 1871. Buck Duke’s American Tobacco Company acquired the company in 1905, but it wasn’t until 1916 that Lucky Strike tobacco became Lucky Strike cigarettes.

The tobacco was sold in round tins, with a bull’s eye design, and the words ‘R. A. Patterson Tobacco Co. Rich’d Va.’ in the outer circle of the Lucky bull’s eye, and the Lucky Strike name in the middle. The Patterson name was removed and the design transferred to a cigarette pack. It was hoped the brand could rival Camel. Camels had their unique dromedary image, and the slogan: ‘I’d walk a mile for a Camel.’ What could Lucky Strike come up with by way of competition? George Washington Hill was the answer. He was the son of Percival Hill, who had succeeded Buck Duke as boss of American Tobacco. Hill was a man of ingenuity and drive, who had helped make Pall Mall a major brand. When he visited the factory that was to make Luckies, he was struck by the aroma in the tobacco-mixing room, which reminded him of morning toast. And that became the slogan for Luckies: ‘It’s toasted.’ As the advertising copy explained, ‘You know how toasting improves the flavour of bread. And it’s the same with tobacco entirely.’ Images of toast appeared in the ads, giving them an almost surreal feel – but also making Lucky seem as wholesome as bread itself. And Lucky took a leaf out of the Camel book by not giving away cigarette cards, implying that the tobacco was too expensive to allow such gimmicks. The campaign was a triumph, despite the fact that the tobacco in every other cigarette was also toasted. It was just that none of the other cigarette manufacturers had thought to say this.

M

Madame Bovary (1857) In his first novel Gustave Flaubert (1821—80) depicted bourgeois life with relentless realism as he unfolded the tragic story of his heroine, bored with her husband and seeking meaning in an affair with Rodolphe. So harshly realistic was the writing that the French Government brought him to trial for alleged immorality, and he only narrowly escaped the charge. Just after the famous passage in which Flaubert laments our lack of ability to express our true feelings, ‘since human speech is like a cracked tin kettle, on which we hammer out tunes to make bears dance when we long to move the stars’, a cigarette is used to dramatise how love has changed Madame Bovary: Her looks grew bolder, her speech more free; she even committed the impropriety of walking out with Monsieur Rodolphe, a cigarette in her mouth, ‘as if to defy the people’. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary, 1857

Mad Men (2007) A finely observed American TV series, created by Sopranos writer Matthew Weiner, Mad Men launched in 2007, and follows the lives of a group of advertising people in an agency on Madison Avenue in the early 1960s. Starring Don Draper as the creative head of an agency called Sterling Cooper, the first episode in the series features the devising of a new campaign for cigarettes. The cigarettes in question are Lucky Strike, which are being launched against a background of Reader’s Digest revelations that cigarette smoking causes cancer. Don Draper now pitches their new slogan to his clients. ‘Lucky Strike—It’s Toasted!’ This vapid offering which is, in fact, a resurrected 1917 slogan, skips right over any health concerns and the clients fall back in wonder. Don Draper reaches, of course, for a cigarette.

Bizarrely, this pleasure was denied to the man in the Mad Men promotional video for Season I, when shown on Apple’s iTunes. The original image of a man seen from behind lounging in silhouette, right hand outstretched with a cigarette in it, has had the cigarette digitally removed. Draper would have no truck with such wimps. In this show everybody smokes cigarettes. The clients, the creative guys, the account executives, the secretaries, the office cleaners, the telephone receptionists — everybody. At home, everybody smokes, with the exception of the children, but even they are no doubt working up to it. As a consequence of this, every scene is washed through with a haze of blue-grey smoke. If this seems unsavoury, so are the characters in this piece. They are vicious, manipulative, sexcrazed backstabbers. So this psychological snapshot of certain personality types written in 1960 seems tailor-made for the Mad Men: With a sample of 8963 persons using the Edwards Personal Preference Schedule it was found that male smokers achieved higher scores compared to the average of the population as a whole in respect of their expressed need for sex, aggression, achievement and dominance, whereas their scores for compliance, order, self-depreciation and association were significantly lower than the average. Daily consumption of cigarettes is seen as being directly related to the degree to which these characteristics are present. In other words, the higher the number of cigarettes smoked, the greater the need for sex, achievement, dominance, etc. A. L. Koponen, ‘Personality characteristics of purchasers’, Journal of Advertising Review, 1960

Manhesel, Professor Professor Manhesel was a German inventor who came to the US to try and interest the tobacco companies in a scheme in which tobacco smoke could be piped into people’s homes in the same way as water, electricity, or most pertinently, gas. Tobacco would be burned and passed into a Smokeometer – a large chamber based analogously on a gasometer – to cool it, and thence pumped down pipes. At its destination, your house, it would pass into long flexible tubes with amber mouthpieces. You would turn a tap, like a gas tap, put the amber mouthpiece in your mouth, inhale deeply, and feel the goodness suffusing you. Electricity, gas, water, and now tobacco smoke on tap: oh brave new world. The only source for Professor Manhesel gives no date; one guesses the 1920s.

Auberon Waugh (ed.), Crash the Ash, 1994

Mao Zedong (Mao Tse-Tung) (1893 – 1976) It is recorded that a doctor suggested that Mao Zedong, who enjoyed chain-smoking English cigarettes, should give up. He refused. ‘Smoking,’ he declared, ‘is also a form of deep-breathing exercise, don’t you think?’ This, though worth repeating, seems unlikely. A quick glance at the almost incomprehensible platitudes of The Little Red Book suggests that Mao lacked the lightness of touch to come up with this.

Margaret, Princess (1930 – 2002) Margaret’s smoking was first noticed in her late teens when she became famous on the party circuit for her turtle-shell cigarette holder. After the death of her father in 1952, a casual habit became a whole-hearted pursuit. She smoked up to 60 strong Chesterfield cigarettes a day, chain-smoking between courses during meals, and drank Famous Grouse whisky heavily at home. However, on her many trips to the Caribbean, she preferred to drink gin. Her dependence on cigarettes was further heightened when she stopped drinking for a while after suffering from hepatitis in 1984. Historian and political writer Paul Johnson recalls: I once saw her extinguish a fag by plunging it into the middle of a delicious tournedos at a dinner given by the then Papal Nuncio, a famous gourmand and amateur chef. How the archbishop winced. Guardian Unlimited, 9 February 2002 Daily Mail, 10 August 2007

Margrethe, Queen (1940 – ) The Ash-Tray Queen: this is the cruel nickname given to Queen Margrethe of Denmark, a heavy smoker who, when asked about her smoking problem, briskly replied, ‘I have no problem,’ and without further ado lit up.

Under pressure from anti-smoking correctness, Queen Margrethe has had to follow the example of her Scandinavian neighbour, King Carl Gustav of Sweden, and refrain from smoking in public – though not, happily, from smoking itself. ‘The Ash-Tray Queen’. Controversy runs in Margrethe’s family. Her husband recently angered animal lovers with his admission to liking fried dog, a taste acquired during early years in Asia.

Marlboro Marlboro man was originally Marlboro woman. And at the start, Marlboro country wasn’t the American plains; it was Bond Street, London. The brand was created by tobacconist Philip Morris, which began as a British company when Philip Morris opened a shop in Bond Street in 1847. In 1854 he made his first cigarettes, and in 1885 the company he had founded (he died in 1873) marketed Blues, Cambridge, Derby and Marlborough – names which all have an aristocratic ring to them. Marlborough was positioned as ‘the ladies’ favourite’. In 1901 Philip Morris & Co. was appointed tobacconist for King Edward VII.

The company was incorporated in New York in 1902 and prospered. In 1924 Marlborough was launched in America as Marlboro, and was still very much for the ladies: it had a red filter-tip described in a clash of metaphors as a ‘cherry tip for your ruby lips’. It was also billed as being ‘Mild as May’. Marlboro sales fell off in World War II and around 1953, as Philip Morris faced tough competition from its rivals, a remarkable transformation befell Marlboro. It was repackaged in a new ‘crush-proof’ cardboard flip-top box – a radical packaging innovation.

A new filter was developed, and the now legendary red and white design was introduced. But the most important change came from the advertising company Leo Burnett, which argued that Marlboro advertising must break away from emphasising the safety and effectiveness of the filter, which other cigarette brands were doing in the face of rising fears about smoking. Instead there would be a new style of advertising that dispensed with copy and created a visual personality for the brand. A new and manlier Marlboro was born, which featured men’s men: sea captains, gunsmiths, athletes all appeared in early ads, as did cowboys. And it was the cowboy who, as Allan Brandt puts it, ‘took the reins of the Marlboro campaign, displacing the other macho men’. In 1962 TV commercials a rugged cowboy rode through equally rugged Marlboro country, accompanied by Elmer Bernstein’s stirring theme from The Magnificent Seven, while punters were encouraged to come to where the flavour is. For a man’s flavor come to Marlboro country. My country. It’s big, open, makes a smoker feel ten feet tall ... Come to where the flavor is, come to Marlboro country. Sales soared. In 2001, this brainchild of a Victorian cigarette merchant was the numberone brand in the USA. Allan Brandt analyses the appeal of the imagery: Just as the Marlboro Man had the fortitude to face down the elements, so too would he face down anxiety about the risks of smoking ... The campaign created a visual shorthand for the motivation for, and meaning of, smoking in an age of technology, science, risk and disease. The Marlboro cowboy would find an enduring place at the American campfire.

The ‘real’ West was discovered by Neil McBain, a Burnett art director scouting rustic settings for a Camay soap commercial at the beginning of the 1960s. At the 6666 Ranch in Guthrie, Texas, McBain swooned at the sight of Carl ‘Bigun’ Bradley, a foreman, and hired him on the spot. As the first cowboy Marlboro Man, Bradley earned less than $10,000 a year, never gave up cowboying and later drowned in a stock pond while breakingin a horse. His cigarettes of choice were found dry on the bank: a pack of Kools.

An urban myth about Marlboro: if you turn the logo upside down it reads Orobl Jew. Readers are invited to check this piece of craziness for themselves. See also Super cigarette. Adrian Room, Dictionary of Trade Name Origins, London, 1982 Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1996 Allan M. Brandt, The Cigarette Century, New York, 2007

Marlboro Intense This new mini-cigarette, introduced in 2008, is 7.2cm long compared with a regular 8.5cm. It is aimed at the so-called ‘smoke-break’ market, who need to slam in a few fast puffs in the doorway of the office building, and haven’t got the time to linger over something longer. The new cigarettes will deliver just as much nicotine as a full-size version, but can be smoked far more quickly. The Times reporter, Ross Anderson, comments: ‘Billy Connolly once observed, astutely, that there is no such thing as bad weather: just the wrong clothes. Equally, there is no such thing as a cigarette that’s too long: just a break that’s too short.’ Too early yet to see how Marlboro Intense will fare. Might one feel foolish asking for it by name? Ross Anderson, The Times, 5 February 2008

Marlboro parodied The prominence of the Marlboro cowboy advertising made it an obvious target for antismoking campaigners. Joseph Cherner, for example, of SmokeFree Educational Services, produced an alternative image which showed a smoking skeleton dressed as a cowboy riding his horse through a graveyard. The headline was Come to Cancer Country.

In 1997 the California Department of Health erected a striking billboard in an exact pastiche of the Marlboro style. It featured a close shot of the heads of two rugged cowboys, looking at each other. The headline was appropriately laconic: ‘Bob, I’ve got emphysema.’

Men and women How do men and women stack up against each other as smokers? Here are some figures.

Tara Parker-Pope, Cigarettes, New York, 2001, derived from World Health Organisation estimates

Menthol cigarette myths Menthol cigarettes seem to have a particular propensity for attracting rumours and myths to themselves. It’s often held, for instance, that they pose a special threat to African-Americans, with whom they are particularly popular, because manufacturers treat the cigarettes to accelerate lung cancer or promote impotence or sterility. But while menthol smokers do indeed form a majority among African-American smokers (75 per cent), African-American menthol smokers account for only 25 per cent of menthol smokers across the US. So any devious tampering with menthol cigarettes would harm a far greater number of whites than blacks. Running in happy tandem with this is the idea that Kools, the leading brand of mentholated cigarette, is in fact run by the Ku Klux Klan, rather than by R. J. Reynolds, as conventional wisdom has it. Since both Camels (RJR) and Marlboro (Philip Morris) head a quite long list of brands said to be owned by the Ku Klux Klan, not to mention various food and clothing products, the sceptical reader will form his or her own conclusion. Menthols are also rumoured to contain fibreglass, which creates tiny nicks in the smoker’s throat and mouth, all the better to transmit the nicotine kick into the bloodstream. They don’t.

It is also believed in some quarters that menthols contain potassium nitrate, saltpetre, to help keep them alight (potassium nitrate is the stuff that makes the fuse of a firework fizz), and ingesting this will make a man impotent. In Thailand, this unfounded rumour (menthols don’t contain potassium nitrate) went a step further in the 1960s, and turned Thai men away from menthols in droves, when it was thought that smoking them would shrink a man’s penis. This surely would be a useful image to add to the varied lexicon of visual warnings now appearing on cigarette packets. Lisa Fernandez, ‘Activists Claim RJR Targeting Blacks’, Durham Herald Sun, 24 March 1997 www.snopes.com

More Introduced by R. J. Reynolds in 1975, More was a 120 mm brown-coloured cigarette that looked like a long slim cigar. Intended to appeal to white males wishing to model themselves on Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson, it did indeed reach this market – but more than half its sales were to women. Furthermore, it appealed to black urban males, who had previously smoked Kools. One potential More smoker interviewed in Harlem said, ‘Man, I can just see myself blasé-in’ up to the bar and orderin’ my Chivas Regal. I lights up my More and I’ve made my point.’ Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978 ‘I lights up my More and I’ve made my point.’

More (2) Sometimes, however dedicated you are, it’s hard to smoke enough. This is Jim Dixon, in Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim. ... he opened the cupboard that contained his smoking engines and accessories – monuments, some of them costly, to economy. As long as he could remember he’d never been able to smoke as much as he wanted to. This armoury of devices had been assembled as each fresh way of seeming to smoke as much as he wanted to had come to his notice: the desiccated packet of cheap cigarettetobacco, the cherry-wood pipe, the red packet of cigarette-papers, the packet

of pipe-cleaners, the leather cigarettemachine, the quadripartite pipe-tool, the crumbling packet of cheap pipe-tobacco, the packet of cotton-wool filter tips (new process), the nickel cigarette machine, the clay pipe, the briar pipe, the blue packet of cigarette-papers, the packet of herbal smoking mixture (guaranteed free from nicotine or other harmful substances. Why?), the rusting tin of expensive pipe-tobacco, the packet of chalk pipe filters. Dixon took a cigarette from the packet in his pocket and lit it. This was actor Jeremy Irons’s thoughtful New Year’s resolution for 2000: I might smoke more. Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, London, 1954 Sunday Times, December 1999

Morland A real cigarette made for Ian Fleming’s fictional James Bond, and for Bond’s creator, Ian Fleming. At the height of Bond’s popularity, Morlands, of Grosvenor Street, London, sold brands called James Bond No. 1, James Bond No. 2 and Three Rings – after the cigarettes Bond smokes. See 007.

Morphology When you stand naked in front of a mirror do you see a true cigarette smoker before you? What you should see is this, according to research from the 1960s, which studied the morphology – the physical form and structure – of the smoker. Smokers … are heavier, have broader chests, hands and calves of larger circumference and hands that are broader and larger. This leaves a mystery: namely the hordes of skinny-shanked, shallow-chested smokers puffing away. Is there within them a larger, stronger being dying to be let forth? A kind of Incredible Smoking Hulk that lurks within?

‘... an Incredible Smoking Hulk that lurks within?’ Seltzer, ‘Morphology, Constitution and Smoking’, Journal of the American Medical Association, 1963

Movies Cigarettes have a hallowed place in the movies. It is where they are at their most eloquent, their most seductive, their most dramatic. On celluloid, cigarettes don’t smell, nor do those who smoke them. They don’t make people cough. Cigarettes would never dream of making anyone ill. They never offend, for when lit, non-smokers are mysteriously never on screen. They have a pristine quality that transcends their day-today realities. Plato believed there was a sort of heaven where the super-real versions of earthly things were stored, the ultimate lily, say, on which all earthly versions of the lily are based; if so, the Platonic heaven of the cigarette is movies. As San Francisco Chronicle movie critic Mick LaSalle says, the things that people deny about cigarettes and smoking are true in the movies. Smoking‘ ... is sexy. It is glamorous. It is cool.’ Whatever one thinks about smoking in restaurants, ‘on camera, there’s simply no more compelling way of doing nothing’. ‘... on camera, there’s simply no more compelling way of doing nothing’. But there’s also no more compelling way of doing something: the cigarette lighting interplay between Bogart and Bacall in To Have and Have Not (1944) bypasses dialogue, develops the relationship in a way words can’t. Smoke speaks volumes. A stubbing-out can mark the end of a tense meeting, the end of a relationship, the end of hope itself. A lighting-up can begin a relationship, can be a moment of insight (enlightenment, as it were), can represent a new dawn in someone’s life. ‘Smoke speaks volumes.’ Smoking can represent thought, contemplation, the mind’s inner workings – the stuff that a camera cannot see.

Smoking in the movies, like smoking elsewhere, suffered set-backs, as anti-smoking factions, more preoccupied with health than art, prevailed. But this is changing. The movie cigarette is on the way back. According to a study in 2005 by two scientists at the University of California, while smoking in movies decreased from 1950 to 1990, it thereafter increased rapidly – to a point in 2002 when it was as common as in 1950, even though the number of smokers in America had halved. In a paper called ‘Tobacco and the Movie Industry’, Annemarie Charlesworth and Stanton A. Glantz counted 10.7 ‘tobacco incidents’ (anything from the appearance of a tobacco ad in the background of a scene to actual smoking) an hour in top-grossing 1950 films, and noted that this had dropped to 4.9 by 1982. By 2002 though, they were back up to 10.9. See Basic Instinct, Chinatown, Now, Voyager, Sleeper, The Big Sleep.

Mick LaSalle, ‘Hollywood Lights up Again at the Movies’, San Francisco Chronicle, 5 November 1996 Annemarie Charlesworth and Stanton A. Glantz, ‘Tobacco and the Movie Industry’, Pediatrics, Vol. 116, No. 6, December 2005

Munch, Edvard (1863 – 1944) Famous for his painting The Scream, it has been recently suggested that Munch’s famous painting of a face contorted as in madness or in the throes of torture, in fact represents Munch’s response to his own battle to give up cigarettes. Danish art historian S. Ankwit points to the exhibition of 1895 in which The Scream was first seen in Munch’s home town of Kristiania (present-day Oslo); there was a lesser-known painting entitled Self Portrait with Cigarette. Ankwit suggests there is a confessional element to this self-portrait, for in Munch’s world the cigarette was associated with deviancy: café society, poverty, illness, death. In this picture there is a ‘programmatic selfdivulgence’ that links itself to ‘the role the cigarette played in Max Nordau’s condemnation of Degeneration and J. K. Huysmans’s celebration of Decadence, and in medical and sociological theories of aberrancy’. Munch smoked Lechfret, a powerful brand, the first to be machine manufactured in Scandinavia. His attempt to give up, if Ankwit’s speculation is correct, led to equally powerful art. Look again at The Scream, and you will see there is a floating, smoky atmosphere to it. S. Ankwit, ‘Munch and Bohemian Smoking’, Bulletin of the Arts, Vol. 39, 1 April 2008

Murad A cigarette brand which was begun in 1900 by Anargyros and was acquired by Lorillard in 1911. The taste for Turkish tobacco was still strong, before Camels and Lucky Strikes switched smokers to American blend, and Murad capitalised on this in spades with its fantastically ornate and absurd box, all gold and red and orange, and wonderful decorations borrowed from a book called Grammar of Ornament by Owen Jones.

Also agreeable is the fun of the cigarette’s name, being named after Murad IV, the seventeenth-century Turkish sultan who executed smokers. See Bans, historical.

Murrow, Ed (1908 – 65) Edward R. Murrow qualifies as one of the most distinguished cigarette smokers of modern times, and one whose delivery and persona were inextricably intertwined with his smoking. As millions of Americans saw in the 1950s and 1960s, and millions of the rest of us saw more recently in Edward Strathairn’s Oscar-nominated performance as Ed Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck (2005), the cigarette was as much a part of Murrow as a limb or other vital organ. In other contexts explored in this book, the cigarette can be voluptuous, cool, dangerous; to Ed Murrow, uniquely, it added gravitas, or complemented his innate gravitas. He smoked from an early age three packs (some say four) of Camel regulars a day. ‘Ed had an obsession with smoking,’ a colleague recalled, ‘as if taking it away from him would be an intolerable burden, the kind of person to whom smoking meant not only pleasure but a relief from subtle impoverishment, some lack.’ Another colleague, Eddy Bliss, remembers the way Murrow would inhale deeply with every drag. He would light up without pausing for the flame to die down: ‘he just drank it down, phosphates, everything’.

‘Whoever said talk is cheap had two lungs ... ’ At a speaking engagement, Murrow grew hoarse. He went to hospital. Barely three weeks elapsed between the diagnosis of cancer and the removal of his left lung. Visiting a colleague not long after, short of wind, Ed Murrow remarked, ‘Whoever said talk is cheap had two lungs.’ See Dry drinking. Murrow took on and defeated Senator McCarthy, using television as the battleground. He had a vision for television that is now lost. ‘This instrument can teach, it can illuminate, it can even inspire. But it can do so only to the extent that humans are determined to use it to those ends. Otherwise it is merely wires and lights in a box. Stonewall Jackson said, “When war comes, you must draw the sword and throw away the scabbard.” The problem with television is that it is rusting in the scabbard during a battle for survival.’ A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times, New York, 1987 Edwards, Edward R. Murrow, New York, 2004

N

Nesbitt, Edith (1858 – 1924) Best remembered for The Railway Children (1906) Edith Nesbitt wrote novels for adults as well as more or less inventing the adventure story for children, was a Fabian and prototype of the new woman. She took up smoking at around the time she cut her hair, in the same spirit as her heroine Nora in Something Wrong (1886), who ‘habitually smoked cigarettes. Not that she cared very much for the thing itself, but Nora in her way was somewhat advanced, and was very strong on the subject of the equality of the sexes. So she smoked as a protest against existing prejudices.’ In The Incomplete Amorist (1906), Betty is an admirer of her Aunt Julia, who is summed up with admirable succinctness: ‘Aunt Julia smoked cigarettes and used words that ladies at Long Barton did not use.’ Sally Feldman, New Humanist, August 2007

New words As well as providing slang over the last century, cigarettes and the way they have interacted with a culture that now frowns on them have recently generated a healthy slew of new and often exotic, sharply focused words. Butt bus

Bus parked near a pub or restaurant used as a smoking section. Originated as a loophole in smoking laws in Canada. Word coined in 2003.

Buttlegger

A smuggler of cigarettes. Based on bootlegger.

Chipper

Occasional cigarette smoker, on five or fewer a day, who can stop at will. See Chipper.

Lung-hugger

Term for anti-smoking activist. Modelled on tree hugger, habitat-hugger, panda-hugger.

Nico-teen

A teenager who smokes cigarettes. Coined as news paper article headline in 1994.

Nicotini

Martini laced with nicotine. Devised in the US after 1 July 2003 smoking ban. Soak tobacco leaves in vodka overnight to produce a cocktail with a nicotine rush and a tobacco aftertaste.

Pack-year

Unit of cigarette smoking. Multiply the number of packs of cigarettes smoked per day by the number of years the subject has smoked. 1 pack year is equal to smoking 1 pack per day for 1 year, or 2 packs per day for half a year

Smexting

Sending text messages on a mobile phone while standing outside a building during a break for smoking. In the two weeks after the UK smoking ban, Orange recorded that texting by their 17 million users was up by 7.5 million, and coined ‘smexting’ to describe the phenomenon.

Smirting

Flirting while on a smoke break. See Smirting.

Smoke-easy

A place where cigarettes are smoked illegally. Modelled on speakeasy, from the US Prohibition, when alcohol was forbidden.

Smoxploitation

Also smokesploitation: movies or videos that depict smoking in an erotic light. Word first recorded in 1996 for people who pay to watch fully clothed attractive women doing nothing but smoking.

Tobacco science

Science that is skewed towards a particular industry. Term first recorded in 1997. The science cited by global- warming fanatics could be described as ‘tobacco science’.

Tony Blair suite

UK term for outdoor smoking areas attached to pubs since the smoking ban. Named after the Prime Minister in power during smoking ban, though Blair showed little personal interest in banning smoking. Verbal reports only; no written citations.

Orange Mobile, ‘Smokers Turn to Their Phones as They’re Sent Outside’, 5 August 2007 Bobbie Johnson, ‘What the hell is smexting?’, Guardian, 6 August 2007 www.wordspy.com wordlust.blogspot.com National Cancer Institute

Nicot, Jean (1530 – 1600) French ambassador in Lisbon (1558 – 60) and lexicographer, who introduced tobacco into France in 1560 and gave us the word nicotine. Nicot was sent to Portugal in 1559 by King Francis II with the tricky task of negotiating a marriage between Francis’s six-year-old sister and Don Sebastian, king of Portugal, aged five. The negotiations failed – perhaps it was the age difference. But the journey was not fruitless: some Portuguese sailors, recently returned from America, gave Nicot a quantity of strange seeds, which he grew into seedlings and then tobacco plants. He sent tobacco leaves to Queen Mother Catherine de Medici, who liked to sniff the powder made from them. Other prominent people followed her example. At first there were objections to the growing tobacco habit, like the Senate of Berne, Switzerland, who added ‘smoking’ to ‘stealing’ and ‘killing’ in the Ten Commandments, but when France hit upon the idea of imposing a state tax on tobacco which brought in a million francs a year, governments suddenly looked in favour upon the habit. As they have done ever since. Nicot, a scholarly man, spent many years on his dictionary of the French language, which is now forgotten utterly. He is known instead for ‘nicotine’, a word which makes no appearance in his dictionary. See Ban, UK smoking and also James I. Morton S. Freeman, New Dictionary of Eponyms, Oxford University Press, 1997

Nicotine A few things that anti-smokers would rather you didn’t know. Among other things, nicotine helps you concentrate, calms you down and causes you to pee less. Here is a miscellany of curious nicotine facts – It takes nicotine just seven seconds to reach your brain after you inhale cigarette smoke.

One drop of nicotine (40 to 60mg) can kill the average human. Nicotine enters the human body carried on particles of tar within cigarette smoke. Cigarettes in the US typically contain approximately 9 milligrams of nicotine, most of which is burned off during smoking; the body absorbs about 1mg of it. When nicotine enters the human body, blood pressure increases, as do heart rate and blood flow from the heart. Arteries narrow; the oxygen level of the blood drops. The claims that nicotine increases concentration, learning ability, and retention of learned information are true; numbers of performance tests have confirmed this. Nicotine produces a sense of alertness, but also of calm. After smoking, nicotine typically remains in the smoker’s blood for six to eight hours. lan W. Cuthbert, ‘Nicotine’, The Oxford Companion to the Body, edited by Colin Blakemore and Sheila Jennett, Oxford University Press, 2001 American Heart Association National Institute on Drug Abuse thedigitalbeat.com 05/2007

Nineteen Eighty-Four George Orwell’s famous black satire where Victory cigarettes appear. See Orwell, George and Victory.

Nostalgia Cigarettes have been coldly defined as ‘nicotine delivery systems’. It would be equally truthful to call them, more warmly, nostalgia delivery systems. They automatically and effortlessly conjure up a thousand and one moments from the past, whether it be the first cigarette smoked, or a cigarette shared, a cigarette enjoyed at a perfect moment. In Brideshead Revisited (1945), when Charles Ryder remembers back from wartime to the golden idyll of Oxford and his friendship with Sebastian Flyte, it is the lovely ‘fat Turkish cigarettes’ smoked at a picnic that come to his mind, and the way ‘the sweet scent of the tobacco merged with the sweet summer scents around us’.

Poet, essayist and novelist Clive James doesn’t even need an actual cigarette to access the nostalgia, having learned as he says ‘to smoke the memory’. You savour your longing for a cigarette rather than trying to repress it. James argues persuasively for the memory being better than the real thing, because ‘the memory lasts as long as you like’. Clive James, ‘Smoking, My Lost Love’, A Point of View, BBC News Channel, 3 August 2007 Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited, London, 1945 See also First puffs.

Now, Voyager (1942) In the famous weepy, Bette Davis gives an impressive performance as Charlotte Vale, a dowdy spinster, repressed by her mother, who undergoes psychiatric treatment by Claude Rains to become a glamorous modern woman. On a sea voyage, where we learn the source of the film’s title, from a Walt Whitman poem – The Untold Want By Life and Land Ne’er Granted Now, Voyager Sail Thou Forth to Seek and Find – she meets suave European Jerry D. Durrance, played by Paul Henreid. It is during five romantic days in Rio de Janeiro that Jerry first plays the so-called two-cigarette trick. As Max Steiner’s romantic, Academy Awardwinning music rises, Henreid places two cigarettes in his mouth, lights both of them, and passes one to Davis. This is the prelude to their first kiss. This seductive piece of cigarette by-play, probably the most famous in movie history, was in fact first performed in The Rich are Always with Us (1932), ten years earlier. ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’ There is much smoking in the film, and another particularly memorable scene at the end, when Charlotte decides to become fully involved with Jerry’s twelve-year-old daughter Tina, who resembles Charlotte’s young repressed self. Jerry will stay with his wife, but he will visit Charlotte and Tina. Jerry lights the cigarettes and asks, ‘And will you be happy, Charlotte?’ Charlotte replies, ‘Oh, Jerry, don’t let’s ask for the moon. We have the stars.’

Let’s Face It (1943), a rather undistinguished Bob Hope film of a musical, has as one of its redeeming features Bob Hope imitating Paul Henreid’s cigarette business – but using eight cigarettes. Now, Voyager, directed by Irving Rapper, screenplay by Casey Robinson and Olive Higgins Prouty, from the novel by Olive Higgins Prouty, 1942, Warner Bros. Although British-born director Irving Rapper made Henreid’s name with this picture, at a 1977 American Film Institute Gala Henreid claimed credit for the two-cigarettes scene. Tim Dirks, www.greatestfilms.org

O

Olivier, Laurence (1907 – 89) In 1956, life was good and bad for Laurence Olivier. The reception given to his Richard III was magnificent; but his marriage to Vivien Leigh was once again in trouble. While he was, in his own words, ‘fucking our love back into existence’, he concluded a useful deal which gave him a new source of income: from Olivier cigarettes. These were to be produced by Gallaher, the makers of Benson & Hedges. After a tour of the factory, and a satisfactory sampling of a cigarette, Olivier agreed the gold-edged royal-blue packet bearing his silhouette. The deal was twopence for every thousand cigarettes sold. He was given a £2,000 advance against the first year’s royalties – money for old smoke. He also received 500 packs of 20 every week, for his own use and to distribute to friends – a handsome 10,000 cigarettes a week. In 1956, Benson & Hedges sold 415,865,980 Olivier brand cigarettes, earning Olivier £3,465. Olivier was loyal to his own brand. Ian McKellen remembers starting work at the National Theatre Company founded by Olivier and finding that ‘there was a cigarette machine only ever filled with the Olivier brand, although it was capable of dispensing half a dozen different ones’.

Olivier cigarettes did not make everyone happy. A retired colonel wrote and expressed his disgust that a man who had been knighted could so ‘besmirch the dignity conferred upon him’ by boosting a brand of cigarettes. In reply, Olivier pointed out that the two things, the cigarette brand and the honour, had nothing to do with each other, that the same tribute had been paid to De Reszke, Sir Gerald Du Maurier – and even to the Royal Navy, in the form of Senior Service. Terry Coleman, Olivier, London, 2005 Ian McKellen, ‘Smoke Signals’, Flaunt Magazine, December 2002

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (1962) Aleksandr Solzhenitsin’s short, powerful novel about Ivan Denisovich, a carpenter condemned with millions of others to the living nightmare of a Soviet work camp in Siberia. A war hero, Solzhenitsin’s criticism of Stalin led to his arrest and an eight-year spell in labour camps. In 1962, with the approval of Soviet Premier Khrushchev, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich became the only one of his books allowed to be published in his own country. Denisovich faces an unfailing ritual of degradation, hatred, discomfort taken to hellish extremes. But he endures, and his hope doesn’t die. ‘Every nerve in his body was taut, all his longing was concentrated in that cigarette butt – which meant more to him now, it seemed, than freedom itself ... ’ The possibility of a cigarette glows like hope itself, yet Denisovich would never lower himself to the level of Fetiukov, the bottom man in Denisovich’s Group 104. It is damningly said of Fetiukov that he is the kind of man ‘who would steal potatoes from your stew’, and fish tobacco out of spittoons to make his own, distinctly second-hand, roll-ups. Aleksandr Solzhenitsin, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, London, 1962 007

James Bond is a one-man celebration of the cigarette. He smokes for England. He smokes, to be exact, 60 a day, 70 when the pressure is on. Bond’s is a personalised cigarette, a Balkan and Turkish mixture specially made for him, with three gold bands at the butt end of the paper, by Morland’s of 83 Grosvenor Street. London WI. Morland’s was a real place, and these cigarettes were available over the counter at the time (1953): they cost 31s. 6d. for 100 and 8s. for 25. Accounts vary, but it seems that Morlands were bought most commonly in boxes of fifty or a hundred. The boxes were sturdy, deep blue in colour, with gold writing. The cigarettes were regular length, untipped. They didn’t carry the Morlands name, the three gold rings standing in for this, but on the edge, in tiny capitals, was the word HANDMADE. When Bond smokes, he really smokes. There is none of today’s pussyfooting about with cigarettes. This is smoking as it should be. When he inhales he ‘drinks the smoke deep into his lungs’ – Moonraker (1955). When he exhales, there are at least two possibilities, that he expels the smoke ‘through his teeth with a faint hiss’, or, ‘slowly, through his nostrils’ – Casino Royale, Moonraker. CO UNTRY

BO N D ’S C IGA R E T T E OF CHOICE

USA

Chesterfield king-size Lucky Strike

France

Laurens Jaune

West Indies

Royal Blend

Turkey

Unnamed

Japan

Shinsei

SOURCE Goldfinger Live and Let Die For Your Eyes Only Dr No From Russia with Love You Only Live Twice

The Shinsei cigarettes ‘hit the palate and lungs like 90° proof spirits and their composition resembles that of a slow-burning firework’. And far and away the most satisfactory cigarette 007 encounters in his foreign travels is when, in From Russia with Love (1957), he is lured to Turkey by an elaborate plot hatched by SMERSH, and meets Darko Kerim, Head of Station T in Istanbul, who gives Bond the ‘most wonderful cigarette he had ever tasted – the mildest and sweetest of Turkish tobacco in a slim long oval tube with an elegant gold crescent’. Later in the story Bond has a battle in a train carriage with ‘Red’ Grant, who is posing as an English agent, Norman Nash. His mission is to kill Bond. Most of us remember the film, with Grant played by Robert Shaw and Bond by Sean Connery. Grant arouses Bond’s suspicions by ordering red wine with the fish – the sort of faux pas one might expect of an Irish-born assassin working for the Russians. ‘When he exhales, there are at least two possibilities, that he expels the smoke “through his teeth with a faint hiss”, or, “slowly, through his nostrils”.’ The red wine scene isn’t in the book. Instead there is an intriguing cigarette-related passage, as Nash offers up Player’s cigarettes, opening the pack ‘with a fairly clean thumbnail’. Bond, we learn, hates Virginia tobacco but takes a cigarette to put Nash more at ease. The ‘fairly clean thumbnail’ should have aroused Bond’s suspicions. The packet of Player’s should have confirmed them. Maybe those cigarettes, so inappropriate to Trieste polite society, do lodge in Bond’s subconscious and ready him for his soon-to-come ordeal at the hands of Nash. Readers are recommended to read Fleming’s book to see in just what cigarette-related manner Bond outwits and defeats Nash. It is surprisingly ingenious and just about believable. William Tanner, pseudonym Kingsley Amis, The Book of Bond; or, Every Man His Own 007, 1965 Adrian Turner, Goldfinger, 1998

007: fellow smokers Bond’s fellow travellers, so to speak, in the smoking world, can sometimes be overlooked, overshadowed as they are by Bond’s formidable manifestation of the habit. But here they are:

Bond’s fellow smokers Char a ct e r

B rand

Sourc e

Mathis

Caporals

Felix Leiter

Chesterfields

Goldfinger

Sir Hugo Drax Mr Big and Goldfinger

Virginians, cork-tipped (a sign of weakness?) Nonsmokers, rare in Bond’s world; these are truly dedicated criminals

Moonraker

Casino Royale

Live and Let Die, Goldfinger Bond girls

Parliament is most popular brand

Origins, cigarette and tobacco Here, in a series of short puffs as it were, is a brief guide to the highlights of the origins and early days of tobacco, and the coming of the cigarette. 6000 BC

Estimate of when tobacco started growing in the Americas.

1492

Explorers Rodrigo de Jerez and Luis de Torres, working for Christopher Columbus, see Cuban natives ‘drinking’ the smoke of tobacco leaves wrapped in maize leaves in the shape of a musket – a prototype cigar/cigarette. Jerez enthusiastically adopts the habit, brings it to Spain, and is promptly imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition.

1560

Jean Nicot writes about tobacco’s medicinal properties.

1560s

Smoking comes to England, popularised by Sir Walter Raleigh.

1604

Elizabethan playwrights Middleton and Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl features an onstage tobacconist’s shop. King James’s ‘Counter blaste to Tobacco’.

1612

Virginia colony run by John Rolfe sends its first tobacco shipment to England. Import duties make King James look more kindly on tobacco.

1619

Privy Council forbids planting of tobacco in England, to protect the monopoly of the Virginia colonists. (In a strange alternative history one imagines a truly English cigarette. Presumably as possible as English wine, and perhaps as undistinguished.)

1665

The Great Plague. Europe fights back against the scourge by smoking the great cure-all: tobacco.

1700s

Tobacco serves as currency in America.

1759

George Washington harvests his first tobacco crop.

1760

P. Lorillard Company begins trading in New York City, specialising at first in snuff. Its date of origin makes it the oldest tobacco company in the US and probably the world.

1778

Goya’s painting La Cometa shows a ‘papelote’ being smoked. This is the Spanish poor person’s cigarette – or ancestor of the cigarette – tobacco, wrapped not in tobacco leaf like the rich man’s cigar, but in paper. The tobacco within could come from cigar stubs or any other source. Handmade, papelotes come in all shapes and sizes.

1821

Start of Liggett & Myers tobacco company, who were later to give the world Chesterfield, Lark and Eve cigarettes.

1830

French chemist Charles Sauria invents rudimentary match, using highly flammable and poisonous white phosphorous.

1832

Some historians claim this date for the invention of the cigarette by an Egyptian artilleryman during the siege of Acre. A cannon crew had improved their rate of fire by rolling the gunpowder in paper tubes, and when their only pipe broke they rolled their tobacco in the paper tubes.

1839

Bright tobacco inadvertently discovered: tobacco cured by the intense heat of charcoal turns bright yellow and has a milder flavour. More than that, to get the best out of it you need to inhale it. Bright tobacco will be the physiological basis of the smoking habit.

1845

Prosper Merimée’s Carmen, about a cigarette girl in a factory in Andalucia, is published. This is probably the first literary reference to cigarettes.

1847

Philip Morris opens his shop in London selling Havana ‘seegars’ and Virginia pipe tobacco.

1853

Thomas Reynolds creates the British Anti-Tobacco Society, but it attracts only 600 members at its peak. This may reflect the British fondness for doing things by halves.

1853 –6

Crimean War. Distinguished by a high level of incompetence on the British side (e.g. the Charge of the Light Brigade), this conflict is said – though historians differ – to have introduced the cigarette and the taste for Turkish tobacco to Europe.

1855

First safety match invented by Swede John Lundström. The inflammable ingredients are divided between match and striking surface, which is coated with red phosphorous. The cigarette now has its invaluable side-kick: a ready means of lighting it.

1856

Robert Gloag, a veteran of the Crimean War, opens England’s first cigarette factory, manufacturing Sweet Threes.

Late 1850s

Philip Morris introduces a classier type of cigarette, boasting the best paper, the purest tobacco, and a fine cork tipping to prevent the cigarette sticking to the lips. Brands included Oxford and Cambridge Blues and Oxford Ovals. Handrolled, these were produced at rate of up to 2,000 a day.

1860

Manufactured cigarettes appear in US. Bull Durham commands 90 per cent of the market.

1860s

Light, inhaleable Bright tobacco starts to replace heavy Turkish tobacco in cigarettes.

1865

Austria introduces double-ended cigarette, mouthpiece at each end, which has to be cut in two before before being smoked. Sixteen million sold in Austria in this year.

1867

The novel Under Two Flags, by Ouida, introduces a female heroine called Cigarette, who ‘rides like an Arab, smokes like a Zouave’. (Zouave is the name for the tough French infantrymen recruited to serve in Algeria.)

1870s

US: Allen and Ginter market their cigarettes in paper containers (rather than loose as was the custom of the time). The containers – which now carry the brand name of the cigarettes – need cardboard stiffeners to keep their shape. It’s easy and appealing to print images on the stiffeners and thus the cigarette card is born, and with it another reason to buy cigarettes.

1880

James Bonsack sets about inventing a cigarette-rolling machine, in response to a reward offered by Allen and Ginter. US cigarette consumption is 500 million compared with 42 million in 1845. Bull Durham cigarettes, made by W. T. Blackwell, are the first US cigarettes to be advertised nationally. Sales rise sharply and James ‘Buck’ Duke takes note.

1883

The new cigarette habit is controversial in the US, as it will be for another fifty years. The New York Times tells its readers: ‘The decadence of Spain began when the Spaniards adopted cigarettes and if this pernicious practice obtains among adult Americans the ruin of the Republic is close at hand.’ John Player, owner of the Castle tobacco factory in Nottingham, starts making cigarettes.

1884

The Bonsack cigarette-rolling machine, which ‘Buck’ Duke has invested in, finally achieves its maximum output and produces 120,000 cigarettes over a tenhour shift. The foundations are thus laid for mass production of low-cost cigarettes and the transformation of the cigarette industry and twentieth-century cultural history. In the UK, W. D. & H. O. Wills launch three brands of cigarettes manufactured on Bonsack machines: Three Castles, Gold Flake and Louisville.

1890

Buck Duke creates the American Tobacco Company.

1891

W. D. & H. O. Wills’ first three brands have been very successful. They launch two more: Wills’ Woodbine and Cinderella, which sell 53 million and 32 million in their first year.

1894

Brown and Williamson tobacco company formed.

1898

A character in the musical comedy A Runaway Girl shocks even sophisticated New Yorkers by smoking onstage while singing ‘Sly Cigarette’: ‘Why did you teach me to love you so/ When I have to pretend that I don’t, you know?’

1899

Lucy Payne Gaston founds the Chicago Anti-Cigarette League which grows to be the Anti-Cigarette Society of America by 1911, not to mention of the World by 1919. Benson & Hedges opens shop in New York’s Fifth Avenue offering upper-class cigarettes. The Merck Manual of Diagnosis and Therapy is published for the first time. It is now (called simply The Merck Manual) the world’s best-selling medical textbook. In 1899 it recommends smoking to treat asthma and bronchitis.

Orwell, George (1903 – 50) As a schoolboy, the novelist and essayist George Orwell (born Eric Arthur Blair), best known for Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), displayed a youthful interest in chemical experiments, which led to a lifelong enthusiasm for cigarettes. With a friend called Prosper Buddicons he embarked on an attempt to make nitro-glycerine. Fortunately for English literature, this was unsuccessful, but a few months later, Eric wrote to Prosper about a much safer experiment. ‘I have got an idea of buying Turkish tobacco & making cigarettes out of it, but it’s awfully hard to get.’ In his adult life, Orwell could not settle down with mass-produced cigarettes. He rolled his own and each new cigarette, slightly different in the consistency of its filling and its size from the one before, was a fresh experiment in the pleasure of smoking. In the Spanish Civil War Orwell went to fight against the fascists. In 1938, at Monte Trazo, he shared a dug-out with Irishman John Donovan, who decades later could vividly remember Orwell rolling and smoking cigarettes formed of strong black shag tobacco – an ordeal Donovan found worse than the conflict. ‘Most trying. Nearly killed me with black tobacco.’ ‘Each new cigarette . . . was a fresh experiment in the pleasure of smoking.’ George Orwell, during the lean years that inspired him to write Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), recalled that he would go to parties with only one cigarette in his pack, find a

smoker and offer it to them. His recipients, invited to peer into an almost empty pack, would inevitably refuse to take his last cigarette and offer one of their own, instead. Thus, according to Orwell, could he puff his way through the party and still have a cigarette left for bedtime. See also Victory. Michael Sheldon, Orwell, London, 1991

P

Page, Lucy Gaston (1860 – 1924) A forceful, humourless anti-cigarette campaigner who grew up in Ohio in a family of nonsmokers and total abstainers from alcohol. A schoolteacher in the 1880s, she graduated from catching schoolboys smoking to grander schemes, founding the Anti-Cigarette League of America in 1899, with the help of a group of Chicago businessmen. The League sent her round the country, giving speeches, distributing leaflets, soliciting donations, and generally undermining the cause of the cigarette. ‘Yours for the extermination of the cigarette,’ she would sign her letters. Page and the League were highly effective, and can take most of the credit for the fact that eleven states had passed anti-cigarette laws by 1911. Early on in the century Page presented a serious threat to James Duke and the other cigarette entrepreneurs. She could have changed social history, as those who instituted Prohibition did, yet the sheer explosive growth of the cigarette habit, sealed by the importance of cigarettes in World War I and their acceptance thereafter, relegated her to being a strident but ineffectual voice. An audible voice, though. In 1920 she sent a letter to President-elect Warren G. Harding, who smoked cigarettes and indeed anything that could be smoked, accusing him of having a ‘cigarette face’ (a kind of cast of face that Page believed was characteristic of cigarette smokers) and demanding that he quit his post. She stood against him in the election, but got nowhere. Harding, a smooth-looking newspaper owner and politician, with appealing but banal policies (a ‘return to normalcy’ after the exigencies of World War I) and ultimately ‘a man of little discernible intellect or imagination’, as the Encyclopedia Britannica crisply observes, was a heavy drinker (even during Prohibition), pursued many extra-marital affairs, and was broad-minded enough to include cigarettes among his vices. Harding won, carried on smoking, though not in public. Britannica summarises him as ‘the least capable of the nation’s chief executives’. Page haunted the streets of Chicago, snatch-

ing cigarettes out of the mouths of boys and girls, and making them sign pledges to a cleaner, healthier life. ‘Warren Harding ... a man of little discernible intellect ... ’ She died in 1924, of throat cancer, though there is no record of her ever having smoked. When she started her campaign, Americans consumed 4.4 billion cigarettes per year. When she took leave of her campaign, the figure was 73 billion. Children in this period were being coached by prim elders in doubtful practices which were to make them more detestable to a part of the adult population. They were encouraged to snatch cigarettes (as well as cigars and pipes) from the so-called grown ‘stinkers’ who were smoking. The children in turn quickly had the epithet turned back on themselves. Christopher Proctor, Sometimes a Cigarette is Just a Cigarette, Sinclair Stevenson, 2003 Warren G. Harding, Encyclopedia Britannica Online, 2007

Pall Mall Introduced in the UK in 1899 by the Butler & Butler company to tempt the upper classes with the first ‘premium’ Turkish cigarette. Butler & Butler was bought by the American Tobacco Company in 1907, and was marketed by the wily George Washington Hill, who emphasised the Britishness of the brand – ‘a shilling in London, a quarter here’. Hill successfully differentiated Pall Mall from Lucky Strike and by 1916 Pall Mall were Turkish brand leaders. In 1924 they sold for 30 cents for 20 (and 5 cents more west of the Rockies).

In 1939 the American Tobacco Company made a historic move: it added 15mm to the length of Pall Malls. King-size cigarettes were born. The beautiful red box, proportioned like a landscape picture, changed shape from the horizontal to the vertical; the typography of the brand name changed too, the ‘Pall Mall’ logo taking on its characteristically elongated shape. As well as its new shape, it boasted not one but two Latin mottoes: In hoc signo vinces, meaning ‘under this sign you triumph’, the divine message reported by the Roman Emperor Constantine after dreaming he saw a Christian cross in the sky, and later adopted as the banner and motto of the Crusaders, and ad astra per ardua, ‘To the stars through difficulties’, i.e. greatness is only achieved by overcoming obstacles. To yoke these thoughts together was the slogan: ‘Where particular people congregate’. ‘Take the famous red box home with you tonight and after your coffee, when you’ve snuggled down in your easy chair to read, relax or chat – light up a real Pall Mall.’ 1924 Pall Mall advertising copy Who are these particular people? The heady brew of Latin and the aspirational slogan imply that one of them – the one in the purple robes perhaps – is the Emperor Constantine puffing away on a king-size. Will Self reflects: In the States ... ah, in the States! Red Pall Mall, the coat of the royal house ... evil on him that thinks it ... and that maddening advertising slogan: ‘Wherever particular people congregate’. Which people would they be exactly? Surely it could only mean those particular people who smoke Pall Mall. See aslo Vonnegut, Kurt.

Passive smoking This of course is the much-debated theory about the effects of non-smokers involuntarily inhaling smokers’ smoke. The phrase comes from the German Passivrauchen, which was coined by one Fritz Lickint, the author of a 1,100-page book, Tabak und Organismus (1939) (Tobacco and the Organism) which was produced in collaboration with the Reich Committee for a Struggle against Addictive Drugs for the German Anti-Tobacco League. See ETS.

Petrol lit by a cigarette – in the movies In the movies, the ashtray filling up with stubs is a classic way of indicating the passage of time. Think of the accumulating stubs thrown out of a waiting car, engine idling, observed by Inspector Callahan at the beginning of Dirty Harry (1971), from which he deduces that this is a getaway car for a robbery that is about to take place. And then there is the ultimate cigarette movie tradition: the one that gives us a slight frisson as we fill up our tank in the petrol station, with all the NO SMOKING signs around. That’s the cigarette being thrown – often in slow motion – into a pool of petrol which promptly explodes. Exactly what happens in The Usual Suspects (1995), for example. Scientists at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms research laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland have investigated whether this happens in real life. Their interest was provoked by arson suspects, who would sometimes claim that a petrol fire was accidentally started by a dropped cigarette. This seems plausible, as a cigarette burns at around 700°C and the ignition temperature of petrol is 246°C. But when the scientists flicked burning cigarettes into trays of petrol, or sprayed a mist of petrol at a lighted cigarette – and they did so thousands of times – nothing happened. The scientists even squirted a fine mist of petrol at a lighted cigarette, but with no result. Guardian, 27 February 2007

Phlegm Various anti-cigarette campaigns have focused on the less appealing consequences of smoking. A UK campaign had a man memorably say of an attractive but cigarette-smoking girl: ‘It’s like kissing an ashtray.’ A recent British Heart Foundation advertisement showed a cigarette nauseatingly oozing with fatty deposits to illustrate the damage cigarette smoking does to the arteries. The UK’s most controversial ad of 2007 was the NHS anti-smoking campaign, Get Unhooked, which showed a man with a giant fish hook through his cheek, dramatising in no uncertain way that the average smoker needs over five thousand cigarettes a year. In the shock and nausea stakes, a Canadian anti-smoking campaign went a memorable step further with the line ‘Why sell cigarettes? Why not just sell phlegm and cut out the middle man?’

Picasso, Pablo (1881 – 1973) The great Spanish painter and sculptor was the most prolific artist who ever lived, working with endless originality in a whole variety of media, constantly changing and evolving his style, so that he seems like a dozen or more painters, sculptors, etc., rolled into one. He lived a long time; his output was prodigious. New Picassos are being discovered all the time: never did an artist enjoy such a buoyant market. He was a noteworthy smoker, too. Here is an attempt to balance up, over his ninety-twoyear lifetime, his artistic output to his cigarette input, based on estimates of his works (which are necessarily rough), and estimates of his smoking, based on a conservative 40 a day, to a more likely 60 a day. It is assumed, also conservatively, that he started smoking at the age of twenty. Picasso’s cigarette of choice was a Gauloise. P i c a sso : Ou tpu t Ceramic pieces Bronze pieces Paintings Prints & Engravings Book Illustrations

P ic asso: Input 3,500

Cigarettes @ 40 a day

1,051,200

360

Cigarettes @ 60 a day

1,576,800

3,500 100,000 34,000

Player ’s Weights A stiff competitor to Wild Woodbines, introduced by Player’s in 1889, when it was first called Player’s No. 1 Virginia. The cigarettes were originally sold loose by weight, and sealed in a decorative envelope – hence no doubt the name Weights. Cigarette-pack historian Chris Mullen observes:

The Player’s Weights pack design seems to have been copied exactly from the old envelopes in which the cigarettes were sold by weight. It is not so radical a design as Woodbine. The brand name is immediately readable, thrown forward from a dark background, though the designer could not resist the Baroque details and subtle clusters of roses that, by association, breathe fragrant perfume over the pack. Chris Mullen, Cigarette Pack Art, London, 1979

Poetry Poetry and cigarettes are not ready bedfellows. As well as the difficulty of rhyming with the word ‘cigarette’, smoking rarely seems a worthy subject to grace the lines of a poem, although the poets themselves were often passionate smokers: think of W. B. Yeats, Dylan Thomas and W. H. Auden, always photographed with a cigarette drooping from the mouth. But rarely is there a poem about a cigarette. An exception is by William Henley (1849 – 1903), famous for the lines ‘I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul.’ ‘Papalito’ is his charming love poem: Your cigarette is laudable I trow! Suave and serene it blandly interposes, And all the moment’s errors overglosses When sick of tramping after effort’s plow, The soul revolts, aweary of its vow. Singing where often the pipe but proses, Its fumes a chat with piquancy endow. No girl so rigid but she will allow Your cigarette.

Bring out the wine jug wreathed with radiant roses. Sit by me, Sweetheart, underneath the bough. Shut me the book; your face is verse enow; And while beatified my fancy dozes, Light, with that sweet hand cool upon my brow, Your cigarette. But what do the French do with a poem on a cigarette? They treat it as a panting Serge Gainsbourg song. Here is Mallarmé’s ‘Vers de circumstance’: Never draw, cigarettes, Cigarettes, ne dessechez

The wet from two lips

Jamais, grace a votre sont lisse,

On which the kiss

Les deux lèvres on sont niches

Of your own smooth tip

Ses baisers, notre seul delice.

Is the only bliss.

This is the accurate translation of a complex verse structure. But another translator besotted by sex and his own ingenuity could translate it thus: Cigarettes never dry Thanks to your slick bounty, The two lips acting as niches Their kisses, our sole delight. See also Life itself. Mallarmé, Oeuvres complètes, Gallimard, 1998

Post, Emily (1872 – 1960) This American authority on etiquette published guides on every aspect of social behaviour and left behind a highly active Emily Post Institute. Her writings, fresh, direct and unpompous, were based on common sense and a keen appreciation of social change. (Although born when electricity was still a theory, she made a point of updating her writings to include the etiquette of TV watching, and etiquette in aeroplanes, for example.) She often figures in cigarette history thanks to a much-quoted article in Good Housekeeping in 1940, where she said that ‘Those who smoke outnumber those who do not by a hundred to one … so non-smokers must learn to adapt themselves to existing conditions.’ She robustly concluded that it was unfair that the few should be allowed to prohibit the many from ‘their comforts and their pleasures’. When she wrote about smoking in her Etiquette Book the following year, she added, ‘If [a hostess] will not let her guest smoke in whatever part of the house they happen to be in, she will not have many guests – either men or women.’ Twenty years earlier, when smoking could still cause controversy – particularly when it was women doing the smoking – in her first book, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, written in 1922, Emily shows herself somewhat ahead of her times. ‘Those who smoke outnumber those who do not by a hundred to one ... ’ She describes a formal dinner party, and its conclusion with the traditional splitting up of the women and men, the men going off to smoke cigars, cigarettes and drink port. But she adds, ‘In the drawing-room, meanwhile, the ladies are having coffee, cigarettes, and liqueurs passed to them.’ In case the message isn’t clear, she adds, ‘There is not a modern New York hostess, scarcely even an old-fashioned one, who does not have cigarettes passed after dinner.’ This was written when women who lit cigarettes in non-smoking areas sometimes paid greater penalties than men who did the same thing. (After fining a young woman $5 for smoking on a ferryboat when men were usually fined only $3, a New York magistrate told her: ‘The extra two is for having the nerve to do it.’) In the latest (17th) edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, lighting up in a roomful of nonsmokers without asking permission beforehand is #12 among the ‘Dirty Dozen’ of ‘Today’s Rudest Behaviours’.

In 1922, the same year as Emily Post endorsed women smoking cigarettes after dinner, a New York Alderman by the name of McGuinness deplored the habit: ‘The morals of our young girls are menaced by this smoking. The young fellows lose all respect for women and the next thing you know the young fellows, vampired by these smoking women, desert their homes, their wives and children, rob their employees and even commit murder so they can get money to lavish on these smoking women. It’s all wrong and it’s got to stop.’ Emily Post, Good Housekeeping, September 1940 Emily Post, Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, New York, 1922 Cassandra Tate, Cigarette Wars: The Triumph of the Little White Slaver, New York, 1999

Potter, Dennis (1935 – 94) British television dramatist Dennis Potter famously sipped champagne, swigged liquid morphine and smoked cigarettes in a final TV interview with Melvyn Bragg, in April 1994, shortly before he died of pancreatic cancer. He memorably named his growth ‘Rupert’, in honour of Rupert Murdoch, and equally memorably described a cigarette as a ‘little tube of delight’. In perhaps Potter’s most perfectly realised drama, The Singing Detective (1986), his hero, Marlow, played with enormous power by Michael Gambon, is in hospital, arthritic, skin ruined with the psoriasis that afflicted Potter. His bed adjoins the Asian Ali, whom Marlow treats with affection and total lack of political correctness. ‘I’m dying for a cigarette. Please, Ali, please. Love your little brown chops.’ Ali goes and gets Marlow’s cigarettes for him, puts a cigarette in Marlow’s mouth (‘Blessings on your head, old son,’ says Marlow). Now Ali tries to light the cigarette with Marlow’s so-called ‘electronic lighter’. ALI: MARLOW:

No bloody flame. Conviction. Do it with conviction. Click again, and the flame jumps up high, almost singeing Ali.

ALI:

Oh my God!

MARLOW:

Turn it down! Turn the wheel! It is like a blow torch.

MARLOW:

Ali – the little wheel – ! Ali finds how to reduce the flame.

ALI: MARLOW:

Good. Yes? I could see the headlines, ‘Another Asian Burnt to Death’. Ali, grinning, lights Marlow’s cigarette. Marlow sucks in smoke.

MARLOW:

No, that sort of thing doesn’t make the headlines any more, does it? Not now the National Front are investing in tandoori ovens. Ali watches with fascination as Marlow eagerly drags in too much smoke, coughs, hurts himself, but beams with pleasure.

ALI: MARLOW:

Good? Good? (Cough, splutter.) Bloody (cough) marvellous – (Cough, splutter, wince.) All my wants and desires and fondest aspirations have finally been reduced to their true dimensions, old son. And he coughs again.

ALI: MARLOW: ALI: MARLOW:

Yes. Your lungs. Look at the blue smoke, Ali. See – the way it coils and drifts. (Nasty cackle.) Just like every human hope. Yes, yes, very bloody wise. I used to think I wanted the good opinion of honourable men and the ungrudging love of beautiful women. (He laughs, then realises he meant it.) But now I know for sure that all I really want is a cigarette. Just one more cigarette, Ali.

Dennis Potter, The Singing Detective, 1986

POW camps While Allied combatants in World War II were showered with cigarettes, their less fortunate POW compatriots were locked away on the strictest of rations. Out of all the rigours, miseries and dangers of being an Allied prisoner of war, shortage of cigarettes ran high. Nearly all servicemen smoked, and after food and shelter their great craving was cigarettes – as even institutions like the Red Cross recognised in their parcels of supplies. Without cigarettes, prisoners would wrap dried mint-leaves in strips of newspaper, and resort to virtually any tobacco substitute: leaves, coffee grounds, even manure. So powerful was the nicotine craving that prisoners could find themselves following guards to collect their discarded butts or volunteering to clean out their ashtrays. Adrian Gilbert, a recent chronicler of POWs, observes that sometimes even prisoners suffering from malnutrition would trade food for cigarettes. To pass the time, some prisoners played cards, took up needlework, grew flowers, organised imaginary days out (to, say, Bournemouth, with someone doing the sound effects of the train), played music, built up libraries or contemplated escape. One prisoner, R. A. Radford, imprisoned in Italy and Germany, was an economist, and he chose to examine the internal economy of the prisoner-of-war camps. Swiftly, he discovered the importance of the cigarette as a unit of currency. They were like ordinary currency: ‘homogenous, reasonably durable, and of a convenient size for the smallest or, in packets, for the largest transactions’. Certain brands were more popular than others as smokes, but for currency purposes a cigarette was a cigarette. Consequently buyers used the poorer qualities … cigarettes such as Churchman’s No. I were rarely used for trading … Naturally people with machine-made cigarettes broke them down and re-rolled the tobacco, and the real cigarette virtually disappeared from the market. Handrolled cigarettes were not homogeneous and prices could no longer be quoted in them with safety: each cigarette was examined before it was accepted and thin ones were rejected, or extra demanded as a make-weight. For a time we suffered all the inconveniences of a debased currency. Another aspect of the POW’s existence worth noting was the sudden exposure to foreign prisoners, a sometimes startling process, from whichever standpoint.

Initially Stalag VIIA had been a camp for French POWs and we were the first British contingent to enter. Confined to their compounds, the French threw cigarettes to us, together with matches. Those cigarettes were Gauloises, made from a strong black tobacco and I actually saw some of our fellows fall to their knees when they inhaled the smoke.

‘ ... prisoners would wrap dried mint-leaves in strips of newspaper, and resort to virtually any tobacco substitute: leaves, coffee grounds, even manure’. See One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich. Adrian Gilbert, POW, London, 2007 R. A. Radford, ‘The Economic Organisation of a POW Camp’, Economica, November 1945 Harold J. Siddall, And So: An Autobiography, www.naval-history.net/WW2MemoirAndSooo.htm

Premier It was the most expensive cigarette brand ever developed – but you couldn’t smoke it. And you needed a small instruction leaflet to light it. This bizarre high point of the cigarette manufacturer’s ingenious pursuit of the safe cigarette, Premier was a smokeless cigarette that – it was claimed – would look, light, smoke and taste like any other cigarette, ‘but had no ash, produced virtually no smoke after the first puff or two, and if left alone, would extinguish itself rather than igniting any surface with which it came into contact’. Premier, initially codenamed Spa, was the brainchild of R. J. Reynolds Company and its launch in 1988 was RJR’s bid to revolutionise the cigarette market with something entirely new, get back market share from Philip Morris, and evade the many health charges now being openly laid against cigarettes. A senior RJR executive smoothly said, ‘Simply put, we think that this is the world’s cleanest cigarette…’So, how did it work? ‘It was the most expensive cigarette brand ever developed – but you couldn’t smoke it … ’ Premier was a cylinder of tobacco extracts wrapped round a carbon rod. The carbon rod was ignited and as it burned down it warmed the air drawn in by the smoker. The air passed

over an aluminium capsule containing beads of tobacco extracts and flavouring, and was then drawn into the lungs via a filter, which was strictly speaking superfluous since there was no smoke. However, you had to light the cigarette with the pure butane flame of a lighter, since the impurities of a safety match would react badly with the carbon rod and make the cigarette taste ‘as if you’d lighted the wrong end’ as one smoker said. Yet another said the smell was ‘as if you’d just opened a grave on a warm day’. You had to be careful to light the rod and not the tobacco, and one Wall Street analyst took the view that a blowtorch would be easier to use than a lighter. What’s more, assuming you’d got your carbon rod successfully smouldering away, instead of having a smoke all you could do was suck in warm tobacco-flavoured air. And because there was no ash, you didn’t feel as though your ‘smoking’ was getting you anywhere. ‘I’ve been smoking the hell out of this, and it won’t go away,’ complained one customer. You couldn’t even stub the thing out; to dispose of it, you had to break it apart. ‘The American public [preferred[ an old-fashioned smoke to a newfangled suck … ’ It has been estimated that when the costly marketing of Premier is taken into account, together with years of research, and special manufacturing equipment, the Premier launch cost almost $300 million, ‘making it a candidate for the most expensive US. consumer product introduction ever’. The American public did not take Premier to its bosom, preferring an old-fashioned smoke to a new-fangled suck, and the experimental brand withered on the vine. See Safe cigarettes. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 1996

Psychology of Everyday Living, The (1947) ‘ ... At meals, a cigarette is somewhat like another course ... ’ Here is another take on a recurrent theme of this book, why do we smoke? Ernest Dichter was a psychologist who came comparatively early to the topic, and in his book The Psychology of Everyday Living, devoted a chapter to the subject, called ‘Why Do We Smoke Cigarettes’. It is let down by a lack of knowledge of the addictive properties of

nicotine, but has interesting and thoughtful points to make, in a rather charming way. And it certainly accentuates the positive. ‘ ... smoking is fun ... ’ ‘Smoking is fun,’ he suggests. We constantly seek the carefree enjoyment we had as children (though this does rather depend on the childhood, it should be added) and as we get older, become enmeshed in work, and responsibilities, the cigarette is a way of ‘snatching a moment of pleasure’ out of the daily grind, in the way we could act on whims as children. Here is a Top Ten of Dichter’s observations: 1. A cigarette is a reward we can give ourselves as often as we wish. 2. At meals, a cigarette is somewhat like another course. 3. ... smoking cigarettes is like being with a friend ... [Dichter quotes one of his correspondents] ‘When I lean back and light my cigarette, and see the glow in the dark, I am not alone any more ... ’ 4. Usually the way we smoke is characteristic of our whole personality. The mannerisms of smokers are innumerable. Some people always have cigarettes drooping from their mouths. Others let the cigarette jump up and down in their mouths while they are talking. 5. Smoking helps us to relax because, like music, it is rhythmic. Smoking gives us a legitimate excuse to linger a little longer after meals, to stop work for a few minutes, to sit at home without doing anything that requires effort. 6. Smoking makes us breathe more steadily, and thus calms us down. 7. Dichter quotes a father on the subject of the first cigarette ... ’I told my son I thought he was a little young ... He is seventeen. It might not do him any harm to wait another year or two. Then I remembered my own first cigarette and what awful stuff I had to smoke in secret. In a way, my son is lucky to be able to start with a good cigarette without running the danger of ruining his health. I gave him a pack of the brand I smoke.’ 8. ‘My brand’ has a special significance, as if it were a part of the smoker’s credo and personality. 9. In a section evocatively called ‘A package of pleasure’, Dichter says: ‘A new pack of cigarettes gives one a pleasant feeling. A full, firm pack in the hand signifies that one is provided for, and gives satisfaction, whereas an almost empty

pack creates a feeling of want and gives a decidedly unpleasant impression. The empty pack gives us a feeling of real frustration and deprivation.’ 10. Dichter’s secret: ‘We ourselves do not smoke at all. We may be missing a great deal.’

Ernst Dichter, The Psychology of Everyday Life, New York, 1947

Puff What simpler act could there be than the puffing of a cigarette? Yet the cigarette makers, ever eager to analyse every aspect of their art, have measured and quantified puffing. The variation in puffing parameters observed among smokers is in the range 20 to 80ml for puff volume, 0.8 to 3.0 seconds for puff duration, and 20 to 100 seconds for puff interval. Now we know. Vosges, Tobacco Encyclopedia, Germany, 2000

Pyrophobia Do you object to cigarettes and cigarette smoking? You may need psychiatric help. And underlying your concerns about health is a morbid and unacknowledged fear of fire, and in particular, the ‘big fire’ or atomic bomb. In 1964, the secretary general of the International Association for Scientific Tobacco Research, Dr H. Aschenbrenner, suggested that before reports on smoking and health could be taken seriously, it should be ensured that the writers of the reports weren’t suffering from pyrophobia (fear of fire). According to Dr Aschenbrenner, antipathy to tobacco often springs from a morbid (and often unconscious) pyrophobia – a phenomenon whose many manifestations include suppressed fear of the ultimate in fires, the atom bomb. The anti-smokers with this phobia must have been legion in 1964, just two years after the Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred. Here are the symptoms of pyrophobia: Breathlessness Nausea Heart palpitations Fear of dying Excessive sweating Shaking

Inability to speak or think clearly Becoming mad or losing control A sensation of detachment from reality A full-blown anxiety attack World Tobacco, 1964

Q

Quitting Quitting is the other side of the coin of smoking. The possibility of quitting is the ever-distant prospect that health-conscious smokers console themselves with. As Richard Klein puts it, ‘Believing one can stop is the pre-eminent condition of continuing.’ ‘I’d give up smoking but I’m not a quitter.’ Jo Brand Quitting is what all smokers think about with almost as much frequency as they think about their next cigarette. In Martin Amis’s novel The Information (1995), his hero Richard Tull wrestles with quitting and quitting wrestles right back. Richard had imagined giving up smoking, and he naturally assumed man knew no hotter hell. Nowadays, he had long since quit thinking about quitting. Before the children were born he sometimes thought he might very well give up smoking when he became a father. But the boys seemed to have immortalised his bond with cigarettes. This bond with cigarettes – this living relationship with death. Paradoxically, he no longer wanted to give up smoking: what he wanted to do was take up smoking. Not so much to fill the little gaps between cigarettes with cigarettes (there wouldn’t be time anyway) or to smoke two cigarettes at once. It was more that he felt a desire to smoke a cigarette even when he was smoking a cigarette. The need was and wasn’t being met.

‘The nicotine patches work well, but it’s kind of hard to keep them lit.’ George Carlin

Perhaps Richard Tull is thinking too much and too hard about his problem, when he could be tackling it in a more straightforward physical way. For there are as many tools available to the would-be quitter as there are aids to smoking. There are nicotine replacements: nicotine gum, nicotine inhalers, nicotine lozenges, nicotine nasal spray and nicotine patches. There are nicotine-free aids: Bupropion, marketed as Zyban, an anti-depressant that reduces withdrawal syndromes; Varenicline Tartrate, marketed as Chantix, which stimulates nicotine receptors in the brain. ‘Cigarettes are a much cheaper and more readily available alternative to nicotine patches.’ Bob Davies Hypnosis and acupuncture are popular. Even laser treatment is available. Richard Klein, who wrote a whole book in lyrical celebration of the cigarette in order to help him give up, sees quitting in a unique way: ‘I’ve quit smoking. I feel better, I smell better, and it’s safe to drink out of the old beer cans around the house.’ Roseanne Barr

… cigarettes, though harmful to health, are a great and civilising tool and one of America’s proudest contributions to the world. Seen in this light, the act of giving up cigarettes should perhaps be approached not only as an affirmation of life but, because life is not merely existing, as an occasion for mourning. Stopping smoking one must lament the loss to one’s life of something – or someone – immensely, intensely beautiful, must grieve for the passing of a star. Mr Klein, as these words show, is himself a bright star in the firmament of those who have contributed to our understanding of cigarettes. Richard Klein, Cigarettes are Sublime, London, 1995 Martin Amis, The Information, London, 1995

Quotations A miscellany of flippant and not-so-flippant thoughts about smoking –

If we see you smoking we will assume you are on fire and take appropriate action. Douglas Adams I kissed my first girl and smoked my first cigarette on the same day. I haven’t had time for tobacco since. Arturo Toscanini Remember, if you smoke after sex you’re doing it too fast. Woody Allen It has always been my rule never to smoke when asleep, and never to refrain when awake. Mark Twain Cigarettes are killers that travel in packs. Author Unknown There are some circles in America where it seems to be more socially acceptable to carry a hand-gun than a packet of cigarettes. Katharine Whitehorn If you don’t smoke or drink, you die in good health. Old Russian saying For the first time in history, sex is more dangerous than the cigarette afterward. Jay Leno I’d rather kiss a mad cow on the muzzle than a smoker on the mouth. Paul Carvel Paul Carvel, Belgian editor and wit, b. 1964, who has also observed that ‘The modern human communicates better with his mouse than with his mouth.’ Please don’t throw your cigarette butts in the urinal. It makes them soggy and hard to light. Author Unknown Once you’re past 50, I think it’s a mistake to give up. I think giving up could kill you.

Beryl Bainbridge I don’t know why I did it, I don’t know why I enjoyed it, and I don’t know why I’ll do it again. Bart Simpson, The Simpsons I’ve been smoking for 30 years now and there’s nothing wrong with my lung. Freddie Starr I’m not what you’d call a heavy smoker. I only get through two lighters a day. Bill Hicks If I’m told to stop smoking in a restaurant, I just say, ‘Excuse me, do you mind not being bigoted around me. Bigotry killed six million Jews.’ Stephen Fry When I was a smoker, people were always coming up to me saying, ‘Miss, your smoke is bothering me.’ I’d say, ‘Hey, it’s killing me.’ Wendy Liebman It is now proven, beyond a doubt, that smoking is a leading cause of statistics. Fletcher Knebel Fletcher Knebel (1911 – 93), US novelist most remembered for Seven Days in May (1962) co-written with Charles Bailey II. If I cannot smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. Mark Twain Life without cigarettes is a little less worth living. Jean-Paul Sartre ‘The movement which began on the West Coast of America among an uncompromising ragbag of New-Age nutters and radish worshippers has now gained the momentum to sweep the world. We laughed when they first started with their bleating, but laughs are now rare among the little groups of office workers huddled in the street, taking a nicotine hit with all the deep joy of a tramp swigging meths.’

Journalist Pete Clark on the anti-smoking movement, London Evening Standard, 1 February 2002 Oscar Wilde: Do you mind if I smoke? Sarah Bernhardt: I don’t care if you burn.

R

Race and ethnicity

Does ethnic grouping affect a person’s choice of brand? Here are figures showing the percentages of brands smoked by different groups of US youths, aged twelve to seventeen, in 1999. Note: Marlboro and Newport were among the top three brands for all three major racial/ ethnic groupings. In contrast to whites and Hispanics, however, the top three cigarette brands for blacks included Kools rather than Camels. Source: SAMHSA, Office of Applied Studies, ‘National Household Survey on Drug Abuse’, 1999

Raffles Raffles cigarettes sought distinction for their brand by naming it after a luxury hotel in Singapore. This hotel had derived its name from Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles (1781 – 1826) who was known as the ‘founder’ of the city of Singapore, now the Republic of Singapore. So far so good; the cigarette had all the aspirational and spurious lineage usually sought for a brand. But time and events interfered to surround Raffles with too many of the wrong associations.

First, it was tainted by association with the fictional A. J. Raffles character who was a gentleman safecracker and thief created by E. W. Hornung (1866 – 1921). This chameleon-like figure flits through a series of stories where cigarettes are often an accompanying motif. In one yarn, ‘No Sinecure’, the job-seeking narrator tracks down an eccentric old man in squalid surroundings who croaks at his visitor: I may not have much body left to boast about, but at least I’ve got a lost old soul to call my own. That’s why I want a gentleman of sorts about me. I’ve been too dependent on that chap. He won’t even let me smoke, and he’s been in the flat all day to see I didn’t. You’ll find the cigarettes behind the Madonna of the Chair. It was a steel engraving of the great Raffaelle, and the frame was tilted from the wall; at a touch a packet of cigarettes tumbled down from behind. ‘Thanks; and now a light.’ I struck the match and held it, while the invalid inhaled with normal lips; and suddenly I sighed. I was irresistibly reminded of my poor dear old Raffles. A smoke-ring worthy of the great A. J. was floating upward from the sick man’s lips. ‘And now take one yourself. I have smoked more poisonous cigarettes. But even these are not Sullivans!’ I cannot repeat what I said. I have no idea what I did. I only know – I only knew – that it was A. J. Raffles in the flesh! Flash-forward to 1992. The Chancellor Norman Lamont had a satanic Dracula-like mien but his Dark Arts did not help him prevent the economic meltdown known as Black Wednesday. The economy went into freefall and the hapless Lamont became equally infamous for his strange nocturnal adventure in which he had called at a newsagent in a seedy area of Paddington late at night to purchase champagne and Raffles cigarettes. It was a long way for a brand’s image to fall – from the Governor of Singapore to a back street in Paddington. Matthew Hilton, Smoking in Popular English Culture, London, 2000

Rand, Ayn (1905 – 82) A Russian émigré who came to the US with the ambition of becoming a screenwriter, Ayn Rand founded the cult of Objectivism and wrote two world-wide bestsellers, The Fountain-

head (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). These two books celebrated individualism and had heroes who were the ideal man, man as ‘he could be and ought to be’. Ayn Rand had two deep commitments in life. The first was to Objectivism, a kind of celebration of self-interest that made capitalism seem tame; the second was to smoking. Indeed, the two became intertwined in her thinking. Because a cigarette was not just a cigarette for Rand. For her it represented humanity’s conquest of fire. Smoking was a Promethean symbol of creativity and inventiveness. ‘When a man thinks, there is a spot of fire alive in his mind,’ writes Rand; and how apposite to have a glowing cigarette in his hand, fire ‘tamed at his fingertips’. I like Cigarettes; I like to think of fire held in a man’s hand. FIRE, a dangerous force, tamed at his finger tips. I often wonder about the hours when a man sits alone watching the smoke of a cigarette, thinking. I wonder what great things have come out from such hours. When a man thinks there is a spot of fire alive in his mind – and it is proper that he should have the burning point of a cigarette as his one expression. In Atlas Shrugged, a novel set in the future with some science-fiction overtones, a brand of cigarettes appears which is a plain white package with no trade name or manufacturer’s name, only a dollar sign stamped in gold. The cigarettes too bear the same gold dollar sign. (One feels it would be appropriate if this were the US tobacco industry’s ‘own brand’.) In 1949, Ayn Rand achieved her ambition, when the film of The Fountainhead came out, based on her screenplay. It was directed by King Vidor and starred Gary Cooper. ‘Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction … ’ Atlas Shrugged Warned off cigarettes, Ayn Rand gave up on the spot in her doctor’s office, but too late; she died of lung cancer. A six-foot-high floral dollar sign was put up by her open coffin in the funeral home. Ayn Rand’s influence lives on in the Nathaniel Branden Institute, which promulgates her teachings, as does Alan Greenspan, formerly head of the US Federal Reserve and a twentyyear associate of Ayn Rand. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, New York, 1957

Reader ’s Digest Between 1950 and 1952, all kinds of research papers began to point to a link between cigarette smoking and lung cancer. Doctors started to switch to pipes, cigars or indeed fresh air. Yet the general public knew little. Everyone had stories of people who smoked two or three packs a day and then came down with a lung disorder. But for every one of these stories there seemed to be a heavy smoker who lived to their 90s. All this changed towards the end of 1952 when the Reader’s Digest, the magazine with the largest circulation in the US, and a reputation for honesty based on its taking no advertising, published an article with the brutal headline ‘Cancer by the Carton’. The article didn’t condemn smoking outright; it just talked of the correlation – but that was enough. ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire – and cancer.’ That article, and its follow-up articles with titles like ‘What Smoking Does to You’, were repeated widely in the media. For the public, it was like discovering that a longloved family member had a dreadful secret vice. Cigarettes, with their claims to health, to glamour, to sociability suddenly fell under a shadow of suspicion. As one writer put it, many people assumed that ‘Where there’s smoke there’s fire – and cancer.’ In 1953, for the first time in 21 years, cigarettes sales declined to 423 billion from 1953’s record of 435 billion. Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978

Rich are Always with Us, The (1932) A not highly regarded New York high-society comedy, which featured an early appearance by a young Bette Davis playing the bizarrely named Marlbro. It is claimed that this is the first appearance in the movies of the two-cigarette trick, later memorably performed by Paul Henreid (with Bette Davis, of course) in Now, Voyager (1942).

Risk Whether the demands made by smokers by their risky behaviour on the health service are truly selfish is discussed under Selfish smokers. A question remains: is it acceptable to penalise smokers for this risky behaviour?

Doing risky things, after all, is not normally penalised by society. A 1994 report questioned the fairness of a heavy additional tax on smokers alone to support the new Clinton health-care programme. Its authors, Jane G. Gravelle and Dennis Zimmerman, argued that individuals who engage in hazardous activities are not necessarily making bad choices. Economic theory tells us that people do things that make them, according to their tastes, happy. People trade off between risk and happiness as they ride motor bikes, carry out stunts on film sets, hang glide, put out fires for a living or eat abnormal quantities of hamburgers. People’s choices aren’t necessarily slanted towards maximising their life span or their health. People smoke because they like it, and their enjoyment ‘outweighs the sum of the actual costs of purchasing cigarettes and the internal health costs’. The writers conclude of recreational, work and dietary practices that are risky, that ‘in fact, we do not impose taxes on these activities’. See also Early-grave defence, Selfish smokers. Jane G. Gravelle and Dennis Zimmerman, Cigarette Taxes to Fund Health Care Reform: An Economic Analysis, 1994 http://tobaccodocuments.org/pm/2048280538-0553.html

Romance No small part of the pleasure of smoking comes from the name of the brand. Here are some dreamy and evocative names from the pre-1920s, as the golden age of the cigarette was dawning ... Blush of Day

Pirate

Musk Rose

Hazelnut

Gibson Girl

State of the World

Golden Cloud

Porpoise

Heart’s Delight

Sunrise

Sunflower

Picaroon

Oracle

Tiger

Myrtle Grove

Lily

Purple Mountain

Tipsy Loo

Pink of Perfection

Mecca

Roosevelt, ‘Princess’ Alice (1884 – 1980) Alice Roosevelt, the controversial daughter of President Theodore Roosevelt, was a determined and dedicated smoker. Her teetotal non-smoking father forbade her from smoking in the White House so she went up on the roof to smoke her cigarettes. Prohibitionists pursued her at every turn but ‘Princess Alice’, as she became known, ignored them and carried on smoking. In the 1930s she appeared in magazine ads for Lucky Strike cigarettes. She did concede that ‘some of the women I know who smoke, look peculiarly leathery – though perhaps they would look leathery anyway’. When friends asked Roosevelt if he could rein in his eldest daughter, Roosevelt said, ‘I can be President of the United States, or I can control Alice. I cannot possibly do both.’ In turn, Alice said of him that he always wanted to be ‘the bride at every wedding and the corpse at every funeral’. She too became a corpse as she paid the price for her dogged cigarette smoking. She died at the age of ninety-six.

Rugby The sly gasper before a rugby match in the old amateur days in the 1960s was nothing out of the ordinary. No more than the consumption of a gallon of beer after it. But it was always

assumed that international matches were on a more elevated plane. Apparently not. The following anecdote relates the run-up to a Triple Crown game in the pre-professional days: An England rugby captain heard that the Welsh were giving lengthy team talks, and when it was suggested that he might do the same reluctantly agreed. But he was a man short on words, and having called for silence, cleared his throat uneasily. ‘Right gentlemen. Today we are playing the Welsh. Ahem.’ There was an awkward pause while he struggled for the next sentence. ‘All I can say is, we’ve got to beat the bastards!’ A further pause. ‘Er … has anybody here got a fag?’ The teller of this tale was Carwyn James, the legendary Welsh rugby coach who was the mastermind behind the British Lions’ defeat of the All Blacks on their 1971 tour of New Zealand. A gentle, cultured man, he played twice for Wales in 1958 as their fly half, but went on to become famous as a thoughtful, inspired coach. He was so inspired that he coined a euphemistic phrase for pre-emptive violence on the rugby field, which was ‘get your retaliation in first’, a saying which has entered sporting language. A heavy and committed cigarette smoker, he got his own retaliation in first before entering hospital on a tour of South Africa. His visits to South Africa were a case of rugby football being at one with Lady Nicotine. He could give up neither even if the world were in flames and indeed on one visit to hospital when his skin condition became unbearable, he gravely asked a friend to stop the car and despatched him to purchase 500 non-tipped which he could smuggle in, hopefully to last the week. Alun Richards, Carwyn, Michael Joseph, 1984

Russia The desirability of American symbols and consumer goods in late Soviet and post-Soviet Russia was huge. Even the most staid Western guidebooks used to recommend bringing Levi’s jeans and Marlboro cigarettes as gifts or an alternate form of currency. But imports weren’t the only way for Russians to enjoy the symbolic prestige of American goods. By the early 1990s, Moscow’s tobacco kiosks seemed to be awash with Marlboro packs, with their characteristic typeface and red and white packaging. But look closer at those packs

and they’re not Marlboro at all: they’ve got names like Cow-Boy, State Line, Montana and Texas – and even the bizarrely generic Mid-West. (As if one might have a British brand called Home Counties.) Walter L. Hixson, Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture and the Cold War, 1945 – 1961, New York, 1996

S

Safe as Tomatoes In this treacherous world, who knows where danger might lurk? Once, even the innocent tomato had a press as bad as the cigarette ... Back in 1897, W. H. Garrison addressed the Medico-Legal Society of New York (W. H. Garrison’s medical qualifications are unrecorded). He observed that the case of the cigarette closely resembles that of the tomato. ‘The belief was once transmitted that the tomato was sinisterly dangerous.’ He recalls tomatoes being named ‘love-apples or wolf-apples’ in the USA when they were shunned as ‘globes of the devil’, their original foreign-sounding names such as the Italian ‘pomo dei moro’ having an ominous ring. Optimistically he says: ‘Let us hope it’s better for the cigarette, with no phonetic enemy to contend against ... ’ Garrison also puts to rest another rumour of the time, that cigarette smoking drives you mad. He quotes Dr Robersky, a doctor at New York’s Bellevue asylum. Now while I say that cigarettes are the least injurious of the methods of smoking, I do not mean to say that the use of tobacco is not harmful. It often is. Excessive use is bad for anyone. I do claim however that there never was a case of insanity which can be traced back directly or indirectly to the use of tobacco in any form. New York Sun, 1 September 1897

Safe cigarettes It is one of the more beguiling paradoxes of the cigarette industry’s history that, as knowledge of health dangers mounted, and manufacturers had to defend their product ever more resourcefully, so the pressure on manufacturers to introduce safer cigarettes increased. But – if a company introduced a brand that pandered to the fears of the public and claimed itself to be safer, wouldn’t this be admitting that other brands weren’t safe at all, even though the company had just been arguing that they were?

Just the two words ‘safe cigarette’ immediately invite you to think of a dangerous cigarette. Yet … the safe cigarette was a tantalising dream, the best of all possible worlds. For some of the industry’s attempts to create a safe, or safer cigarette, see Kent, Premier, Salem.

Salem The first filter-tipped menthol cigarette, introduced in 1956 by R. J. Reynolds. Billed as ‘The first Truly New Smoking Advance in over 40 Years!’ they combined the appeal of the filtertip, now fashionable because of health scares associated with smoking, with the therapeutic associations of menthol, found in cough and cold remedies. They took their name from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, the city where RJR was founded and had and continues to have its headquarters. One of the fastest-growing brands in the USA, it sold only 4 billion in 1956 but 35 billion by 1960. The brand’s slogan in the late 1960s, sung to music in television and radio commercials, was ‘You can take Salem out of the country, but … you can’t take the country out of Salem.’ Later, the slogan became ‘Springtime … it happens every Salem.’ In the late 1990s the packaging took an exotic, not to say ecological turn, with the inclusion in each pack of a single cigarette with a green filter. Salem has the distinction of advertising endorsement by Magnum’s Tom Selleck.

Salvo Some early advertising (1907) for an early brand … Fleecy white clouds across a sky of blue, Bright golden sunbeams piercing white clouds through,

The fragrant mem’ry lingers with me yet, When our lips shared that Salvo cigarette.

Fancy white paper, curling smoke of blue, Bright cold tobacco, piercing paper through, Aroma fragrant lingers with me yet, When our lips shared that Salvo cigarette. Appropriately gentle verses for gentle times, this seemly kind of advertising is quite unlike the frenzied promotional battles of Camel and Lucky Strike that were to come within the decade. Appropriate too that Salvo was as insubstantial as one of those sunbeams: the brand didn’t in fact exist. It was invented by a C. M. Hornibrook, of 150a Haverstock Hill, London NW, to illustrate his Ideas for Advertising a Cigarette to anyone who might be interested. The following twenty-one ideas for advertising a cigarette are the copyright of C. M. Hornibrook who will be pleased to receive offers for any or all of them. The enterprising and guileless C. M. Hornibrook offers up conundrums: Q:

How does the fragrance of the Salvo cigarette compare with the American dollar?

A:

Because therein a hundred scents lie hid.

Jokes, such as ‘Told to the Marine’: RMA: RM:

What’s the name of the ship that doesn’t carry Salvo cigarettes? Hardship.

Hornibrook was clearly a man of many talents. How many modern copywriters could leap with such ease from the sublime to the ridiculous – and then back again? And could they

end their pitch with such an exquisite flourish as this, with its satirical sideswipe at other less honest advertising practitioners. Salvo Cigarettes Winged thoughts, like the Phoenix, arise from their fires Bringing eloquence both to the truthful and liars. Tracts 1 – 8, British Museum 012331 G-39

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905 – 80) Dramatist, novelist and existentialist philosopher, whose sombre and complicated reflections on freedom and responsibility perhaps speak more to the mood of post-war France than the traditions of Western philosophy. Sartre, who coined the phrase ‘Hell is other people’, smoked two packets of Gauloises a day and several pipes and wrote that ‘smoking is the symbolic equivalent of destructively appropriating the entire world.’ ‘His doctor told him that unless he stopped his toes would have to be cut off ... ’ Smoking, according to Sartre, is a ‘sacrificial ceremony’. After performing this ceremony with dedication throughout the years, he found himself scarcely able to walk, or even hold a cigarette. His doctor told him that unless he stopped his toes would have to be cut off, then his feet, then his legs. This was a sacrifice too far and Sartre gave up. Sartre’s behaviour should be compared and contrasted with Carry On actor Charles Hawtrey, whose response to the threat of having his legs cut off versus giving up cigarettes was considerably more philosophical – in the Anglo-Saxon sense – than Sartre’s. It is interesting that the English philosopher A. J. Ayer (1910 – 89), author of Language, Truth and Logic (1936), who held philosophical views that gave short shrift to the metaphysics of Sartre, did have a similar taste in cigarettes: Ayer smoked Capstan Full Strength, and smoked them at full speed. See also Hawtrey, Charles.

Scouts In his training manual Scouting for Boys (1907) – a title that might have ambiguous, indeed negative connotations today – Sir Robert Baden-Powell (1857 – 1941) solemnly warned the nation that smokers ‘generally turned into rotters’.

He had returned to England in 1903, after long and distinguished service in South Africa, bravely defending the town of Mafeking for 219 days – the siege lasting eight weeks longer than his superiors had led him to expect. Back home, he was appalled to find the deterioration of morale in English youth. He described ‘thousands of boys and young men pale, narrowchested, hunched up, miserable specimens, smoking endless cigarettes, numbers of them betting’. He also observed in Scouting for Boys: No boy ever began smoking because he liked it, but generally because he either feared being chaffed by the others as being afraid to smoke, or because he thought that by smoking he looked like a great man – when all the time he only looks like a little ass. Robert Baden-Powell, Scouting for Boys, London, 1907 Lord and Lady Baden-Powell, ‘Character Builders’, Deep Cove Crier February, 1994

Selfish smokers Cigarette smokers have long been charged with social selfishness, just as obese people have. Their selfish lack of discipline or weakness of will puts a country’s health system under needless pressure. ‘Preventing smoking and obesity may save lives, but it doesn’t save money ... ’ We disciplined and healthy people are the ones who have to pay for their fecklessness. Some fascinating new research calls this into doubt.

Preventing smoking and obesity may save lives, but it doesn’t save money, according to Dutch researchers writing in the Public Library of Sciences Medicine Journal. What they found was that the health costs of slim, healthy non-smoking people eventually add up to being greater than those of either smokers or fat people. Pieter van Baal, an economist at the Netherlands National Institute for Public Health and the Environment, said, ‘It was a small surprise. But it also makes sense. If you live longer, then you cost the health system more.’ Van Baal and his researchers created a computer model to estimate the number of surviving individuals and occurrence of various diseases for three hypothetical groups of men and women, examining data from the age of 20 to the time when the model predicted everyone had died. There were obese non-smokers; healthy non-obese non-smokers; and lifetime smokers of normal weight. Until the age of fifty-six, the health costs were higher for obese people and smokers and lower for healthy people. At older ages the highest yearly costs were incurred by the smoking group. But then, life expectancy cuts in. ‘Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don’t survive very long … ’ Because both smokers and the obese die younger than the healthy people, it costs less to treat them in the long run. The cost of care for the obese was $371,000, for smokers $326,000, while the slim and healthy cost an extortionate $417,000. Far from being selfish, smokers emerge as rather selfless from this research. ‘Lung cancer is a cheap disease to treat because people don’t survive very long,’ van Baal says. ‘But if they are old enough to get Alzheimer’s one day, they may survive longer and cost more.’ Economist W. Kip Viscusi made a similar point in 1994, when he argued that while the tar and nicotine levels of cigarettes were 25 per cent lower than half a century earlier, most of the mortality calculations were drawn from studies done in the 1950s and 1960s with brands more toxic than those in current use. Viscusi concluded that smokers on balance were actually saving 23 cents a pack more than they were costing the rest of society because they had the bad luck to die younger. Strictly as sound fiscal policy, he added, ‘cigarette smoking should be subsidised rather than taxed’.

Wired, 5 February 2008 Public Library of Sciences Medicine Journal, January 2008 Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1996 Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1096 See also Risk.

Semiotics Semiotics is the study of signs and symbols in various contexts. Here, a semiotician analyses the role cigarettes play as a couple are out on a date. Cheryl and Ted are sitting in a bar in America sipping drinks, gazing into each other’s eyes, smoking cigarettes. They are being filmed and analysed. Let’s scrutinise Cheryl’s smoking gestures. The sequence of holding the cigarette invitingly between her index and middle fingers, fondling it as if it were a phallic object, and then inserting the cigarette into the middle of her mouth, slowly and deliberately, is highly suggestive of coitus … Her movements are slow, his are abrupt; she crosses her legs, he keeps his apart; she puffs her smoke upwards, he blows it downwards; she holds the cigarette in a tantalising manner between the index and middle fingers, he holds his sturdily; she puts the cigarette out with a lingering motion, he crushes it forcefully. Her gestures convey sensuality, voluptuousness, sultriness; his suggest toughness, determination, control. Smoking cigarettes, argues Marcel Danesi, is far more than enacting a habit or fulfilling a need: it is a discursive act, it sends out messages about who we are, how we see ourselves, how we want to be seen. As Rebel without a Cause (1955) instantly illustrates. In the ‘playing chicken’ scene, James Dean sits in his car, engine idling, while his opponent does the same. The opponent runs his hand through his slicked hair, grooms himself. But James Dean merely smokes, the cigarette dangling from his lips, the cigarette speaking more eloquently than words his coolness and self-command. Marcel Danesi, Cigarettes, High Heels and Other Interesting Things, London, 1999

Seven minutes The amount of time by which you supposedly shorten your life every time you smoke a cigarette. Add in the time you shorten it with every cup of coffee or glass of wine, for which

equally elaborately calculated statistics exist, and it’s a miracle that anyone makes it past thirty. See also Average life expectancy, Counting. Julian L. Simon, ‘The Health Economics of Cigarette Consumption’, Journal of Human Resources, Vol. 3, No. 1 (Winter, 1968), pp. 111 – 17

Sexy ‘Cigarettes are sexy ... ’ This is Paula Spencer, heroine of Roddy Doyle’s novel The Woman Who Bumped into Doors (1996), experiencing an unfiltered jolt in the simplest prose of just how powerful an impression a cigarette can make. Fiona nudged me. ‘There he is.’ I saw him and I knew who she meant. It couldn’t have been anyone else, after all I’d heard about him, after all I’d expected. He was in a group but all by himself. His hands in his pockets with thumbs hooked over the denim and a fag hanging from his mouth. It got me then and it gets me now – cigarettes are sexy – they’re worth the stench and the cancer. Roddy Doyle, The Woman Who Bumped into Doors, London, 1996

Sharing In the Golden Age of smoking, the sharing of a cigarette between a man and woman was seen as an intimate, not to say erotic, act – a perception enhanced by such films as Now, Voyager (1942). Such was the inspiration behind Detective Al Dewey and his wife-to-be as they shared cigarettes in the still innocent 1940s. Detective Dewey would share a cigarette in different fashion years later when he escorted a captured killer, Perry Smith, in a car. Smith was one of two men who committed the mass murder of a family with a brutality which shocked America. The men and the murders became the subject of Truman Capote’s classic book In Cold Blood

(1965). In Capote’s book Dewey finally tracks the killers down and escorts one of them back to Kansas. Dewey is driving the lead car. Perry Smith sits beside him, and Duntz is sitting in the back seat. Smith is handcuffed and the handcuffs are attached to a security belt by a short length of chain – an arrangement so restricting his movements that he cannot smoke unaided. When he wants a cigarette, Dewey must light it for him and place it between his lips, a task that the detective finds ‘repellent’ for it seems such an intimate action – the kind of thing he’d done while he was courting his wife. The prisoner Smith senses Dewey’s distaste. ‘I’m very sensitive; I usually know what people are feeling. Like you.’ He means Dewey but does not look at him. ‘You hate handing me a butt. That’s your business. I don’t blame you.’ Truman Capote, In Cold Blood, 1965

Shields, Brooke (1965 – ) American actress who came to fame aged thirteen playing a child prostitute in Pretty Baby (1978) and later became more famous still in ads for Calvin Klein jeans with the line: ‘Want to know what gets between me and my Calvins? Nothing.’ Her claim to immortality in the world of cigarettes was her striking anti-smoking stance: Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life. Easy to make fun of this, but think about it for a beat longer and it makes sense. Mitchell Symonds, That Book, London, 2003

Silk Cut Highly successful low-tar cigarette introduced by the Gallaher Group in 1964. The pack was distinguished by being an unadorned white, with the Silk Cut name in gold letters on a purple square. It wasn’t until the 1980s that the brand really took off, paradoxically thanks to the UK Government’s recent tough restrictions on cigarette advertising. Ads could no longer suggest that cigarettes were safe, popular, natural or healthy, nor could they link smoking with social, sexual or business success. What was supposed to be a body blow to the cigarette companies turned into a mighty boost, as the advertising agencies exploited to the hilt the very limitations that were intended to handicap them.

Silk Cut’s agency, Saatchi and Saatchi, began its Silk Cut campaign in 1983 with a poster that featured a beautifully photographed length of purple silk with a slash in it. All the slash revealed was stark whiteness. That was it. No words. Just the standard Government Health Warning to helpfully clue the public in that this was a cigarette advertisement, and start them enjoying the game of decoding the new campaign. There followed the image of a purple silk shower curtain, complete with rings slotted on to a metal bar, the shower head spraying water in silhouette behind it. The curtain is intact. The image grimly echoes the most famous shower in twentieth-century cultural history, as the curtain waits for the arrival of Norman Bates’s knife. Another poster showed a huge Venus fly trap, its jaws clamped on a torn-out piece of purple silk into which is sewn a zip – the ‘fly’ that has been trapped. One of the last images of the campaign featured a Silk Cut pack with crude stitches in it – obviously repairing a cut. This witty, ingenious, somewhat macabre campaign caught the public imagination and entered popular culture, appearing for example in David Lodge’s novel Nice Work (1989). Vic Wilcox, a factory worker, shares his car with Robyn, an expert in semiotics. Every few miles they seem to pass ‘the same huge poster on roadside hoardings, a photographic depiction of a rippling expanse of purple silk in which there was a single slit, as if the material had been slashed with a razor’. This excites Robyn’s interpretative tendencies, who speculates that curves of the silk represent the female body, and the slit is ‘obviously a vagina’. The cutting theme reflects a male desire to mutilate the female body as well as penetrate it. Vic insists it’s a perfectly harmless piece of cloth. Yet given the dark bizarreness of some of the Silk Cut images (can-can dancers with purple silk underwear, legs made of scissors – ouch!), maybe Robyn is on to something. Notable Silk Cut smokers include Helen Fielding’s creation Bridget Jones, and Robbie Williams. Some of the other Silk Cut ads: • A mosquito made of purple silk wrapped round a steel needle, penetrating the surface on which it rests. • A magician cuts silk – apparently by willpower, shown in his furrowed forehead and glowing eyes.

• The purple silk of a lampshade has had a chunk bitten out of it by a set of false teeth that have leapt out of their glass of water. • An ad for the Edinburgh Festival: creatures that look like Haggis, their bodies wrapped in purple silk, their limbs made of bagpipe parts, wander round a field seeded with mantraps.

www.alastairmcintosh.com/articles/1996_eros_thanatos.htm David Lodge, Nice Work, London, 1989

Silva Thins A cautionary tale of how not to advertise … Silva Thins, introduced in 1967, were the American Tobacco Company’s pioneering but doomed attempt to create a brand specially for women. Women were a growing proportion of the cigarette market; they liked the new brands of king-length cigarettes, recently introduced, as being a more stylish smoke; they appreciated the supposed health benefits of the filter-tip. The executives had read (or at least heard of) the recently published The Feminine Mystique (1963), and Silva Thins seemed also to tie in with the new women’s liberation movement, and offer explicit feminist appeal. That at least was the idea. The problem was F. William Free, the advertising executive American Tobacco chose to launch the new brand. Free certainly knew how to make an impact. When he worked for the Marschalk Company and launched Coca-Cola’s very first soda brands, Sprite, Tab and Fresca, commercials for Fresca (a lime-lemon drink) described it as having the ‘frosty taste of a blizzard’. The day after the first commercial ran, a foot of snow fell in New York, and William Free walked out into the snow, had himself photographed with a bottle of Fresca, and printed the picture in a full-page ad in the New York Times the following day, complete with a handsome apology to New York. ‘Cigarettes are like girls; the best ones are thin and rich … ’ For American Tobacco, Free came up with the line ‘Cigarettes are like girls: the best ones are thin and rich’ – a line so wildly off-beam it might have been targeted at men. The slogan led the National Organisation for Women to call for a boycott of the brand. Silva Thins gave way to the vastly more successful, and much better advertised, Virginia Slims. As Silva Thins faded into obscurity (except for the slogan) F. William Free headed for

more fame with his 1971 slogan for National Airlines, featuring an attractive stewardess and the headline: ‘I’m Cheryl – Fly Me.’ This prompted women’s rights groups to picket Free’s office with signs reading: ‘I’m Bill – Fire Me.’ Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, New York, 1996 New York Times, 8 January 2003

Sinatra, Francis A. (1915 – 97) Son of Sicilian-born Francesco Sinatra, Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken, New Jersey, and began his hugely successful career singing for the bands of Harry James and Tommy Dorsey. He was a teenage idol before the Beatles were thought of; when he sang girls swooned, screamed, and peed on their seats either from overwhelming excitement or simple reluctance to give the seats up. He had a magnetic effect upon women, and made full use of it. He would make love to any woman he could, talking in a sexually direct way that was surprising for its time. He was a skinny young man, but as his one-time wife and all-time love Ava Gardner observed to the Governor of Kenya, at a social occasion, ‘There’s only ten pounds of Frank, but there’s a hundred and ten pounds of cock.’ What the Governor of Kenya said in reply is not recorded. Sinatra really did do things his way, whether it was women or singing. His great gift as a singer was his focus on the lyrics, the words, the nuance, the meaning of what he sang, rather than the melody. This focus on meaning perhaps explains his easy transition into being a fine and popular actor. ‘Drink, drink, drink. Smoke, smoke, smoke. Schmuck, schmuck, schmuck!’ Sinatra reproaches himself in later life. When Sinatra couldn’t do things his way, he got the Mafia to do them for him. There’s good evidence that it was Mafia threats that got him out of a tough contract with Tommy Dorsey, and that it was Mafia threats that got him into the film From Here to Eternity (1953). His career had gone downhill at the time, and the film, and the Oscar he won for Best Supporting Actor (as Private Maggio), rescued it. Sinatra repaid the favour by carrying bags of money for the Mafia around the world. He was admirably anti-racist, and anti-anti-semitic, often in a practical way, insisting that black performers he worked with could stay in the same hotel as him; he was generous to fel-

low artists down on their luck; he was loyal to friends; and he was also a deplorable drunken bully, often given to physical violence, who always had to be the boss. Cigarettes were so much part of Sinatra’s life that they infused and changed the sound of his voice. When he sang ‘September of My Years’ at the age of fifty, one listener thought that ‘the silken baritone of 1943 was now like torn velvet’. This was the effect of ingesting many, many thousands of unfiltered Camels. To give credit to brands where it is due, Sinatra had earlier smoked Lucky Strikes, but switched to Camels in the mid-1950s. Anthony Summers and Robbyn Swan, Sinatra, Doubleday, 2005

Slang Some slang terms for cigarettes – Banana

To pass someone a cigarette

US

1940 – 50

Butt

To pass someone a cigarette, or stub one out

US

1940 – 50

Cancer sticks

Jocular

UK

1959

Coffin nails

‘Pamela tries to persuade me that every puff of smoke ... is a nail in my coffin.’ Galaxy Magazine, 1867, cited in Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang, 1965

US

1867

Dub

Origin uncertain

US

1970

Durries

Australian for cigarette – from Bull Durham rolling tobacco?

Aus

1940s

Fags

Abbreviation of fag-end of cigarette

UK

1888

Gaspers

Indicates use of cheap Virginia tobacco rather than Turkish

UK

1910

Golliwog

Gauloises, so named by British soldiers in WWII because of the blackness of the tobacco

UK

1940s

Grits

Origin obscure

US

1990

Harry Tates

Rhyming slang for Player’s Weights. Harry Tate was a popular music-hall comedian, real name R. M. Hutchison (1872 – 1940)

UK

early 1900s

Jacks

Word originally for tobacco

US

1949

Joes

From Joe Camel

US

1920s?

Snout

From 1885 tobacco; from 1950 cigarettes. Obscure

UK

1950s

Square

Factory-made cigarette and thus inferior

US

1951

Sticks

Cigarette industry slang for its own product

US

1960s?

Straights

Factory-made cigarette and thus inferior

US

1951

Tabs

Northern dialect and slang. Obscure

UK

1935

Tailies

Tailor-made cigarettes – perhaps jocular for roll-ups US

1924 – 96

Eric Partridge, The New Partridge Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English, edited by Tom Dalzell and Terry Victor, London, 2006 Judi Sanders, Californian Poly Slang, 1990

Sleeper (1973) Miles Monroe, the hero of Woody Allen’s film Sleeper, is a health-food store owner who wakes up 200 years in the future and finds that attitudes to health have changed radically. Deep fat, steak and cream pies are now known to be healthy. Wheat germ and organic honey are seen as ‘the charmed substances’ – superstitious nonsense from the past. He struggles with the doctors who revive him: DOCTOR:

He’s ranting. We’d better tranquillise him.

MILES:

I knew it was too good to be true. I parked right near the hospital. The doctor hands him a cigarette.

DOCTOR: MILES:

Here. You smoke this, and be sure you get the smoke deep down into your lungs. I don’t smoke! It’s tobacco.

DOCTOR:

It’s one of the healthiest things for your body. Now go ahead.

DOCTOR 2:

You need all the strength you can get.

Sleeper, screenplay by Woody Allen and Marshall Brickman, directed by Woody Allen, 1973

Slimming Smoking and slimming have been linked ever since a powerful advertising slogan of 1928: ‘Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.’ A 1998 study showed that teenage girls take up smoking because they believe it will help them stay thin. There is nothing new under the sun. Or is there? A new study explores the relationship between smoking and eating. It begins with the blindingly obvious, such as: ‘Research found that cigarette taste is enhanced after eating meat or drinking alcohol or beverages that contain caffeine’, but moves on to more novel territory, namely that there are foods which diminish the taste of cigarettes and the pleasure one takes in them: a slice of cheese, a glass of water, a plate of broccoli, a dish of skimmed milk. The researchers suggest that clinicians might want to consider advising dietary changes for smokers trying to kick the habit. So plenty of greens and fruit and gallons of water will make smoking less pleasurable. But this neat plan has one great drawback: the Smokers’ Diet will provide neither pleasure in food, nor pleasure in cigarettes. So what is its virtue – apart from perhaps ensuring a taste-free longevity? See also Kensitas. ‘Cigarette sales would drop to zero overnight if the warning said, “Cigarettes contain fat.” ’

Dave Barry. F. Joseph McClernon, ‘Nicotine & Tobacco Research’, April 2004

Slogans Come on and taste me! A miscellany of slogans Abdulla No. 7

There’s heaven in a seven.

1946

Ambassador

The luxury length cigarette!

1950s

Anchor cigarettes

So much satisfaction!

1950s

Balkan Sobranie

For ladies only ...

1920s

Benson & Hedges

The length you go to for pleasure.

1940s

Pure gold from Benson & Hedges.

1950s

Bristol Cigarettes

Take a tip, take a Bristol.

A man at sea will often hanker For the flavour of an Anchor.

Today’s cigarette is a Bristol. A real cool flavour you’ll never forget. Bristol is today’s cigarette.

Cadets

Cadets bring quality to smaller cigarettes.

Cambridge

Rothman’s Cambridge – we’ve got the taste!

1950s

Camel

I’d walk a mile for a Camel.

1921

Blow some in my direction.

1930s

Slow down. Pleasure up. It’s your taste. Where a man belongs. Carlton

If you smoke, please smoke Carlton.

Chesterfield

Blow some my way.

1926

A silly millimeter longer [101s]. Consulate

Fresh as a mountain stream.

1960s

Craven “A”

For your throat’s sake.

1945

Curzon

Make friends with Curzon cigarettes.

De Reske

The aristocrat of cigarettes.

1940s

If Clark Gable offered you a cigarette, it would be a De Reske.

1940s

Noël Coward said of the tight-fisted journalist Godfrey Winn, ‘If Godfrey Winn offered you a cigarette it would be a bloody miracle.’ Doral

Taste Me! Taste Me! Come on and Taste Me!

Embassy

Late night final.

Eve

Farewell the Ugly Cigarette. Finally, a cigarette as pretty as you are. Every inch the lady.

1971

Kensitas

No, thank you, I’d rather have a Kensitas!

1960s

Kool

Mild, but not too light.

1930s/ 40

Lady be Cool. Enjoy a cooler kind of mild. Come all the way up to KOOL. Lucky Dream

Imitated but never equalled.

Lucky Strike

It’s toasted.

1917

Reach for a Lucky instead of a sweet.

1920s

It’s tasty.

1920s

LS/MFT [Radio catchphrase: Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco]

1940

So round, so firm, so fully packed, so easy on the draw.

1958

The mildness of America’s best.

1920s

The filter does not get between you and the flavour.

1950s

Come to where the flavour is – come to Marlboro country.

1955

Where was Moses when the lights went out? Groping for a pack of Meccas.

1910

Marlboro

Mecca Old Gold

Pall Mall

We’re tobacco men ... not medicine men. Old Gold cures just one thing. The World’s Best Tobacco.

1930s

Wherever particular people congregate.

1960s

Pall Mall Gold 100s

The 7 minute cigarette.

1967

Park Drive

... For pleasure ...

Peter Stuyvesant

The international passport to smoking pleasure.

Philip Morris

Call for Philip Morris!

1933

Piccadilly

Particular people PICC a PICCADILLY.

1939

Player’s

Be sure of pleasure.

1960s

So much more to enjoy.

Player’s will please you.

1924

They’re Player’s and they please.

1925

Player’s please.

1927

George Green, Player’s advertising manager, heard a customer in a tobacconist’s asking for ‘Player’s, please’ and went back to his office and wrote it down in the neat handwriting that was later used on the packets. The daily round. Dependable as ever. Player’s Navy Cut

The forces’ favourite.

1939

Red and White

Time to light a Red and White.

1955

Just the job for the man who inhales.

Silva Thins

Cigarettes are like girls: the best ones are thin and rich.

1967

(Compare with Virginia Slims, below, rather more in tune with the times.) Strand

You’re never alone with a Strand.

1960

Tarreyton

I’d rather fight than switch.

1966

TRUE

True, the enjoyable low tar. And that’s the truth.

Viceroy

20,000 filter traps.

1954

Virginia Slims

You’ve come a long way, baby.

1968

Winfield

Anyhow ... Have a Winfield.

Winston

Winston tastes good like a cigarette should.

1950s 1954

Voted by Advertising Age 1999 eighth best out of all US TV jingles in the twentieth century. See also Benson & Hedges, Camel, Chesterfield, Lucky Strike, Marlboro, Pall Mall, Silva Thins, Strand, Virginia Slims, Winston.

Smirting A recent and useful addition to the English language, smirting is flirting while smoking. The word has been traced back to 2003, in New York, when the city’s smoking ban came into force and people were forced to congregate outdoors to smoke. More than an amusing new word, smirting is now a new social phenomenon. ‘ ... the pavement has become the dating arena of our times ... ’ Where bans occur, smirting follows. It swiftly appeared after the 2004 ban in Ireland where, according to the Sunday Times, a study has found that a quarter of Irish couples who got together over the past two years had met while smoking outdoors.

Smirting has many advantages over more traditional methods of approaching the opposite sex. As one Irish smirter puts it, ‘There’s nothing sleazy about asking for or giving someone a light or a cigarette, so you don’t feel as stupid as you do just going up to a girl in a pub.’ The shared habit makes starting a conversation easy: ‘So what do you think about the ban?’ is a popular line. The roughly five-minute life span of a cigarette means that the smirters have the option to continue the conversation or, without embarrassment, go back inside. Since 1 July 2007, smirting has come to Great Britain, and the pavement has become the dating arena of our times, and the cigarette the ubiquitous go-between joining the sexes. Think not of a pack of twenty cigarettes: think rather of a pack of twenty Cupid’s arrows. Gemma Soames, Sunday Times, 12 August 2007 Sarah Hughes, Observer, 30 October 2000

‘Smoke, drink and get well’ The reassuring title of an article in Newsweek in 1946. As the battle between the pro- and anti-smoking factions rumbled on, Dr William Stroud was taking no prisoners. Newsweek reported: ‘Sipping a highball while smoking was recommended for smokers suffering from heart disease by a prominent health specialist last week. Dr William D. Stroud, professor of cardiology at the Graduate School of Medicine University of Pennsylvania, made the recommendation . . . ’ Newsweek, 12 February 1946

‘Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)’ Merle Travis (1917 – 83), songwriter and guitarist with a style so distinct as to have the instrumental technique ‘Travis picking’ named after him, grew up with Ike Everly, father of Don and Phil, as neighbours and became proficient in blues, ragtime and popular tunes. After a failed folk album, Travis’s luck changed, and 1947 was a boom year for him. ‘Divorce Me C.O.D.’, ‘So Round, So Firm, So Fully Packed’, and ‘Three Times Seven’ were all hugely successful, while ‘Smoke! Smoke! Smoke!’, written for his friend Tex Williams, became a million-selling hit, the ultimate defiant theme song for the cigarette. Now I’m a feller with a heart of gold And the ways of a gentleman I’ve been told The kind of guy that wouldn’t even harm a flea But if me and a certain character met The guy that invented the cigarette

I’d murder that son-of-a-gun in the first degree It ain’t cuz I don’t smoke myself And I don’t reckon that it’ll harm your health Smoked all my life and I ain’t dead yet But nicotine slaves are all the same At a pettin’ party or a poker game Everything gotta stop while they have a cigarette Smoke, smoke, smoke that cigarette Puff, puff, puff, and if you smoke yourself to death Tell Saint Peter at the Golden Gate That you hate to make him wait But you’ve got to have another cigarette. The song was used in the soundtrack of the film Thank You for Smoking (2005). ‘So round, so firm, so fully packed’ is worth consideration too, playing as it does off the then current Luckies slogan, even putting in a reference to ‘toasted by the sun’ so that, just for a moment on one’s first-time acquaintance with the song, it’s possible to suspect that it is a packet of Luckies that is being serenaded. No, Merle Travis is too normal for that. So round, so firm, so fully packed That’s my gal So complete from front to back That’s my pal Toasted by the sun And I’m a son-of-a-gun If she don’t make my five o’clock shadow Come around at one You can bet your boots I’d walk a mile Through the snow Just to see her toothbrush smile They mentioned on the radio ... Merle Travis had a number of close encounters with the law, being as keen on drinking as he was on smoking. A mighty heart attack felled him at the age of sixty-five and, for all we know, an impatient St Peter is still waiting at the Golden Gate. Merle Travis and Tex Williams, ‘Smoke! Smoke! Smoke! (That Cigarette)’, 1947

Smokeless cigarettes Introducing – e-cig. At last, a cigarette for today’s way of smoking: we can get our fix without having to go outside to the street, or to the ignominy of the smoking shelter. A celebrity hangout, Chinawhite in Soho, London, is trying out Britain’s first ‘e-cig’, a Chinese-made six-inch plastic white stick that uses a batterypowered atomiser that supposedly creates realistic puffs of smoke. As you suck, the tip glows red. In each e-cig is a ‘nico-filter’ cartridge. This is said to be safe, because there is no smoke or tar, though it delivers a strong dose of nicotine. A £50 starter pack includes the cigarette, one filter and a recharger for the battery. The filter will provide enough nicotine for about 350 puffs, equivalent to about 30 cigarettes. Replacement packs of six filters cost £10 each. There is nothing new under the sun. In 2005, the US Government approved a new smokeless cigarette for the market. The Aeros Smokeless Cigarette requires no heat for use and delivers no smoke, tar or carbon monoxide. The manufacturer reports that one Aeros can deliver an eightpuff use over 40 times before being depleted. Just one or two Aeros carried in a pocket or purse can last the user all day. Aeros are made using a special sealed plastic tube that preserves the freshness of the tobacco inside, the website tells us. ‘When the tube ends are cut, tobacco extract vapors are released with each puff. The invisible extract vapors include natural tobacco flavors and nicotine. Aeros may be used anywhere without restriction. The new cigarette leaves no smoker’s breath, tar stains on teeth or odors on clothing and furniture.’ See also Premier. Daily Mail, 23 October 2007 www.aerosinfo.com/index.cfm

Smoker ’s hat

Inventor: Patent No: Date of patent: Appl. No.: Filed:

Walter C. Netschert 4,858,627 22 August 1989 198335 25 May 1988

This notable invention was described as ‘a portable hat system’ that ‘enables the smoking of tobacco-type products without affecting the environment’.

The hat featured an integral fan which would draw the smoke expelled by the wearer back into a filtration, purification and de-ionisation system. This it was claimed would remove combustion products and smoke odours. To top it all there was an exhaust system that as well as deodorising the expelled fumes, could also infuse them with scent, if you so required. This Rolls-Royce of cigarette paraphernalia included a built-in cigarette pack holder and, more empoweringly, a device which would hold the burning cigarette in front of your lips, together with a receptacle for ashes. Had this device gone into production, you would have been able to smoke completely hands-free. The hands-free mobile phone seems a poor compensation.

Smoking, reasons given for Psychologists and sociologists strive in vain to pin down our desire to smoke. The motive, the reason, the cause – however your mind-set sees it – all seem to disappear like, well, smoke.

Some reasons given for smoking

Social bonding Peer pressure Personal pleasure Ceremonial/ritual Aid to contemplation Rite of passage displacement for young people Self-destructive reaction to depression or unhappiness Addiction as a result of being duped by cigarette companies For a fuller account see Why? See also Psychology of Everyday Living, The.

Smoking and drinking In an article criticising the humbug surrounding cigarettes, the prolific and witty journalist Bernard Levin (1928 – 2004) offered a small German poem, and his own translation thereof. Alkohol und Nikotin Rafft die halbe Menscheir hin;

Ohne Alkohol und Rauch, Stirbt die andere Hälfte auch. If you smoke and if you drink It is later than you think; If such poison’s not your game, You will perish just the same. Bernard Levin, The Times, 22 December 1983

Smoking on aeroplanes Yes, it can be done. The technique used by air crew to smoke clandestinely on flights is as follows. Go into the toilet, squat down by the pan, and then balance a fifty pence piece on the flap at the base of the pan. This keeps the flap open, and you smoke the cigarette while blowing the smoke down the hole. Given the number of people using the toilet, and the awkwardness of having one’s head in the toilet bowl, this shows commendable dedication to the business of smoking. Caitlin Moran, The Times, 25 February 2008

Song, cigarettes in From the gloom of fags and failure every day to the optimistic notion that one can puff one’s cares away, from the nostalgia evoked by lipstick traces on a cigarette to the simple need of just wanting to smoke, cigarettes mesh perfectly with popular music. In sadness, smoke gets in your eyes; in jealousy, a lover notes that now there are three cigarettes in the ashtray – a powerful image indeed.

Sponsorship The cigarette sponsorship of sport has been fast receding over the past decades. No more sponsored snooker championships with the stars merrily smoking away between breaks. No more Formula 1 cars emblazoned with cigarette-pack names. The rot set in back in 1912. Ernest Shackleton, the famous Antarctic explorer, writes to Nansen, a Norwegian supporter, in September of that year.

I own a tobacco company all of my own … and I want to extend its scope to the United States of America. There if I could say that I had the warrants as suppliers to European royalties it would make a great difference…I want Norway also. If you would use your power and ask the King then the thing would be settled … the firm is called the Tabard cigarette company. Tabard was not really all his own idea. The story went back to the faroff hopeful days before he sailed on Discovery, when Shackleton was working at the expedition offices in Burlington Gardens. Down the street at the entrance to Albany, was a tobacconist’s where he bought his cigarettes. The proprietor was a cigarette manufacturer called Forbes Lugard Smith, who soon struck up an acquaintance with the talkative and entertaining Shackleton. Smith was a bit of a mystery. Despite his name people thought he wasn’t really English, largely because of his habit of wearing pyjamas at home during the day. At any rate, he owned tobacco plantations in Turkey, he was rich and, it seemed, philanthropic. In the end he joined Gerald Lysaght, Elizabeth Dawson-Lambert, Lord Iveagh and others who had mountains in the Antarctic named after them by Shackleton in gratitude for financial aid given to the Nimrod expedition. Ronald Huntford, Shackleton, London, 1985

Spontaneous human combustion This apparently supernatural phenomenon, where a corpse is found that is so thoroughly burned that little remains, yet the area around the corpse is largely untouched, is usually the responsibility of the hero of this book: the cigarette. Perhaps the most famous case occurred in St Petersburg, Florida. Mary Hardy Reeser, a sixty-seven-year-old widow, spontaneously combusted while sitting in her easy chair on 1 July 1951. The next morning, her nextdoor neighbour tried the doorknob, found it hot to the touch and went for help. She returned to find Mrs Reeser, or what was left of her, in a blackened circle four feet in diameter. ‘All that remained of the 175-pound woman ... was a section of her backbone, a shrunken skull the size of a baseball, and one foot encased in a black satin slipper … ’ All that remained of the 175-pound woman and her chair was a few blackened seat springs, a section of her backbone, a shrunken skull the size of a baseball, and one foot encased in a black satin slipper just beyond the four-foot circle. Together with about ten pounds of ashes.

The police report declared that Mrs Reeser went up in smoke when her highly flammable rayonacetate nightgown caught fire, almost certainly because of a dropped cigarette. Robert A. Baker and Joe Nickell, Missing Pieces, New York, 1992 Sporting smokers: a pack of twenty Great sportsmen, and notable smokers, these. Cricket Shane Warne

The greatest spin bowler of all time. Stalwart B & H smoker who accepted $200,000 from Nicorette for four months’ abstinence – but fell from grace.

Chris Martin

Current New Zealand Test cricketer who smokes roll ups and, unusually for a sportsman, reads books. Shares name with Cold Play front man.

Phil Tufnell

A spin bowler who played 42 times for England. An amiable chap known as ‘The Cat’ but not for reasons of athleticism. He smoked 30 a day for 20 years. Reacted with a sunny smile when barracked by an Australian: ‘Hey, Tuffers, lend us your brain. I’m building an idiot.’

Bill Wyman

The Rolling Stone part-time cricketer with the celebrity Bunbury XI smokes a St Moritz cigarette between his first and middle finger while fielding in matches.

Cricket, football, long jump C. B. Fry

Edwardian Renaissance man with a First in classics, who played both football and cricket for England, and equalled the world record for the long jump, apparently while smoking a cigarette. Was said to be able to jump backwards up on to a mantelpiece.

Golf Arnold Palmer

1960s golf champion who smoked and promoted L & Ms on TV. ‘Arnie’s a man who really likes to smoke,’ viewers were assured.

John Daly

Smokes as he golfs.

Angel Carbrera

Smoked his way round the course to win 2007 Open at Oakmount Country Club, saying some players needed sports psychologists, but all he needed was his cigarettes.

Tiger Woods

He too enjoys a smoke on the fairway.

Baseball Joe DiMaggio

Led the Yankees to nine titles in 13 years. This sporting phenomenon retired before TV appeared in US house holds, adding a certain mystique to his fame. He was married to Marilyn Monroe, and promoted Chesterfield in the 1950s.

Tennis Fred Perry

Cheshire-born World Champion at table tennis before taking up tennis, where he was World No. 1 player for five years. His walking talking designer label, highly innovative for 1940, was inspired by New White Owl cigars.

Tim Henman

Has been known as an occasional smoker.

Anna Kournikova

Occasional smoker of Marlboro Reds.

Football Paul Gasgoine

The self-destructive genius was once observed smoking with such intensity it seemed as if he was ‘sucking every last bit of “goodness” out of his fag’. Smoking was the least of his worries. He was recently sectioned.

John Charles

Big John, the Gentle Giant, played for Leeds, Juventus and Wales. Was once observed in the tunnel taking a last puff on a cigarette, chucking it away and running on to the pitch. In an international.

Zinedine Zidane

The great ‘Zizou’ fronted a campaign against smoking in 2002 but in 2006 was observed enjoying a cigarette just before a World Cup semi-fi-

nal with Portugal. If he’d had one before the final perhaps he wouldn’t have butted that Italian. Racing James Hunt

Came to the podium after winning the 1976 British Grand Prix and bummed a cigarette off a journalist.

Cycling John Trevorrow

Cyclist who was three times Australian road champion, posed for sponsors at the beginning of every stage of the Tour of Italy in 1981 with a lighted cigarette in his mouth.

Rugby Serge Blanco

Speedy rugby wing, played 93 times for France. In 1991 he instigated a try against England from behind his own try line. This Biarritz player smoked 60 cigarettes a day.

Horse racing Lester Piggott

The greatest ever British jockey survived on a diet of cigars and champagne. Was a folk hero too for his evasion of income tax – but unfortunately went to prison for it in 1988.

Reserves

Some other figures worthy of mention.

Football David James

Running

England’s current goalkeeper was once in the clutches of cigarettes. As a kid he broke a finger and, deprived of sport, joined a gang of smokers, soon graduating to the strongest brand he could find. ‘If someone turned up with a packet of “light” fags we’d paper the holes over or rip the filter off. “Light” fags were soft.’

Dave Wottle

Dave Wottle, the last true amateur Olympian, won the 800 metres title at the 1972 Olympics wearing a scruffy golf cap. He came from the back of the field and beat the Russian favourite. He was a happy and regular smoker – a fact that has been airbrushed from history.

Snooker Alex Higgins

‘Hurricane’ Higgins was as swift and unstoppable in his consumption of booze and cigarettes as in his playing technique. The booze and cigarettes outmatched him, though, and his career faded.

Spud The first cigarette to use menthol as a flavouring. Lloyd ‘Spud’ Hughes, a racingcar driver, experimented with tobacco as a hobby, and came across a way of impregnating tobacco with menthol. Lacking any real interest in cigarettes, he sold the technique to a small tobacco company, Axton-Fisher, for $90,000, who brought out the brand in 1926. Menthol, extracted from the peppermint plant, proved to be an inspired flavouring. Medically classified as a mild local anaesthetic, it diminished the harsh nicotine taste of the cigarette not just by offering up a rival flavour but by actually numbing the throat. The result was a cooling, faintly medicinal experience that seemed to cancel out the unhealthy qualities of smoking. This pioneer of menthol cigarettes, although soon to be outstripped by Brown & Williamson’s Kool, continued as a solid success for decades. A 1935 ad declares, ‘Smoke like a chimney? Who cares! Your mouth will taste clean as a whistle … If you keep to Spuds.’

Although, as can be seen, the name came from its inventor, TV campaigns in the 1950s chose to play on the colloquial meaning of ‘spud’, and featured an animated potato, wearing a top hat, who would (sometimes literally) sing the praises of the brand. ‘Smoke like a chimney? Who cares! Your mouth will taste clean as a whistle … If you keep to Spuds.’ As for the real ‘Spud’, he took the money and indulged his true passion: flying. He opened his own airport, staged daring air races, in which he often crashed, most spectacularly when he attempted to land at night by the light of a pocket torch. Two years later he had spent every last cent. He ended up working at a gas station, while devising another flavoured cigarette: this time based on the mint julep. See also Kool. Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978

Stalin, Joseph (1879 – 1953) Working as one of the top advisers to Uncle Joe can have been no easy ride. The stocky mustachioed Russian tyrant had the blood of around 10 million of his citizens on his hands, and your first concern would be to make sure he didn’t add yours.

Stalin had that most essential characteristic for any tyrant: a ferocious and unpredictable temper. He disliked people disagreeing with him, yet very soon sensed when people were agreeing with him to avoid his anger. That got him really angry. He drank copiously, smoked furiously. His favourite brand of cigarette was Herzogovina. When these were not to hand he smoked Belomor, named after the Bolshevik acronym for the Baltic – White Sea Canal, a 227-kilometre canal inaugurated by Stalin. Of the 170,000

prisoners consigned to build it, 25,000 died in a year and a half. Health and Safety at Work was not one of Stalin’s strong points. He also had a fondness for Edgeworth cigarettes, introduced in 1930 by Larus & Brothers, who made pipe tobaccos. The new cigarette contained a harsh pipe-tobacco mixture. Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of his heavy smoking in meetings was that the only person he permitted to smoke was – him. He did make an exception for one General Skapoznikov, a veteran whom he respected, and whom he addressed by name and patronymic. Skapoznikov could light up, a favour which Stalin’s biographer, Simon Sebag Montefiore, likens to Queen Victoria allowing the old Disraeli to be seated, like herself, during audiences between monarch and Prime Minister. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin, London, 2003

Stinkers See Page, Lucy Gaston.

Strand John May of the UK S. H. Benson advertising agency was responsible for this last-minute campaign for a new brand, Strand, launched in 1959 for client W. D. & H. O. Wills. His TV commercial featured a moody-looking young man in a raincoat and hat mooching around alone and finally lighting up a Strand. He derived the idea from the look of the young Frank Sinatra, observing that ‘Loneliness had made him a millionaire – I didn’t see why it shouldn’t sell us some cigarettes.’ ‘You’re never alone with a Strand ... ’

Terence Brook, looking somewhat like the young James Dean, played the young man and became a heart-throb; and the music, the ‘Lonely Man’ theme, became an instant hit and reached number 39 in the charts.

But this seemingly perfect campaign missed out in one crucial way: it didn’t sell any cigarettes. People, it seemed, associated the brand with loneliness – but the wrong sort of loneliness, loser’s loneliness rather than the Frank Sinatra type.

Stranger than Fiction (2006) In this smart movie, Will Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS man who starts hearing a voice – the voice, it turns out, of the narrator who is telling his story. This is Kay Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson, and Harold is the hero of her latest novel. The tricky thing is, Harold is real, brought mysteriously into existence by Kay’s art, but Kay always kills her heroes off. Kay smokes violently, her troubled inner life manifest and visible in her habit, and has a unique and singularly disgusting stubbing-out technique: Kay coughs a nasty hacking cough. She puts out the cigarette on the ledge. She reaches into the breast pocket of her shirt and pulls out a wadded piece of tissue which she opens, revealing several half-smoked cigarettes. She puts her current half-smoked cigarette into the tissue paper, re-wads and replaces it in her breast pocket. Penny Escher (Queen Latifa) is the assistant assigned to Kay to help her finish the novel she is having trouble with. Penny takes a dim view of Kay’s smoking. PENNY: KAY:

And I would be remiss not to remind you that the publishers expect to see something soon. They can see my ass. She hacks a terrible cough. Penny pulls a pamphlet out of her jacket pocket and hands it to Kay.

KAY: PENNY: KAY:

(continues) What is this? Literature on the nicotine-patch programme. (coyly) Penny. You should just take up smoking. It’s much more enjoyable. Stranger than Fiction, directed by Marc Forster, screenplay by Zach Helm, 2006

Stubbings-out If the smoking of a cigarette is like a form of communication, with its own subtle grammar of meaning, as certain experts tell us, the stubbing-out is the full stop at the end of the sentence. But try telling that to the fried egg and stay popular … Here are a few of the impromptu ashtrays and the circumstances of memorable stubbingsout. Cold cream

In Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (1940), society matron Mrs Van Hopper crushes a cigarette into a jar of cold cream.

Fried egg (1)

Not one to be ashamed of repeating a good moment, in To Catch a Thief (1955) Hitchcock has actress Jessie Roy Landis, playing Grace Kelly’s mother, stub a cigarette out in a fried egg.

Fried egg (2)

In Jean Luc Godard’s A Bout de Souffle (1959) a cigarette meets a similar sticky fate.

Fried egg (3)

Atomic Rooster’s album Nice ‘N’ Greasy showed a vivid image of a cigarette stubbed out in a fried egg. The ‘N’ is to be commended for its grammar; a lesser band would have settled for ‘N.

Arm

In the 1987 thriller Best Seller James Woods plays a hired assassin who teams up with a cop turned author, played by Brian Dennehy. The excellently acted Woods character coolly demonstrates his toughness by stubbing a cigarette out on his own arm.

Tongue

In David Cronenberg’s film Eastern Promises (2007), Viggo Mortensen takes toughness to the ultimate level and stubs a cigarette out on his tongue, before going on to dissect a corpse.

Super Cigarette If Superman’s weakness was Kryptonite, Lois Lane’s Achilles heel was cigarettes – Marlboro Lights in particular. The 1980 film Superman II, directed by Richard Lester, who took over from Richard Donner, was remarkable for more than just its joint directorship. Notable too was the transform-

ation of Lois Lane, the love interest for the Man of Steel, from a resolute non-smoker to a walking, talking advertisement for Marlboro Lights. Throughout her half-century comic book career, Lois Lane was never once seen smoking a cigarette, and Superman himself would have admonished any weakling who smoked. But in this film she is in thrall to the distinctive red and white packet. In one scene with Clark Kent in their office there is a cigarette dangling from her lips as she prepares some orange juice and extols the virtues of vitamin C in said fruit. Then the word ‘natural’ issues from her lips as she deposits her Marlboro cigarette in the ashtray. This less-than-subtle plug is accompanied by this embodiment of innocent American girlhood chain-smoking throughout. Even when she’s not smoking a Marlboro, the brand figures in other cameos throughout: it should have got an Oscar for blatant product placement. In one dramatic scene a man is thrown into the side of a van with a large Marlboro sign plastered across it. Then at the end of the movie when Superman battles with the villains, he does so against a backdrop of Marlboro posters. As he flies off in victory he leaves behind in frame a parked taxi – with a Marlboro logo on top. Got the message? Let’s hope so – because the makers of Marlboro were said to have paid $42,000 for 22 exposures of the Marlboro logo in the movie.

Superlatives Smoking, most voracious

Jim Purol and Mike Papa each smoked 135 cigarettes simultaneously for five minutes on 5 October 1978 at Rameys Lounge, Detroit, Michigan.

Strongest cigarette

Capstan Full Strength, 26/2.6 mg nicotine per cigarette, UK.

Longest cigarette

Head Plays – 11in (27.9cm) long, sold in packets of five in 1930, USA.

Shortest cigarette

Lilliput, 1¼in (31.7mm) long, ⅛in (3mm) in diameter, 1956, UK

Most popular cigarette (UK)

Benson & Hedges Special Filter.

Most popular cigarette (USA)

Marlboro.

Superstitions The greatest cigarette superstition is that of the third cigarette, but there are other more minor ones. Be careful, for example, when you tread on a discarded packet of cigarettes. ‘1952, Girl, 14 [London]: If you see an empty cigarette packet with a picture of a black cat on it, you put one foot on it and say, “Black cat, black cat, bring me luck. If you don’t I’ll tear you up.” ’ A woman in South Shields, it is recorded, would as a child place a foot on an empty packet of Woodbines and say: ‘Willie, Willie Woodbine, bring me luck. If you don’t I’ll tear you up.’ See The Third Cigarette. Opie and Tatem, A Dictionary of Superstitions, Oxford University Press, 1989

Sweet cigarettes Sticks of candy, with one end dyed red to resemble a cigarette’s glow, sold in packs of ten. At one time they enjoyed enormous popularity. Now political correctness has removed the red, and they have become simply ‘candy sticks’. Also there were chocolate cigarettes. The poet Dylan Thomas recalls Christmas, and the ‘useless presents’, the presents that were actually the best of all, things like a ‘folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor’s cap … ; once, by a mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet’. And endless sweets, from hardboileds to ‘butterwelsh for the Welsh’. There were also packs of sweet cigarettes:

‘You’d put one of the cigarettes in your mouth and wait for an old lady to scold you, and then with a smirk you ate it.’ The 1960s and 1970s were a fertile time for sweet cigarettes. There were splendid imitations of the real thing, simulations of adult packs with names like Pell Mell and, ingeniously, Junior Service. More often, popular TV shows lent their names to the packs: there was the 007 brand, Thunderbirds, Wagon Train, Interpol, The Man from Uncle, Lone Ranger, and even – luring the potential punters in at the most tender of ages – Noddy brand sweet cigarettes. Wyatt Earp, Dan Dare, Burke’s Law and Dixon of Dock Green lent an air of authority to this vicarious rehearsal for smoking. Monkees, Popeye, Laurel and Hardy, Yellow Submarine and Doctor Dolittle covered any remaining market profile bases. Dylan Thomas, A Child’s Christmas in Wales, London, 1954

T

Talking cigarette packet In 2001 a UK firm developed the prototype of a talking cigarette packet; really, a remonstrating cigarette packet, a mother-in-law of a cigarette packet, which issued a health warning every time it was opened. The hinged lid of the packet had a stiff plastic strip connected to a microchip and a miniature loudspeaker hidden in the base. Opening the switch triggered playback of a short recording: a health warning or even, as was mischievously suggested as a possibility, a death march. It is a shame this technology was not available in earlier decades, when our relationship with cigarettes was more innocent. Instead of, for example, Bing Crosby being simply the face of Chesterfield in the press, when we opened a pack he could have crooned to us. News in Science, ABC, abc.net.au, 9 March 2001

Tareyton An American Tobacco brand, Herbert Tareyton achieved a certain lasting fame in 1966, with its ‘Unswitchables’ advertising campaign, which showed a variety of smokers with an exaggeratedly bruised and blackened eye, but proud and grinning, with the line: ‘Us Tareyton smokers would rather fight than switch.’

Like Winston, the ungrammatical line seemed to stick in the mind of smokers, and for a short while Tareyton entered the top ten of US cigarettes, before becoming a product better remembered for its advertising than itself.

Tax: where it goes From UK smokers, the government took some £7,600 million in tobaccoduty revenue in 2006 to 2007. In view of serious concerns about the dangers of smoking, it ploughed a total of £69.5 million of this money back into educational campaigns (£13.5 million) and schemes to help people stop smoking (£56 million). UK Government revenue and expenditure on tobacco 2006 – 7

To write this is one thing. But when you visualise these figures, it is clear to see just how seriously the government takes the threat of smoking to its populace.

Thank you for not smoking – in your own car The weasel-like phrasing of the sign ‘Thank You For Not Smoking’, in the back of UK taxis over the last few years, begs a couple of syntactical and ethical questions. If one defiantly elects to smoke a cigarette in the back of the cab, can the taxi driver do anything about it? Apart from grimace? And why is he thanking you in advance when you have not really been offered a choice? The inference is that you will not smoke so he is thanking you for not smoking anyway. Why not come right out with it and say No Smoking, rather than this coy anticipation of your obedience. Most of us do obey anyway, bemused by this strange phrasing. Later we escape to the sanctuary of our own vehicle and smoke away like billy-oh. But not any more. There are moves afoot to ban smoking in private cars. Well, perhaps not so private any more. In 2005, members of the New Jersey Legislature wanted to make it illegal to drive a car while smoking. The bill, A4306, introduced on 27 June 2005, stipulated up to a $250 fine for smoking while driving. It would be a secondary offence enforced only if a motorist had been pulled over for a separate traffic violation or other offence. But Democrat Assemblyman

John F. McKeon said his bill would promote safety. He did not however cite any studies linking smoking to a heightened risk of car accidents. And upstate in Jefferson, a police sergeant with 20 years’ experience behind him, said he couldn’t recall a single accident attributed to smoking by the driver. One citizen, interviewed while taking a smoke break from her job in Dover last week, commented: It’s my car. I own it. Next time, will they come into my house? What’s the difference? And will they come into your house? Will the ‘Thank You For Not Smoking’ signs go up there too? Rob Jennings, Asbury Park Press, New Jersey, 7 September 2005

Thank You for Smoking (1994) Christopher Buckley’s satirical novel has enormous fun at the expense of the cigarette industry, as his hero Nick Naylor struggles to defend this impossible cause: ‘Nick Naylor had been called many things since becoming chief spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies, but until now noone had actually compared him with Satan.’ Christopher Buckley, Thank You for Smoking, New York, 1994

Theatre The very act of smoking a cigarette is a small piece of theatre. Every bit of it – from the opening of the packet to stubbing the cigarette out. Remember the sentimentalists who tapped the cigarette on the packet or cigarette case to tighten up the

loose tobacco, even when smoking firm tipped cigarettes? Or the exhibitionists who reached down to pluck a cigarette from the packet with their open lips after shaking them up? Or the bizarre creatures who smoked a cigarette with it held between the middle fingers? Then there were those who smoked with the cigarette concealed inside the furtive cupped hand. This signified an outdoor worker or a man with criminal tendencies. Then there’s the inhaling – and the exhaling. From the truncated, internalised method of the minimalists to the extravagant puffing in and out of the would-be boulevardiers. Such a huge palette of ways to show off. So actors, of course, loved cigarettes. More showing off, more jiggery pokery, another prop! It could even mean not acting at all. This was Gerald Du Maurier’s advice to a fellow thespian: Must you kiss her as though you were having steak and onions for lunch? It may be what you feel but it’s damned unattractive from the front row of the stalls. Can’t you just say ‘I love you’ and yawn and light a cigarette and walk away? Perhaps the lady (and the audience) would have preferred the steak and onions approach.

Gerald Du Maurier was the great actor manager and father of author Daphne Du Maurier. He was the original Captain Hook in James Barrie’s Peter Pan in 1904 and went on to embody the essence of theatrical sophistication. Oddly enough, in 1906 he played Raffles, the name of another cigarette brand. His true memorial though was the brand named after him: Du Maurier. A lovely red packet with a stylish hinged lid. Not stylish enough for him though – he smoked another untipped brand and only lent his name to the cigarette to pay off a huge tax bill. On the day he joined the National Theatre, Ian McKellen met Michael York (born Johnson) who had found his stage name on top of a London bus, as it passed a poster for York cigarettes. McKellen remembers the extraordinary time when audiences smoked in both cinemas

and theatres. Some theatres had ashtrays with rough surfaces on which smokers could strike matches. One of McKellen’s first lessons in acting technique was weighing up whether a significant pause on stage was worth the risk of its being interrupted by the scrape of matches, the ‘inhales and splutters and the illumination of inattentive faces’. Smoking on stage or in the audience is now a no-no. Strange herbal cigarettes which are permitted imply a bunch of recidivist hippies on stage. So great scenes, such as the moment when John Gielgud as Spooner in Pinter’s No Man’s Land (1975) raids his host’s cigarette box and secretly enjoys a smoke, would acquire a strange ambiguity. Gielgud as a secret dope-smoker? In fact Gielgud had a mellifluous, modulated voice nurtured by a daily ration of Turkish cigarette smoke. The fool persisted in this destructive habit until his early death at the age of ninety-six. He could have lived to be a hundred. Judith Cook, Daphne: A Portrait of Daphne Du Maurier Norman Fisher, Noël Coward, 1992 Interview with John Moffat in the Theatre Archive Project at the University of Sheffield Ian McKellen, ‘Smoke Signals’, Flaunt Magazine, December 2002

Thérèse Desqueyroux (1927) This novel by Nobel Prize-winning novelist François Mauriac was based on a real-life trial: a young wife attempts to murder her coarse landowner husband. The murder attempt is gratuitous. Thérèse it seems acts under the oppressive atmosphere of the bleak countryside and the constrictions of country life, and merely wishes to see in her complacent husband’s eyes ‘a momentary flicker of uncertainty’. A vital clue to her character is that ‘Elle fume trop’: she smokes too much. She ‘smokes so much that her fingers and nails are yellow as if she had soaked them in arnica’. The 20 granules of aconitine that she uses to poison Bernard, her husband (who rolls his own, incidentally), rhyme with her own favourite poison, Richard Klein reminds us. Georges Franju made an atmospheric film of Thérèse Desqueyroux (1962), with Emmanuele Riva as the heroine, ‘pacing restlessly about the house, snatching at the umpteenth cigarette’. ‘Elle fume trop … ’ Richard Klein, Smoking is Sublime, London, 1995 Philip Kemp, filmreference.com

Thinking about smoking

Robert Lynd, The Blue Lion and Other Essays, London, 1923

Third Cigarette, The There has long been a superstition about the peril of lighting a third cigarette from one light. Two is fine, or four – but not three. This good account is taken from the B.A.T. Bulletin, a publication initially created by British American Tobacco to support its employees enlisted in World War I. The superstition originated with the British Army in the Boer War. The sniping ability of the Boer sharp-shooter was of a high order, most of them having been born and brought up in the wilds where all sorts of shooting was second nature to them. The British Army soon learned that when lighting a smoke at night if the match was held long enough for three men to light from it, it was also just long enough to enable an alert sniper to draw a bead on the match flame, with the result that the last man was frequently killed. And so in this way arose the belief that it was ‘unhealthy’ to light three cigarettes on a match. This belief grew into a superstition which was handed down through the British Army, and they brought it with them into the last war. Three on a Match is a 1932 film about three women who were friends at school and meet up later and bring each other up to date about their lives. Then melodrama strikes … Joan Blondell, Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak laugh off the old superstition that one of them will die soon if they light up from the same match – though this is exactly what happens. B.A.T. Bulletin, November 1921

Thomass, John Distinctively named Belgian cigarette. D. H. Lawrence’s favourite smoke?

Three Castles This brand started as fiction and became a reality. The name Three Castles, for a brand of pipe tobacco that became cigarettes, started as a fictional name in a line in the first chapter of W. M. Thackeray’s novel, The Virginians (1857): ‘There’s no sweeter tobacco comes from Virginia, and no better brand than The Three Castles.’ Thackeray invented the name, and one G. Waterston of Edinburgh suggested it to the original manufacturers, W. D. & H. O. Wills Ltd. Introduced in 1878, the loose tobacco had a mild flavour and enjoyed success. It became a machine-rolled cigarette in 1884, and in 1892 became the first cigarette in the UK to be sold in a cardboard packet, as opposed to a paper packet. Shortly before World War I, Wills merged with several other British tobacco manufacturers and formed the Imperial Tobacco Company. Three Castles was the brand of choice for the great drama critic Kenneth Tynan. Adrian Room, Dictionary of Trade Name Origins, London, 1982

Three Fives A cigarette which boasted a family of mathematical siblings … Three Fives, which also appears numerically as 555, was a brand of State Express cigarettes, made by the Ardath Tobacco Company, founded in London in 1895 by Albert Levy – later Sir Albert Levy. The 555 derives from the State Empire Express, a train on which Albert Levy sometimes travelled. The train was the flagship of the New York Central and Hudson River Railroad,

becoming the world’s fastest train in 1891, with a top speed of 82 mph. The engine number was 999, and this prompted Levy to choose similar three-figure names for a range of ten State Express cigarettes from 000 to 999 including, surprisingly, 666 – no doubt the black sheep of the family. In the 1950s, 555 won out and the other brands were dropped. See also Zanzibar, Sultan of. The name Ardath came from a weird and fantastical novel of that title by Marie Corelli, a hugely successful novelist in late Victorian times, who had borrowed it from the Book of Esdras in the Apocrypha. ‘So I went into the field which is called Ardath … there I sat among the flowers and did eat of the herbs of the field and the meat of them satisfied me.’ Adrian Room, Dictionary of Trade Name Origins, London, 1982

Threes Quite apart from Three Castles, above, the word ‘three’ seems to have a world-wide appeal to cigarette makers. Here are some other trios:

Time A man is fishing at night … And of course a cigarette has an important part to play. To attack at once when a big fish moves late at night is always a great temptation – and a great mistake. I sucked the lure, tested the knot, then sat down and lit another cigarette. When the cigarette had burned down I stubbed it out and walked softly up the shingle to the neck of the pool.

So writes expert fisherman Hugh Falkus, demonstrating one of the less celebrated properties of the cigarette: you can measure time with it. Falkus also claimed that the time you should wait to strike on a salmon when it takes a worm is the time it takes to smoke a Player’s cigarette. Note the precision of the brand. The Greeks, habitual chain-smokers, have often measured distance in cigarettes. So a Greek café owner explained to a tourist that his farm was ‘two cigarettes away’. When asked whether that meant stopping for two cigarettes on his way or smoking as he walked, he simply shrugged, as if to say, who cares. More recently, the rom-com film Definitely, Maybe (2008) shows one of its three couples having of all things a cigarette-smoking competition to see which of two brands lasts longer – a smoke-off, no less. For this, see Definitely, Maybe. Hugh Falkus, Sea Trout Fishing, London, 1975

Titanic Fifteen hundred dead, 700 survivors. But never mind human cost. What caught the imagination of the cigarette makers was that so many of the passengers who remained on the doomed ship on 15 April 1912 carried on smoking their cigarettes to the very last. What insouciance and bravado in the face of death, using an object which embodies in itself an existential gamble. James Cameron’s 1998 film does high justice to the original event, even if not slavishly accurate. Leonardo di Caprio’s character Jack, for instance, seems to smoke a filter cigarette, not to be introduced for another three decades. (Though it might be a cork tip, which would be allowable.) There is a lot of smoking on board Cameron’s Titanic, and social commentator Malcolm Gladwell in The Tipping Point (2000) has speculated on which characters would be best represented by the cigarettes of today. Jack

Rugged individualist

1st class passengers

Languid toffs

Steerage

Rough and ready types

Marlboro Dunhill Roll-ups or Winston

Rose

She’s come a long way.

Virginia Slims

Titanic, James Cameron, writer and director, 1998 Malcolm Gladwell, ‘Dept. of Puffery’, New Yorker, 9 March 1998

Tobacco is a dirty weed Tobacco is a dirty weed, I like it. It satisfies no normal need, I like it. It makes you thin, it makes you lean, It takes the hair right off your bean, It’s the worst darn stuff I’ve ever seen, I like it. This is the only piece of poetry for which Graham Hemminger (1895 – 1950) is remembered. That said, it is a very good piece. It was published in the Penn State Froth, a journal of which Hemminger was Assistant Editor. It also shows that back in 1915, regular, normal-thinking people had a pretty clear idea of the deleterious effects of cigarette smoking, and makes a mockery of the claims made against cigarette companies decades later by the stupid, hypocritical and downright greedy.

Tom and Jerry In 2006, after a complaint to the British media regulator Ofcom by one viewer, Turner Broadcasting began to scour their library of some 1,500 classic Hanna-Barbera cartoons, including Tom and Jerry, The Flintstones and Scooby-Doo, to remove or digitally alter scenes that glamorise smoking. The lonesome viewer, troubled by what he or she had seen, complained about two scenes in Tom and Jerry: one, in an episode called ‘Texas Tom’ where Tom tries to impress a female cat by rolling, lighting and smoking a cigarette in one hand; the other in ‘Tennis Chumps’, where Tom’s opponent smokes a large cigar. But, as a website which (optimistically) calls itself Common Sense Media points out, Tom and Jerry is packed with inappropriate sexuality (Tom uses a bra as a parachute), violence – guns, knives, saws, axes, explosives – and unacceptable social behaviour: the cat and mouse

pair promote ‘unhealthy competition’, although how this differs from the healthy kind is left unsaid. Perhaps most damning of all, in episode after episode, the two of them smoke: cigars and cigarettes. In 2007 Warner Bros released volume 3 of the Tom and Jerry Spotlight Collection on DVD, remastered for better sound and picture quality. The box set advised that it was for adult collectors and the material – of all things – might not be suitable for children. How times have changed. A cat or a mouse smoking a cigarette – just how different is that from Brian, the talking dog, in Family Guy? ABC Newsonline, 22 August 2006 www.commonsensemedia.org

Top ten best-selling cigarettes: UK B ra n d

Share of U K mark e t

M anufac ture r

Lambert & Butler

16.5%

Imperial

Richmond

15.5%

Imperial

Mayfair

13.6%

Gallaher

Marlboro

7.0%

Philip Morris

Benson & Hedges Gold

5.6%

Gallaher

Silk Cut

4.9%

Gallaher

Superkings

4.5%

Imperial

Royals Is

4.3%

BAT

Benson & Hedges Silver

3.2%

Gallaher

Embassy

3.0%

Imperial

Total 78.1%

Source: Ash, 2008

Tortoise, smoking A tortoise that smokes and appears to be addicted to nicotine has been discovered in China’s north-eastern province of Jilin, Chinese state media reported in June 2008. The animal is the pet of a man called Yun, who is himself a smoker; no great surprise given Chinese smoking habits. Xinhua news agency reports that Yun teased his tortoise by putting a cigarette butt into its mouth, and to his surprise it started to smoke it. From then on Yun shared his cigarette with his pet. Apparently, the tortoise could finish a cigarette in four minutes. For those who wish to pursue the topic, and allied matters, a quick glance at You Tube will reveal several smoking dogs, a smoking bird, a smoking monkey and a smoking rabbit. Perhaps the rabbit favoured Bravo – the unusual cigarette that contained lettuce rather than nicotine. See Animals, Bravo, China, Kookaburra. Calgary Herald, 6 June 2008, cited in communities.canada.com/ottawacitizen/blogs/quittingtime/default.aspx

Tramps Brown & Williamson paid Charlie Chaplin 2 cents a pack for their new cigarette brand Tramps, launched in 1974. The Tramps pack featured an iconic image of Chaplin’s tramp, with bowler hat and cane, and was brought out as a response to new interest in Chaplin’s films in the early 1970s. That interest did not extend to the brand, which died swiftly. In 1928 Chaplin had taken the ‘blind smoking test’ for the advertisers of Old Golds, and came out in favour of – er – Old Golds. Robert Sobel, They Satisfy, New York, 1978

Travis, Merle (1917 – 83) See ‘Smoke, smoke, smoke, that cigarette ... ’

Tynan, Kenneth (1927 – 80) Kenneth Peacock Tynan, England’s most stylish drama critic of the 1960s and 1970s, dandy, aesthete, spanking enthusiast and heroic smoker, started early in at least two of these fields. By the time Tynan was sixteen he was wearing a ladies’ raincoat in black and white check, carrying an elegant black umbrella with a red silk ribbon wrapped round it, and languidly smoking a Brazilian cigarette from a lengthy cigarette holder. Many of his devoted admirers in the 1950s admired the louche, engaging way he toyed with a cigarette. As Tynan’s reviewing career took off, he would write dressed in a yellow silk dressing gown trimmed with blue. To assist his writing, there would be a bottle of German Riesling or Gewurztrammer, cans of chilli corned beef, and a supply of Three Castles cigarettes. Of these he would smoke three packs a day. Tynan’s indomitable cigarette habit began to take its toll. In his diaries, Tynan looks back at a party in 1966: ‘The table was candlelit, and after dinner male guests competed in blowing out the candles without pursing their lips (i.e. forming an open “O” ) ... Of the men, I alone couldn’t perform the feat, even at a couple of inches’ distance from the flame. “Aha,” said someone, “that means you have emphysema.” ’ When Tynan checked with his doctor he learned ‘with a little shudder’ that this was indeed the case. ‘Aha ... that means you have emphysema.’

Tynan’s nude revue O Calcutta! (1969) was a success, but ill-health and mounting debt began to get the better of him. Tynan, who had once championed John Osborne, of Look Back in Anger fame, now found himself at the theatre viewing a new Osborne play, The End of Me Old Cigar (1975) which portrayed a ‘lilac-trousered Oxford trendy with a passion for inflicting dangerously painful spankings’. His cheques began to bounce. He couldn’t draw breath without the expectation of a racking cough. His obsession with sadomasochism had got the better of him, and he broke a blood vessel in his penis, which according to Colin Wilson took on ‘the shape of egg-timer’; he also needed to wear a truss. When the emphysema took him, he weighed less than eight stone. Tynan became famous nationwide on Saturday, 13 November 1965, when on a satirical programme called BBC3 he used the word ‘fuck’ – the first time it had been heard on the airwaves. What he said was, ‘I doubt if there are very many rational people in this world to whom the word “fuck” is particularly diabolical or revolting or totally forbidden.’ Many disagreed, including Mr A. E. Vine of Orpington, who wrote, ‘I think it is my duty to let you know that in my opinion you are a dirty dog.’ Dominic Shellard, Kenneth Tynan: A Life, 2003 Kenneth Tynan, The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan, London, 2001, cited by Shellard Colin Wilson, The Angry Years: The Rise and Fall of the Angry Young Men, London, 2007

U

Urban legends and myths See Chesterfield Leper, Lucky Strikes, Menthol cigarette myths.

US cigarette consumption 1900 – 2007 The figures are a social history in miniature. Cigarette smoking takes off like a rocket, with World War I acting as a mighty accelerant. Even when the health scares start in the 1950s the rate of growth slows only slightly. It’s not until the big legal actions against the cigarette companies, restrictions on advertising are introduced, and a proliferation of warnings, that consumption starts to drop – but only back to what it was some 60 years ago.

V

Viceroy Introduced by Brown & Wilkinson in 1936, this was the first brand to feature a filter made from cellulose acetate, which outperformed the paperand-cotton-wadding filters of other cigarettes. Viceroy advertising showed a blow-up of the ‘20,000 tiny filter traps’ that prevented tar and nicotine from reaching ‘your throat and lungs’. This is thought to be the first time a cigarette manufacturer conceded that the lungs were a significant part of the smoking process, and might indeed be in need of protection.

Vicious circle

Victory In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Victory was the name of a brand of gin so rough that the book’s hero Winston Smith found that it tasted ‘like nitric acid and, moreover, in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on the back of the head with a rubber club’. Victory was also the name of literature’s most distinguished fictional cigarette. As Winston Smith, in his cramped flat, watched by a telescreen, not even certain if 1984 is the real date, so thoroughly does Big Brother’s world rewrite history, swigs his gin and reaches for a cigarette …

He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES and incautiously held it upright, whereupon the tobacco fell out on the floor. Distinguished smoker Will Self, who makes several appearances in this book, recalls being in India, and seeing Chandigarh, Le Corbusier’s New Town, on the cover of a pack of 10. Was it an anti-Modernist jibe that these were reminiscent of the Victory cigarettes Winston Smith smoked in Nineteen Eighty-Four? Tip them up and the bone-dry, pulverised tobacco fell out of the end. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the grandfather of all dystopian novels and social conspiracy tales, Winston Smith finally meets O’Brien, supposedly a conspirator against Big Brother, who has an entirely different lifestyle from Smith’s. O’Brien can switch off the telescreens that monitor everyone’s lives; he offers Smith a drink that Smith has only ever heard of – wine. And most tellingly of all he offers him some proper cigarettes, thick and wellpacked, ‘with an unfamiliar silkiness in the paper’. A cigarette is the denominator of so many things, and Orwell understands this to perfection. Although Orwell may not have known it, Victory was a real brand of cigarette, a brand name in fact deployed by more than one company. Five real-life Victory cigarettes from round the world Bulgaria

Bulgartabac, Bulgarian State Monopoly

Cambodia

BAT subsidiary

Malta AG

Cousis & Co

Russia

Baltiskaya TF

USA

Leighton Tobacco Co., introduced 1942

George Orwell’s novel is often seen as a horrifying vision or prediction of the future, when really it was a harsh satire about his own time: eighty-four is forty-eight backwards, a reflec-

tion of the year Orwell wrote the book. The title was a moveable feast; Orwell was perfectly happy for his American publishers to issue the book as The Last Man in Europe. George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949 The World Catalogue of Cigarette Manufacturers and Brands, 2007

Virginia Slims This highly successful launch might have disappeared into history. It all depended on just one word … In the 1960s, the ever innovative Philip Morris company had its eyes on the female smoking market. Fewer women smoked than men, but perhaps a cigarette aimed directly at them could change this. The company launched a brand called Embra, with the slogan ‘Embra. For My Woman’. Embra bombed. Perhaps the possessive ‘My Woman’ was at odds with the new atmosphere of women’s liberation. Philip Morris’s next effort, Virginia Slims, were launched in 1968 in an advertising campaign created by the Leo Burnett Company of Chicago (also responsible for the Marlboro Man), which in contrast deliberately derived its energy and wit from women’s lib.

The first TV commercial featured sepia-tone footage of fictional incidents from the early decades of the century, where women found smoking are sternly treated by their chauvinistic husbands – sent to their room with no supper for instance. The sepia turned to full colour as the commercial came to the present day, and a fashion model showed off the new cigarette while a jaunty musical theme accompanied the lyrics ‘You’ve come a long way, baby.’ The tone of the commercials was perfectly pitched: light, fun, celebratory of women. The voice even managed to embrace old-fashioned virtues: namely that Virginia Slims’ slimness was more suited to the female hand, just as the milder tobacco was more suited to the female palate. Virginia Slims performed a neat balancing act: it not only paid tribute to women being equal to men, but allowed women their femininity too. The press ads had the same wit. A girl photographed as if in Victorian times wears a stifling-looking swimming costume. She daydreams to herself: ‘Just you wait. Someday we’ll

be able to wear any bathing suit we want. Someday we’ll be able to vote. Someday we’ll be able to smoke just like a man. Someday we’ll even have our own cigarette.’ The catchphrase and the cigarette took off. But it nearly didn’t happen. ‘ … the first cigarette for women only … designed slimmer for a woman’s slimmer hands and lips … and packed in a slim purse pack.’ It was the word ‘baby’ at the end of the catchphrase that caused the problem. Who added the word isn’t clear. Maybe Burnett’s presented it that way and changed their mind. But the agency thought the word was wrong, too close to ‘babe’ and woman as a sex object, while Philip Morris thought the word toughly affectionate, the way Bogart, say, would talk to a woman. The client won the day and the one word change from ‘You’ve come a long way,’ to ‘You’ve come a long way, baby’ made a difference that as one Burnett executive recalled ‘lifted the whole thing a hundred feet in the air’. By 1976 Virginia Slims were number 15 among US cigarettes and today is still a potent and successful brand. Hard-core feminists remained unconvinced by the Virginia Slims strategy. Betty Friedan, author of The Feminine Mystique, the best-selling feminist tract that pre-dates Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, founded NOW, the National Organisation for Women, and added to the Virginia Slims slogan the words ‘And don’t call me baby!’

Vonnegut, Kurt (1922 – 2007) Novelist Kurt Vonnegut will probably be remembered for three words, ‘So it goes’, the phrase the extra-terrestrial Tralfamadorians use in his novel Slaughterhouse Five (1969), when someone dies. When Douglas Brinkley interviewed him for Rolling Stone Magazine in 2006, he noticed Vonnegut reaching for a packet of half-smoked Pall Malls to relieve his coughing. As he lights up his wheezing stops. When asked whether he worried that cigarettes were killing him, he revealed that he had been smoking Pall Mall unfiltered since the age of twelve or so. Now he was planning to sue the Brown & Williamson Tobacco Company, who manufactured them – but not for any such carping reason as lung cancer.

No. No. I’m eighty-three years old. The lying bastards! On the package Brown & Williamson promised to kill me. Instead, their cigarettes didn’t work. Now I’m forced to suffer leaders with names like Bush and Dick and Colon. Douglas Brinkley, Rolling Stone Magazine, August 2006

W

Waller, Fats (1904 – 43) Thomas Waller, pianist, composer and lyricist, famous for his large size, Derby hat and exuberant good cheer. ‘Ain’t Misbehaving’ is maybe his most remembered song. He also gave us these loving lyrics that intertwine the smoke of a cigarette with lost love. Watching smoke rise, clouding my eyes. I see your face forming out of the blue. Sad and lonely, all on my own, With smoke dreams of you … … In the twilight gloom of my silent room, I light a cigarette First a glow that’s warm, then the ashes form Just like a vanished love I can’t forget. Paradise lost, at what a cost There’s no escape in the things that I do I’ll be haunted all my life through With smoke dreams of you. Fats Waller, ‘Smoke Dreams of You’, 1939

War War and cigarette smoking have always gone hand in hand. In the US Civil War (1861 – 65), tobacco was issued to Union and Confederate soldiers, and many Northerners encountered nicotine for the first time. During Sherman’s march, Union soldiers raided warehouses in search of the mild, ‘bright’ tobacco of the South, tobacco light enough to be inhaled when smoked. The added kick of inhalation meant that ‘bright’ tobacco started to replace the heavier Turkish tobacco in cigarettes.

World War I carried on and consolidated the swiftly growing cigarette habit promoted by cigarette pioneers such as Duke, using advertising and the new technology of mass production of the Bonsack machine. The leader of the American Expeditionary Force, General Pershing, stated: ‘You ask me what I need to win this war. I answer tobacco as much as bullets.’ The cigarette became the ultimate comfort, more important almost than food: Pack up your troubles in your old kit-bag and smile, smile, smile While you’ve a Lucifer to light your fag Smile, boys, that’s the style.

The poet Siegfried Sassoon exercised his concern for his men thus:

A large YMCA canteen gladdened the rank and file, and I sent my servant there to buy a pack full of Woodbines for an emergency that would be a certainty ... twelve dozen packets of Woodbine in a pale green cardboard box were all I could store up for the future consolation of B Company, but they were better than nothing. Even previously censorious institutions like the YMCA and the Red Cross piled in with their consignments of cigarettes to the trenches. World War I was in effect the ultimate cigarette promotion among the English-speaking peoples. Before the war, cigarette smoking could still be viewed as slightly effeminate; after the war it was masculinised and heroic. Cigarettes, as Richard Kluger writes, ‘quickly became the universal emblem of the camaraderie of mortal combat, that consummate male activity’. See YMCA. Richard Kluger, Ashes to Ashes, 1997

Warnings, visual The new trend is for visual warnings to adorn cigarette packets. No longer will we read those stern and impersonal admonitions to the effect that SMOKING KILLS or MOST DOCTORS DON’T SMOKE. Instead, our moments of smoking pleasure are now prefaced with these ‘examples of good pictures’, as the authorities call them: Visual warnings recommended by health authorities Human heart with damaged muscles as a result of myocardial infarction Drooping cigarette to symbolise impotence Human brain showing effects of a stroke Healthy lung and a lung with cancer Dying man in oxygen mask Children and pregnant women Cancerous lungs Diseased mouth Coughing child Droopy penis The award for the most pathetic warning must go to a fuzzy image of a hand, that might or might not look aged, hard to tell, with the dire injunction: ‘Smoking causes ageing of the skin’. Daily Telegraph, 31 August 2007

Warnings, written Warnings on cigarette packets, arranged in order from most dire to mildest Germany

Rauchen kann zu einem langsamen und schmerzhaften Tod führen. Smoking can lead to a slow and painful death.

France

Fumer bouche les artères et provoque des crises cardiaques et des attaques cérébrales. Smoking clogs arteries and causes heart attacks and strokes.

Malta

Id-duħħ an fih il-benżene, in-nitrosamini, il-formaldehyde, u l-idroġ en cyanide. Smoke contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.

Iceland

Reykingar drepa. Smoking kills.

Russia

KypeHИe ТaбaКa ВьIЗьIВaeТ HИКoТИoВyЮ ЗaВИСИMoСТь. Smoking tobacco causes nicotine dependence.

Latvia

Atmest smēķēš anu Jums var palīdzet Jūsu gïmenes ārsts un farmaceits. Your family doctor and pharmacist may be able to help you quit smoking.

Turkey

Sigara içmek cildin erken yaşlanmasına neden olur. Smoking causes early ageing of the skin.

USA

Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide. This warning, ‘Cigarette Smoke Contains Carbon Monoxide’, seems, as David Krogh says, ‘less a warning than a piece of information that the government thought smokers might find handy’.

Japan

As there is a risk that it might damage your health, try not to smoke too much. And be sure to observe smokers’ etiquette. For sheer comprehensiveness, mention must be made of Indonesia’s warning:

Indonesia

Merokok dapat memyebabkan kanker, Serngan jantung, impotensi dan gangguan kehamilan dan janin. Smoking can cause cancer, heart attack, impotence and problems during pregnancy, as well as affecting the health of the newborn.

Waugh, Auberon (1939 – 2001) Novelist, satirist, notable smoker, and defender of smokers’ rights, Auberon Waugh memorably observed: ... smokers are heroes because they do ... die ... on average two or three years younger. They do not then clutter up the welfare services, nor put a terrible burden on their children, nor spend everything they have to leave on nursing home fees. Longevity is becoming the great curse of western civilisation. At its worst manifestation, there are wards and wards where old people lie in semi-coma, usually on a drip, recognising nobody, understanding nothing, being turned three times a day like damp hay. Waugh expanded the debate about passive smoking by warning of the dangers of ‘passive hamburger eating’ and claimed that computer games ‘produce all the symptoms and most known causes of cancer’. Auberon Waugh (ed.), Crash the Ash, 1994

Wayne, John (1907 – 79) John Wayne’s career began in silent movies and encompassed nearly 200 films, including masterpieces ranging from Stagecoach (1939) and The Searchers (1956) to True Grit (1969) and The Shootist (1976). The Duke had a distinctive growling drawl, a blunt sincerity, and an idiosyncratic way of walking, as if he was holding a toffee in his bum. He smoked three packs of Camels a day, and was happy to tell the world about it in a series of advertisements.

‘You want that gun? Pick it up. I wish you would.’ Unfortunately, his last advertisement was a TV spot where he describes his losing battle out on the range with Big C. He had one lung removed and four ribs and despite the efforts of colleagues to hush the matter up in case his career was adversely affected, he went public to encourage others to have regular check-ups. Not that he turned sanctimonious: he was soon back on chewing tobacco and cigars. American comic Denis Leary includes Wayne in one of his cigarette riffs: I can remember a time in this country when men were proud to get cancer, goddammit! It was a sign of manhood! John Wayne had cancer twice. Second time, they took out one of his lungs. He said, ‘Take ‘em both! I don’t fuckin’ need ‘em! I’ll grow gills and breathe like a fish!’ John Wayne as Sheriff John T. Chance in Rio Bravo (1959) IMDb, ‘No Cure for Cancer’ (1992), written by Denis Leary, Memorable Quotes

Weaning and smoking In 1958 Harvard psychologist Charles McArthur found that, among a group of 252 Harvard men he followed for about 15 years, the ability of the smokers in the group to stop smoking was directly related to how long they had been breast-fed as babies. That is – completely against intuition – the longer the time on the teat, the more easily they could stop. The shorter the time on the teat, the harder it was to stop smoking. See also Freud, Sigmund. Charles McArthur et al., ‘The Psychology of Smoking’, Journal of Abnormal and Social Pyschology, 1958, cited in David Krogh, Smoking: The Artificial Passion, New York, 1991

Why? Why do we smoke? It’s the central mystery of smoking. Smokers themselves would seem the best qualified to answer, but that isn’t so. Psychologist M. A. H. Russell puts it like this:

To seek the solution to the question, why do people smoke?, the obvious way to begin would seem to be simply to ask; but if we do this we find that many smokers are at a loss for a satisfactory answer … When confronted with this question they hesitate, smile foolishly, shrug their shoulders and say something like, ‘Habit, I suppose,’ or ‘I don’t know’ … The simple answer is that they enjoy it, but the simple pleasure principle does not always operate with smoking. There are few who positively enjoy every cigarette and some smokers experience no positive pleasure at all. Smoking’s benefits are at best hard to pin down. The most fascinating writer on why we smoke is David Krogh. In his book, Smoking: The Artificial Passion, he asks – So what does tobacco do? With its use, there’s none of heroin’s ecstasy, alcohol’s sudden brightening of personality, marijuana’s giddiness, LSD’s visions. The urge to get high is understandable, even to those who disdain it. To the casual, non-smoking observer, it’s as if smokers have gotten the worst of both worlds: drug addiction, without drug euphoria.

‘Ninety per cent of all drinkers drink alcohol when they feel like it but leave it alone when they don’t. About 10 per cent drink out of compulsion, because they have to. But when one turns to cigarettes these figures are reversed, with only about 10 per cent of smokers being able to take it or leave it.’ Krogh goes on to point out the amazing power of the cigarette habit. Ninety per cent of all drinkers drink alcohol when they feel like it but leave it alone when they don’t. About 10 per cent drink out of compulsion, because they have to. But when one turns to cigarettes these figures are reversed, with only about 10 per cent of smokers being able to take it or leave it. Smoking is a Nag, an endlessly repeated tug on the sleeve, infusing itself into our work and play. ‘There are few who positively enjoy every cigarette and some smokers experience no positive pleasure at all.’

How amazing, then, that smokers have so little idea of why they do it. Smoking seems to sit, fat and laughing, on one of our cherished assumptions: that we have reasons for doing what we do; that we are purposeful even in our indulgences. People often do things they don’t understand, but what comes close to smoking in terms of an ongoing act that is motivated by forces that are within us, and yet unknown to us? At the conference table of the self, smoking speaks another language; it takes up our time and energy, but is unable to tell us why. See also Imitation, Psychology of Everyday Living, The. M. A. H. Russell, ‘The Smoking Habit and its Classification’, Practitioner, 212 (1974), cited by Krogh David Krogh, Smoking: The Artificial Passion, New York, 1991

Wild at Heart (1990) David Lynch’s Wild at Heart is a road-movie story of Sailor Ripley (Nicholas Cage) and Lula Pace Fortune (Laura Dern), a couple from Cape Fear, North Carolina, who go on the run from Lula’s mother and become – to pick one of the least bizarre of the story elements – involved with the Mob. Surreal and hypnotic in David Lynch’s best manner, Wild at Heart features a touching tribute to the pervasive power of cigarettes. LULA:

SAILOR: LULA: SAILOR: LULA:

Well, I was thinkin’ about smokin’ actually ... My mama smokes Marlboros now, used to be she smoked Kools. I stole ’em from her beginnin’ in about sixth grade. When I got old enough to buy my own, I bought those. Now I’ve just about settled on Mores, as you probably noticed? They’re longer. I guess I started smokin’ when I was about six ... My mama was already dead from lung cancer ... What brand’d she smoke? Camels, same as me ... Guess both my mama and my daddy died of smokeor alcohol-related illness. Gee, Sailor. I’m sorry, honey. I never would have guessed it.

SAILOR:

It’s OK. I hardly used to see them anyway. I didn’t have much parental guiding. The public defender kept sayin’ that at my parole hearin’. He was a good ol’ boy, stood by me ... Even brought me some cartons of cigarettes from time to time.

Lula may not be the most educated of women, but her query, ‘What brand’d she smoke?’ shows one of the most admirable, unstoppable of human virtues: curiosity. Wild at Heart, from the novel by Barry Gifford, screenplay by David Lynch, 1990

Wilde, Oscar (1854 – 1900) Most people have read Oscar Wilde’s famous quip about the cigarette being the perfect type of the perfect pleasure. But you may not have come across the follow-up. Oscar Wilde on cigarettes

‘A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?’ British American Tobacco researcher on Oscar Wilde

‘Let us provide the exquisiteness and hope that they, our consumers, continue to remain unsatisfied. All we would want then is a larger bag to carry the money to the bank.’

The cigarette: ‘the eleventh finger of pleasure’. The often quoted ‘perfect pleasure’ line comes from The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Less often quoted, the hero of the story refers to the cigarette as the ‘eleventh finger of pleasure’. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1890 Iain Gately, La Diva Nicotina, ch. 17, quoting BAT researcher Colin C. Grieg in a document from the early 1980s

Wills’ Woodbine The history of Woodbines has glided over the last 120 years from the sylvan glades to the rather glummer world of Andy Capp. The brand was first called Wild Woodbine (‘wode binde’ in Middle English) named after a plant such as honeysuckle or a Virginia creeper. It seems likely that inspiration was poetical: Shakespeare writes of the ‘luscious woodbine’. And it’s always been a sweet, mellow smoke despite its reputation for strength; even in the 1940s and 1950s more Woodbines were smoked than any other brand in Nottingham, the home of its creators, because their taste was distinctly sweet compared to others. It was in Nottingham that W. D. & H. O. Wills created the Wild Woodbine brand of cigarettes in 1888. At first it was intended as an export brand and was partnered by a brand called Cinderella. But Cinderella did not go to the ball and Wild Woodbine prospered, being the beneficiary of the Bonsack machine; by 1891 over 53 million cigarettes were being manufactured. With World War I the Woodbine came into its own. In the trenches it offered succour to the poor cannon-fodder and was immortalised in the legend of Woodbine Willie. The brand had dignity. The essence of Englishness and old values still wreathed about it. The Pre-Raphael-

ites would have approved of this vignette, in a poem called ‘Pluck’ written by a nurse in the trenches, Eva Dobell: But when the dreaded moment’s there He’ll face us all, a soldier yet, Watch his bared wounds with unmoved air (Though tell-tale lashes still are wet), And smoke his Woodbine cigarette.

From then on it’s downhill for Woodbine. It becomes entrenched as a sure sign of poverty and an emblem of working-class affiliation. By the 1920s and 1930s Bulldog Drummond, the thriller’s precursor to James Bond, was able to mock those working-class football supporters and their stained yellow fingers as they screamed and gesticulated at the referee. Its decline was inexorable. By World War II it was overwhelmed by the glamour of American cigarettes and other more aspirational brands on the battlefields. And its continued existence as a brand still available in packs of five underlined its attachment to the poor and disadvantaged. The five pack was still in existence until 1973, and by then it was always associated with the fag clamped between the lips of the dole-bound wastrel and misogynist Andy Capp, a popular cartoon character in the Daily Mirror.

The Boulting Brothers’ 1959 film I’m All Right Jack, a vigorous satire on post-war industrial relations in the UK, featured Peter Sellers as shop-union steward Jack Kite, in a characterisation so sharp it provoked union problems while shooting. In one scene the camera pans in on his Woodbines, clearly marking out his class. By 1982 the singer Van Morrison could reminisce about the brand in a song called ‘Cleaning Windows’. I went home and listened to Jimmie Rodgers in my lunch-break, Bought five Woodbines at the shop on the corner And went straight back to work. Hard-up window cleaners? It was never meant to be this way. In 1888 the pack design was already foreshadowing the Art Nouveau movement with its austere but ornate style. It was a design classic with its wonderfully abstract twines. By the 1950s it was considered too fancy for a world tired-out by war. Firts the inverted commas around Wild were dropped and then finally the whole word. By 1966 the pack was a faded shadow of its former sweet-scented magnificence. ‘I know a bank whereon the wild thyme blows, Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows, Quite over canopied with luscious woodbine ... ’ Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2,1

Wills’ Woodbine: a visit to the factory Novelist and passionate cigarette smoker Beryl Bainbridge didn’t have enough money to become a regular smoker until the 1980s, and it was then that she presented a series of television documentaries, which recorded a journey across England. One of the places we visited was the Wills cigarette factory in Bristol. Mr Wills came to the city in 1786 and went into partnership with a Mr Watkins, who had a warehouse in Castle Street. Caskets of Virginia tobacco were hauled up from the quayside into the workshop and eight men stripped the leaves from the plants – how odd that cigarettes should start as flowers – and prepared the tobacco for sale. The factory was now in a very modern setting, trees and the like, and it had news-stands and canteens. I was shown round by two very helpful employees. These puritanical days, when people are hellbent on telling others what’s best for them, it couldn’t have been easy for them showing off their workplace. Not with pride. After all, there aren’t any guided tours round germwarfare establishments or ratpoison laboratories, though I expect it helps that the government makes so much money out of what it produces. The machines were smaller than I had expected. One was filled with leaves and looked like a honeycomb cut in half, the paper cells buzzing and quivering, waiting to be fed, and the other was going in for a spot of lace-making, spinning the ciggies round and round and rearranging them in snow-white triangles waiting to be packeted. Beryl Bainbridge, Guardian, 14 May 2007

Wine and cigarettes First, the good news for cigarette smokers who enjoy a glass of wine. A study presented in 2003 at the European Society of Cardiology in Vienna suggests certain constituents in red wine may be able to reverse some of the damage caused by cigarettes. The researchers, from the Alexandra Hospital in Athens, Greece, found that two glasses (250 ml) of red wine countered the harmful effect on the arteries caused by one cigarette. The less good news is that to counter the effect of five cigarettes one would need to drink ten glasses of wine – or considered another way, maybe that’s even better news. A 40-cigarette-a-day habit would entail drinking just over three bottles of wine a day which, as anybody who has worked in the City or advertising in their heyday would acknowledge, is perfectly do-able.

The research team also established that non-alcoholic red wine worked just as well, though this is a less interesting proposition: surely one might just as well smoke smoke-free cigarettes. The other key point raised by the research is that the smoking and the drinking have to be simultaneous. You can’t smoke, then drink red wine later. But that shouldn’t present a problem. News release, European Society of Cardiology Congress 30 August – 3 September 2003 Researchers: John Lekakis and Christos Papamichael from the Department of Clinical Therapeutics in Alexandra University Hospital, Athens, Greece

Winston How a misused conjunction helped a brand take off … In the early 1950s, the market for filter-tipped cigarettes was growing. R. J. Reynolds decided to introduce a new brand that would be king-sized, filter-tipped but not at a premium price. It would have a Camel-like taste but would hopefully reach sectors of the market where Camels weren’t smoked.The name Winston was chosen, which was the first half of WinstonSalem, R. J. Reynolds’s home town. It was a safe British-sounding name like Kent or Pall Mall. The pack design was simple, as was the message on the pack: ‘Finer Filter, Finer Flavor’. The new brand launched in 1954. A very unremarkable ad showed a couple smoking together, with a headline ‘Winston brings flavor back to filter smoking!’ It was the slogan that changed everything: ‘Winston tastes good – like a cigarette should.’

Many literacy snobs were offended by the use of ‘like’ as a conjunction. R. J. Reynolds defended the wording as a colloquialism, and turned the words into a catchy lyric in TV advertising. They were supported by the US’s then best-known philologist, Professor Bergen Evans, who pointed out that Shakespeare, Keats and the King James version of the Bible all used the same construction. The slogan has attracted the attention of anagram makers, with these results: The end glows, idiot. Attacks lungs easier, too! Noted radiologist: ‘That wee tag-line sucks-so!’ Inhale to get stature, got sick and ... O! Dies slow.

Woman in White, The (1860) The smoking of cigarettes in mid-Victorian England was still tinged with a hint of effeminacy. But some fictional characters managed to transcend the stereotype: one such was Count Fosco in Wilkie Collins’s The Woman in White. Count Fosco is a typically flamboyant, sartorially elegant Italian, his cigarette smoking standing in contrast to the cigar smoking of his downto-earth British host, Sir Percival. However, it is Fosco who is clearly the more resourceful, the more cunning and the domineering presence. All his cigarettes are hand-rolled for him by his submissive wife, Madame Fosco, a woman who had always been regarded as forceful, opinionated and independent until she had been tamed by her masterful husband … An immensely capable spinster, Marion Holcombe is forced to admit, ‘if he had married me, I should have made his cigarettes as his wife does – I should have held my tongue when he looked at me, as she holds hers’. So the moral of this is: the way to a man’s heart is not through his stomach, but by handrolling his cigarettes. Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, London, 1860 Matthew Hilton, Smoking in Popular English Culture, London, 2000

Woodbine Willie – Kennedy, Geoffrey Studdert (1883 – 1929) Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy was a Church of England poet and clergyman, who achieved fame for his bravery and eccentricity on the battlefields of World War I. He brought comfort and cigarettes to the troops, and described his job as a padre as ‘taking a box of fags in your haversack, and a great deal of love in your heart’. Arthur Savage, a veteran of the World War I trenches, remembers him thus: A man I recall with great affection was Woodbine Willie. His proper name was Reverend Studdert Kennedy, an army chaplain he was and he’d come down into the trenches and say prayers with the men, have a cuppa out of a dirty tin mug and tell a joke as good as any of us. He was a chain smoker and always carried a packet of Woodbine cigarettes that he would give out in handfuls to us lads. That’s how he got his nickname. At Mesines Ridge he ran out into no man’s land under murderous machine-gun fire to tend the wounded and dying. Every man was carrying a gun except him. He carried a wooden cross. He gave comfort to dying Germans as well. He was awarded the Military Cross and he deserved it. He came down the trench one day to cheer us up. Had his bible with him as usual. Well, I’d been there for weeks, unable to write home, of course, we were going over the top later that day. I asked him if he would write to my sweetheart at home, tell her I was still alive and, so far, in one piece. He said he would, so I gave him the address. Well, years later, after the war, she showed me the letter he’d sent, very nice it was. A lovely letter. My wife kept it until she died. He worked in the slums of London after the war among the homeless and the unemployed. The name Woodbine Willie was known to everyone in the land in those days. Died very young, he did, and at his funeral people placed packets of Woodbine cigarettes on his coffin and his grave as a mark of respect and love. Demobilised in 1919, Studdert Kennedy was appointed a chaplain to the king. In 1922 he left his Worcester parish to run the church of St Edmund King and Martyr in Lombard Street in the City of London. ‘He was slightly built and liked to joke in public about his prominent ears and simian features, though contemporaries were much more likely to be arrested by the large and melancholy brown eyes.’

‘ ... a box of fags in your haversack, and a great deal of love in your heart.’ Arthur Savage cited by Spartacus Educational, www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk Geoffrey Rowell, ‘Kennedy, Geoffrey Studdert’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004

Writing There has always been a link between writing and drinking, and no less a one between writing and smoking. ‘Smoke often and smoke with gusto.’ A. A. Gill, the controversial journalist, food writer and novelist (and an impressively heavy drinker in his youth), advises aspiring writers very emphatically to smoke. ‘Smoke often and smoke with gusto,’ he says. And bear in mind that no non-smoker is worth reading. Writers who give up, he adds, ‘become crashing bores’. A dangerous prediction, since Gill gave up in 2003. His lively writing remains unaffected, but he looks back with nostalgia on his 60 cigarettes a day: ‘ ... every one was my friend’. TV dramatist Dennis Potter famously smoked cigarettes until his last breath, and observed: Nobody has yet been able to demonstrate to me how I can join words into whole sentences on a blank page without a cigarette burning away between my lips.

Eventually almost any moment of difficulty ... needed a cigarette Novelist John Fowles found that ‘nicotine is undoubtedly a concentrative drug’, just as Beryl Bainbridge is convinced that it ‘contains something that invigorates the mind’. Ian Jack writes eloquently on his early years in journalism and his relationship to cigarettes.

At first only the difficulty of headline writing needed a cigarette: how to express a council row in three lines of type of no more than eight characters to each line, with the middle line shorter or longer than those above and below to give it a pleasing symmetry? That called for a Gold Leaf, and then other things did too. A better first paragraph, a good caption, a Guinness in the supper break. The dreadful escalation had begun, the progress from 10s to 20s, from Gold Leaf to Piccadilly to Benson & Hedges to Silk Cut to Marlboro. Eventually almost any moment of difficulty – and writing is one long series of such difficulties – needed a cigarette. It helped you to think. In my case, it went on helping (or not) for nearly four decades. Sunday Times, July 1999) Sunday Times, July 1999 Guardian, 15 December 2005 Dennis Potter, Sunday Times, 30 October 1977 John Fowles, Journals, Vol. 2 Ian Jack, Guardian, 25 February 2006

X

X, Brand ‘Brand X’ was the anonymous competing brand once much used by TV advertisers when regulations meant that the real competitor couldn’t be named. Brand X was the one that didn’t get the dirty shirt collar as clean as the brand advertised; Brand X was the battery that ran out of juice first. In the US the Brand X device was used so much that millions of dollars of free publicity had made it a household word, just as well known in a surreal way as real brands. In 1960 several firms took this fact to its logical conclusion by marketing their own Brand X products: Brand X Window Cleaner, Brand X polishing cloth, for example. A Hartford liquor store started to sell its own Brand X whiskey, and claimed it outsold other brands 4 to 1. Three young Manhattan admen founded the Brand X Enterprises to market Brand X cigarettes, which were created ‘for the man who is satisfied with nothing less than second best’. Martin Solow, President of Brand X Enterprises, observed: ‘There are millions of people who don’t want to be first, who believe first place is too crowded. Our cigarette is for the man who, as a boy, dreamed of becoming Vice President.’ The rise of Brand X as a real brand soon prompted advertisers to stop using the term, favouring instead terms like ‘another leading detergent’.

‘ … for the man who is satisfied with nothing less than second best … ’

Time, 31 October 1960

Xanthe Brand introduced by resourceful cigarette pioneer Robert Gloag in the UK in the 1860s, cashing in on the exotic appeal of Turkish tobacco and the new fad of the cigarette. See Gloag, Robert.

X Esquire (1927) This was the first novel by the part-Chinese thriller writer Leslie Charteris (1907 – 93), formerly Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin, who went on to create the wholly British hero Simon Templar, ‘the Saint’, a year later. X Esquire is worthy of a mention as it features a plot to destroy Britain by the most deeply insidious of means – with poisoned cigarettes.

Y

Yearning There is a whole spectrum of ways in which we desire cigarettes, modulating from yearning to full-blown craving. ‘ … even an unlit cigarette … had promise in it.’ It is yearning that novelist Rose Tremain (1943 – ), author of Restoration (1989) and Music and Silence (1999), explores in her latest novel The Road Home (2007). The protagonist is Lev, a grizzled forty-year-old from Eastern Europe who is mourning his wife, and travels westwards to England in search of a better life. Much of his 50-hour coach journey is taken up with reveries about his past life – and cigarettes. Lev is a monumental cigarette smoker. Smoking is forbidden on the coach but still Lev clutches on to his dented pack of Russian cigarettes. He knows he cannot smoke, ‘But even an unlit cigarette was a companion – something to hold on to, something that had promise in it.’ In the first chapter, aptly entitled ‘Significant Cigarettes’, Lev’s musings on cigarettes punctuate his journey like Stations of the Cross. His longing for a cigarette had grown steadily since he’d drunk the vodka and now it was acute. He could feel the yearning in his lungs and in his blood, and his hands grew fidgety and he felt a tremor in his legs. How long before the next gas stop? It could be four or five hours. He then recalls his heroic quest to find precious poinsettias for his mother Ina’s birthday. He finally delivers them to her doorstep at dawn, and when the sun reached them ... the red of their leaves intensified in a startling way, as when desert crocuses bloom after rain. And that was when Lev lit a cigarette. He sat down on the steps of Ina’s porch and smoked and stared at the poinsettias, and the cigarette was

like a radiant amber in him and he smoked it right down to its last centimetre and then put it out, but still kept it pressed into his muddy hand. Rose Tremain, The Road Home, 2007

YMCA The Young Men’s Christian Association had an ambiguous stance on cigarettes during the early years of the last century. During World War I the YMCA supplied dogs to carry supplies of cigarettes to the front-line troops in the trenches, on much the same principle as the St Bernard dog with his brandy flask. But by 1919 they were warning that smoking could impair your skills with a rifle. Some mistake surely. The Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA or ‘the Y’) was founded on 6 June 1844 in London by a young man by the name of George Williams. At the time, the organisation was dedicated to putting Christian principles into practice, although presumably these principles did not envisage certain practices of the Village People over a century later when they sang ‘YMCA’.

Young smoker of the year To Kelly Marie Pocock, a single mother of three, of Merthyr Vale, South Wales, belongs the singular honour of being mother to the UK’s youngest smoker. A surprised friend, Natasha Dudley, found Kelly’s three-year-old boy hiding under a bed, smoking a cigarette. (Perhaps he had an advanced awareness of just how tough things are getting for smokers, and took appropriate precautions.) Natasha brought the boy downstairs where, to her even greater surprise, he took a cigarette butt from an ashtray, lit it, and began smoking in front of his mum. Natasha captured the whole thing on her mobile phone’s video camera. Mr Jonathan Rees, prosecuting Kelly (yes, Natasha turned in her friend; political correctness struck again), reviewed the footage, which he said demonstrates ... the boy placing a cigarette into his mouth, lighting it with a lighter and sucking, drawing smoke clearly into the lungs and he seems to do it with some accomplishment.

It doesn’t cause him any discomfort. He is sat on a chair close to the mother, who is talking on the phone. It is clear that the boy, at the age of three, knows what to do with a lighter and cigarette. Good lad. In an ideal world, the little record books that proud parents buy to mark their infants’ progress may be in need of updating. As well as the space where you record first steps, and first words, wouldn’t it be satisfying to make room for ‘first cigarette’? But the world we live in is far from ideal. The unfortunate Kelly got a 40-week jail sentence suspended for two years. As for the lad (who can’t be named for legal reasons), who knows? Maybe he will be on nicotine patches by the age of six. Or perhaps, let’s be more optimistic: like the male baby born and celebrated in the film The Children of Men (2006), set in a future world where males have stopped being born, in our future world Kelly’s boy too will become a symbol of hope for humanity – a smoker, natural, accomplished, happy, in a world where the practice has all but been extinguished. Telegraph, 23 January 2009

Z

Zach A cigarette introduced in 1974 by Lorillard to compete with Philip Morris’s endlessly successful Marlboro. What Lorillard was after was ‘a full-flavoured smoke with a western motif’. In pursuit of this they had already marketed Maverick, Redford and Luke, all of which had failed. Zach had an original design, which was a pack that looked like blue denim. But it was no match for the all-conquering Marlboro man, and was off the market within a year.

Zanzibar, Sultan of In the 1960s, cigarettes were often personalised, with special labels, rings round the filter, or other individualising touches. One exotic instance of this comes from British American Tobacco, who supplied State Express 555s in airtight tins of 50s personalised for the Sultan of Zanzibar. The tin labels showed the personal crest of the Sultan in place of the brand name, and the pack also featured the crest. When a sultan died, the labels on the tins and the pack design were changed to reproduce the crest of his successor. But in July 1962, the then Sultan, Abd Allah ibn Khalifah, took exception to the fact that his crest, and thus symbolically he himself, was being burned as the cigarettes were smoked. The solution was simple. Abd Allah ibn Khalifah had no objection to the crest of his predecessor, Khalifa ibn Kharub, being sent heavenwards, or Mecca-wards, in smoke, so the old cigarette printing die was resurrected. Jack Jones, ‘Cigarettes – Liverpool 5’, BAT, 1965

Zidane, Zinedine (1972 – ) Only days before France played Portugal in the 2006 World Cup, photographers snapped Zinedine Zidane smoking a cigarette. This was unfortunate, inasmuch as he had been chosen in 2002 by the EU to front an anti-smoking campaign revolving around the rather hopeful message, ‘Feel free to say “No”.’ ‘Zizou’ might have fallen from grace, but his football remained unaffected, and his playing helped see France through to the final.

But the footballer who enjoys a cigarette was merely following ‘a long and noble tradition’, as Guardian sportswriter Simon Hattenstone points out. See Football: cigarette-smoking dream teams.

Zippo The iconic accessory for the dedicated cigarette smoker is the Zippo lighter – the lighter that never lets you down. The story started at a country club … In 1932, outdoors at the Bradford Country Club in Pennsylvania, American businessman George G. Blaisdell watched a friend light a cigarette with a cumbersome weatherproof Austrian lighter. The lighter worked well, defying the wind, but was basic in appearance and needed two hands. George Blaisdell, who had learned metal work in his father’s factory, decided he could improve on the design, struck a deal with the Austrian company, and began to re-engineer their product. Blaisdell made the case rectangular, attached the lid with a welded hinge, and surrounded the wick with a wind hood. Blaisdell’s lighter could of course be used one-handed. Inspired by the name and success of a recent invention, the zipper, he called it a Zippo, and backed it with an unconditional lifetime guarantee: ‘It works or we fix it free.’

It was a gamble. The Depression was still making itself felt; $1.95, the price of the lighter, would put a meal in front of a family. But the Zippo, tapping into the inexorable rise of the cigarette, succeeded. Companies started to order them with their own logos on for promotional purposes. With the coming of World War II, Zippo dedicated all its manufacturing capacity to supplying the US military, an astute move that ensured the Zippos would become part of cultural history.

Although not named as such, it is clearly a Zippo lighter that plays such a vital part in Roald Dahl’s much anthologised short story ‘Man from the South’. An American youth is smoking by a pool and offers a light to a strange little old man. The old man doubts that the lighter will work in the wind, but the boy reassures him that it always works. ‘All-ways?’ asks the old man softly. Soon, a nightmarish bet is under way. If the lighter is as reliable as the boy claims, and lights ten times running, he wins a Cadillac. If it fails to light at any point, the old man will chop the boy’s little finger off. This classic short story was filmed by Hitchcock, with Peter Lorre as the obsessive gambler and the young Steve McQueen as the boy. See also Dunhill. www.zippo.com Roald Dahl, ‘Man from the South’, Colliers Magazine, 1948