Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

A striking example of the attitude of the mid-nineteenth century days towards tobacco may be found in connexion with railways and railway travelling. In the early days of such travel there were no smoking compartments, and indeed smoking was "strictly forbidden" practically everywhere on railway premises. Relics of this time may still be seen in many stations and on many platforms in the shape of somewhat dingy placards announcing that smoking is strictly forbidden, and that the penalty is so much. Nowadays the incense from pipes and cigars and cigarettes curls freely round these obsolete notices and helps to make them still dingier. If you wanted to smoke when travelling you had either to contrive to get a compartment to yourself, or to arrange terms with your fellow-travellers. In a Punch of 1855, Leech drew a railway-platform scene wherein figures one of those precocious youngsters of a type he loved to draw. A railway porter says to his mate, as the two gaze at the back of this small swell, with his cane and top-hat, "What does he say, Bill?" "Why, he says he must have a compartment to hisself, because he can't get on without his smoke!" Another drawing in a Punch of 1861 points the same moral. It represents an elderly "party" and a "fast Etonian" seated side by side in a first-class compartment. The latter has a cigar in one hand and with the other offers coins to his neighbour; the explanation is as follows: "Old Party. Really, sir,—I am the manager of the line, sir—I must inform you that if you persist in smoking, you will be fined forty shillings, sir. Fast Etonian. Well, old boy, I must have my smoke; so you may as well take your forty shillings now!"

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 15:

Notwithstanding the few examples given above, tobacconists, more than most tradesmen, seem to have continued to use signs that had at least some relevance to their trade. Abel Drugger was a "tobacco-man," i.e. a tobacco-seller in Ben Jonson's play of "The Alchemist," 1610, so that it is not very surprising to find the name used occasionally as a tobacconist's sign. Towards the end of the eighteenth century one Peter Cockburn traded as a tobacconist at the sign of the "Abel Drugger" in Fenchurch Street, and informed the public on the advertising papers in which he wrapped up his tobacco for customers that he had formerly been shopman at the Sir Roger de Coverley-a notice which has preserved the name of another tobacconist's sign borrowed from literature. Seventeenth-century London signs were the "Three Tobacco Pipes," "Two Tobacco Pipes" crossed, and "Five Tobacco Pipes." At Edinburgh in the eighteenth century there were tobacconists who used two pipes crossed, a roll of tobacco and two leaves over two crossed pipes, and a roll of tobacco and three leaves.

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