Читать книгу The Joy of Smoking: The Light-Hearted Look at Lighting Up - Sue Carroll & Sue Brealy - Страница 8

Smoking chills

Christopher Columbus, Sir Water Raleigh and Sir Francis Drake have all been blamed (or credited, depending on your point of view) with introducing the much-maligned weed to Europe.

Wrong.

Columbus did indeed receive a present of fruit and tobacco from the Arawak Indians the day he discovered the New World in 1492. But, as soon as he was out of sight, he ate the fruit and chucked the dried leaves overboard. Two weeks later he reached Cuba, where members of an expedition sent inland reported the strange sight of natives ‘with a little lighted brand made from a kind of plant whose aroma it was their custom to inhale’. One of these explorers, Rodrigo de Jerez, determined to immerse himself in the local custom, and ended up chain-smoking his way back across the Atlantic. By the time Columbus reached Spain in March 1493, de Jerez was hooked and, before you could say ‘nicotine’, was joined by thousands of his countrymen in this strangely compelling habit.

FACT

One of the earliest methods of consuming tobacco was as a tea that was ‘drunk’ through the nose or via the anus.

But not all were seduced by the weed. The military governor of Hispaniola, Gonzalo Fernadez de Oviedo, gave one of the first anti-tobacco rants on record: ‘Among other evil practices, the Indians have one that is especially harmful: the ingestion of a certain kind of smoke they call tobacco. They imbibe the smoke until they become unconscious and lie sprawling on the ground like men in a drunken stupor … It seems to me that here we have a bad and pernicious custom.’

Poor Gonzalo. All that disgust and indignation was to no avail, as the European lust for tobacco proved insatiable. In 1531, large-scale cultivation of the weed began in Santo Domingo and by the end of the century commercial crops were growing in Cuba and Brazil.

In the meantime, word had spread to other European courts whose monarchs, wishing to be at the cutting edge of new developments, dispatched lackeys to obtain this exciting new substance. One of these, Jean Nicot, snaffled some of the tobacco cuttings destined for his master, Henri II of France, and began to explore some of the plant’s legendary medicinal benefits. After he claimed to have cured a man of a tumour with an ointment made from tobacco leaves, the ‘Nicotian Herb’ was taken up by the French court and found to be irresistible. Nicotine was born.

FACT

A single tobacco seed is all but invisible. One million seeds would weigh barely three ounces.

To the French, nicotine was useful in combating illness and disease, everything from worms to toothache. To the English, it represented pleasure, and it was in Elizabethan England that tobacco smoking became an activity of mass appeal rather than a distraction enjoyed only by the elite. When buccaneer and people’s darling Francis Drake was given ‘feathers and bags of tobacco’ by friendly natives in what is now San Francisco, he did not jettison his gifts but carried the precious cargo home to his queen and countrymen. It is also known that Sir Walter Raleigh, cloak-laying favourite of Elizabeth I, brought back tobacco from his first Virginian expedition in 1586, and it was he who persuaded his mistress to sample the delights of tobacco. Gloriana was captivated by the habit, thus ensuring its fashionable take-up among nobility and common folk alike.

Having adopted the custom directly from North American Indians, the English chose the pipe as the preferred implement for taking in smoke, rather than the cigar favoured by the Spanish. Members of the nobility appointed special servants, employed solely to trail around after them carrying their pipes, tobacco and many other implements needed to light up. The hoi polloi made do with a tiny clay pipe and a hot coal, but no matter. The result was very much the same, that of ‘pleasing drunkenness’. In 1598, a German visitor to London noted: ‘The English are constantly smoking the Nicotian weed. They draw the smoke into their mouths, which they puff out again through their nostrils, like funnels, along with it plenty of phlegm and defluxion from the head.’ At this time tobacco cost £4.10s per pound; a flagon of ale cost a penny.

Tobacco’s expense was partly due to the fact that the English, as yet, had no plantations abroad and therefore no direct access to the weed. Tobacco enthusiasts relied largely for their supply on Drake and his swashbuckling mates, who ambushed foreign ships travelling from the New World and commandeered their precious cargo. Raleigh, the weed’s greatest champion of the age, planted tobacco alongside his other great discovery, the potato, at his estate in Ireland, where he was promptly relieved of it by a bunch of thieving locals. They left the potatoes, though.

Every schoolboy knows the story that on one occasion Sir Water Raleigh, while smoking, was doused in water by a well-meaning servant who thought he was on fire. Fewer will know that Raleigh became the first to enlist tobacco as the dying man’s comfort. As he ascended the scaffold in 1618, the victim of a trumped-up charge brought by the puritanical King James I, Raleigh ran his finger across the blade of the axe and commented with a smile, ‘This is sharp medicine but it will cure all disease.’ He insisted on smoking to the last, and kept his pipe in his mouth until his head fell. The contrast between the witty, pioneering Elizabethan and the dour, anti-smoking Jacobean could not be starker.

FACT

Sir Walter Raleigh’s pipe box carried the inscription: ‘It was my companion in that most wretched time’, a reference to his years in jail under King James I.

Meanwhile, the cultivators of tobacco in the Americas had not been idle and their ranks were swelled daily by Englishmen unable to live with James’s canting ways. In 1612, John Rolfe planted some Nicotiana tabacum seeds in Virginia and set about learning the art of cultivation, harvesting and curing the delicate plant. In this he was helped by the family of his wife, the Indian princess Pocahontas who had captured his attention by performing naked cartwheels in front of him. Thanks to the skills of his in-laws, Rolfe succeeded in creating a tobacco with a unique taste and aroma, which immediately found favour in the English market. Despite the King’s entrenched opposition in England, such was demand that tobacco shipments to London went from 20,000 pounds in 1618 to 1.5 million pounds in 1627. At the time of James’s death there were 7,000 establishments selling tobacco in London alone.

All was not plain sailing, however. Life expectancy for English colonists was just six months and tobacco cultivation was a labour-intensive occupation. Then, in 1619, a ship arrived in Chesapeake Bay and John Rolfe recorded a momentous event in his diary: ‘There came in a Dutch man-of-warre that sold us 20 negars.’The cheap source of manpower was seized on eagerly by the colonists and marked the beginning of the slave trade. The Chesapeake became the largest tobacco producer in the world and by 1700 was exporting 38 million pounds of the weed to Britain, a rise of nearly 60,000 per cent on its 1620 levels.

The story was much the same in the rest of Europe. The Spanish smoked everywhere, at play and at prayer, only desisting when Pope Urban VIII threatened to excommunicate anyone caught smoking in a holy place. The Thirty Years War saw the start of tobacco as the soldier’s friend and the spread of the weed to Sweden and Holland, where it had hitherto been relatively unknown. But, as ever, tobacco had its detractors. ‘I cannot refrain from a few words of protest against the fashion lately introduced from America,’ sniffed a horrified German visitor, ‘a sort of smoke tippling … which enslaves its victims more completely than any other form of intoxication, old or new. These madmen will swallow or inhale with incredible eagerness the smoke of a plant they call Herba Nicotina, or tobacco.’

Tobacco was the new hot ticket and the resourceful Dutch recognised that it possessed a currency value that was global, giving it infinite possibilities as an instrument of trade. In 1652 they bought the entire Cape of Good Hope for ‘a certain quantity of tobacco and brandy’. The Dutch became the main traffickers of the weed throughout the world, creating new, enthusiastic markets wherever they took this wonderful habit.

In England, the smokers had survived the unwelcome attentions of James I and his son Charles I (who was determined to outdo his father in the unpopularity stakes and was beheaded for his pains) and the tuttings of the tight-lipped Puritans. Charles II had one brief go at burning the tobacco fields at Winchcombe in Gloucestershire, and came to the wise conclusion that he was literally playing with fire. His subjects chain-smoked throughout the great plague of 1665, believing that tobacco had medicinal and preventative qualities, but they hardly needed the Black Death as an excuse for lighting up. Another visitor from the Continent was flabbergasted to observe that, ‘In England, when the children went to school, they carried in their satchels, with their books, a pipe of tobacco, which their mothers took care to fill early in the morning, it serving them instead of a breakfast.’

FACT

‘This morning I got together 36 horse and found an armed multitude guarding the tobacco field … a rabble of men and women calling for blood for the tobacco. The soldiers stood firm, and with cocked pistols, bade the multitude disperse but they would not, and 200 more came from Winchcombe. Ten men could not in four days destroy the good tobacco about Cheltenham … I was forced to retreat.’ Letter from a government agent, 1658

North of the border, the Scots were playing catch-up. The country that gave birth to the weed-hating King James viewed the English obsession with tobacco as sinful and excessive, and William Barclay of Towie exhorted his countrymen ‘not, as the English abusers do, to make a smoke box of their skulls’. But in 1707 England and Scotland became one country and within 15 years the Scots were controlling 50 per cent of the tobacco trade. They tore down the Glaswegian fishing huts and replaced them with vast tobacco wharves, superbly placed to exploit the shipping routes to the tobacco plantations of the New World. Such was their domination and understanding of the market that, when the American War of Independence caused a major tobacco shortage in Britain, the Scots had already stockpiled huge quantities in anticipation. Prices soared from 3p per pound to 38p and drove the English to reintroduce the cultivation of home-grown baccy in Yorkshire.

But their problems were nothing compared to those of the French peasantry, whose tax on tobacco was twice that of their British equivalents. If life wasn’t exactly a picnic for tillers of the soil in Britain, for the average French yokel it was a life of unremitting poverty and grind, relieved only by the occasional smoke. What’s more, the weed’s ability to suppress appetite was especially useful in a world where there was never enough to eat. The French ruling classes had supported the American colonists against their British overlords. Now they were to pay the price as the sans-culottes turned on their masters with a hatred that inspired an orgy of blood-letting. Snuff, inextricably linked with the aristocracy, went out of fashion overnight, and snuffers with any sense switched to smoking with all speed. In the hysterical frenzy of denouncements and executions that followed the revolution, an impromptu sneezing fit was all it took to finish up on the guillotine.

For the first two years of the Republic, the French rejoiced in the fact that they were the only citizens in Europe to enjoy tax-free tobacco, only to have this enviable status cut abruptly short by the infamous pocket-sized tyrant, Napoleon Bonaparte. Just one generation after the execution of Louis XVI and his cake-eating queen Marie Antoinette, the little Corsican had introduced a punitive tobacco tax to fund his megalomaniacal military ambitions and was generating more income from tobacco than any of his high-born predecessors had dreamed of. By the time he finished rearranging the map of Europe, he had created a greater demand for tobacco than ever before.

FACT

Napoleon Bonaparte had a kilo-a-week snuff habit, the equivalent to 100 ciggies a day.

Just as, 200 hundred years earlier, the Thirty Years War had occasioned a huge surge in demand for tobacco, the Napoleonic Wars were to do the same, opening up the vast Russian market to the weed. Compared to the rest of Europe, smoking had not captured the Russian imagination and smoking had been confined to the Russian aristocracy, who imbibed through enormous, exotic hookahs. As these were less than practical for battlefield use, the new nico-converts found other methods of smoking, including cigars, a habit that had found its way from Spain. Yet again, tobacco was discovered to have an essential role as an appetite suppressant among troops suffering extreme food deprivation, not to mention its calming properties in the face of battle. No wonder that the weed has become known as the ‘Patron Saint of Soldiers’.

Elsewhere, the now legendary camaraderie between boozers and smokers became apparent, as French and British soldiers used brief lulls in hostilities to trade tobacco and brandy off the field. But it was the British who were to triumph on the field, and Napoleon was exiled to St Helena, one of the tiniest islands in the South Atlantic, where the British taxpayer funded his snuffing habit for the remainder of his days. The Duke of Wellington and the army that he referred to as ‘scum’ returned home victorious to a nation more in love with tobacco than ever before, and a new method of smoking the delicious weed. Fifteen years before Waterloo, Britain imported just 26 pounds of cigars. Fifteen years after the battle, imports rocketed to more than 250,000 pounds, an increase of nearly one million per cent, and tobacconists sprang up all over Britain to exploit this phenomenon.

FACT

‘The best judge of an Havana cigar’ in the 1830s was considered to be one Charles Lambert who, along with a Mr Butler, ran a tobacconist in Drury Lane.

Smoking became a feature of everyday life, made even more joyous by the appearance of the friction match in 1850 and the cigarette six years later. This ingenious little tobacco stick was an innovation of the Turks and enthusiastically taken up by their British allies during the Crimean War, where, for the first time (but not the last), it became the soldier’s solace. Some disapproved, seeing the cigarette as ‘a miserable apology for a manly pleasure’, but, seeing its potential, returning war veteran Robert Peacock Gloag began to turn out handmade cigarettes in 1856, followed closely by Bond Street tobacconist Philip Morris.

At first a sideline, the cigarette quickly gained a huge following in the tobacco market and, across the Atlantic, American consumption shot up from 42 million cigarettes in 1875 to 500 million in just five years. Manufacturers couldn’t roll out handmade cigarettes fast enough to meet demand. Not only that, the wages of the rollers accounted for a whopping 90 per cent of the production costs. Tobacco giants Allen & Ginter came up with the novel idea of offering a prize of $75,000 to anyone who could find a way of improving production. One bright young spark came up with the Bonsack machine, which rolled out 70,000 ciggies a day. In a move smacking of lunacy, A&G refused to cough up the prize money, and the marvellous machine was snapped up by James ‘Buck’ Duke, the owner of a tiny Virginian tobacco company. The Duke splashed out a massive 20 per cent of his turnover on advertising, introduced collectable cigarette cards and installed agents at the docks to hand out Duke cigarettes to immigrants as they landed. His enterprise and aggressive tactics paid off – within five years he was selling 2 million cigarettes a day.

FACT

The famous card sharp ‘Poker Alice’ Tubbs (1851–1930) refused to be converted to the cigarette and died at the age of 79 after a lifetime’s love affair with cigars.

Suddenly cigarettes were the hip thing, while pipes were passé for the very reason that they couldn’t be passed around at social gatherings, one of the great attractions of the ciggie. Cigarettes had an air of conviviality: they could be shared around and used to effect introductions. But above all they were perceived as glamorous and smoked by elegant people. They symbolised everything a person wanted to be, confident, alluring, irresistible, with a hint of danger.

America smoked everything that the Bonsack machines threw at them, and the market for cigarettes appeared infinite. ‘Buck’ Duke had by far the largest share of the market, but that wasn’t enough for him, he wanted the whole cake. Superbly placed to achieve this, he started swallowing up small competitors, (including the unfortunate Allen & Ginter), raised his spend on advertising even further and introduced a ruthless pricing strategy. The other manufacturers ran up the white flag and sued for peace on Buck’s terms. In 1889, what was left of the opposition was gobbled up into the American Tobacco Company, with the 33-year-old Duke as its president.

Then, in 1896, the unthinkable happened. Cigarette consumption fell and continued to fall. Duke needed new markets and, seeing that the Old Country had a heck of a lot of smokers, he turned his sales and marketing talents on the British, who unfortunately proved unresponsive both to his price cuts and the black arts of advertising. Undeterred, he got on the next ocean liner bound for Europe to give the Brits the full force of the Duke personality first-hand. To show he meant business, he began buying up small regional manufacturers. But the British had not painted a third of the world red by allowing an upstart American to steal their business from under their nose. The ten largest manufacturers combined to form the Imperial Tobacco Company and began buying up retailers which, unsurprisingly, refused to stock Duke’s brand of cigarettes. This time it was Duke who sued for peace and a new, jointly owned company, British American Tobacco, was set up to exploit the global tobacco market. The first multinational was born.

‘He found a tree that had not been damaged by shellfire and sat down beneath it, lighting a cigarette and sucking in the smoke. Before the war he had never touched tobacco; now it was his greatest comfort.’

Birdsong, Sebastian Faulks

After a five-year dip in its fortunes, tobacco hit record-breaking levels again in 1901, with China alone consuming 1.25 billion cigarettes a year. But it was the two devastating world wars that altered the course of tobacco and its role in society. Boredom, fear, nerves, hunger, camaraderie, for any number of reasons cigarettes transcended country, cause and no-man’s-land to become a source of comfort to both sides. A creeping reluctance to smoke cigarettes had appeared before the war, but, faced with ceaseless shelling, the mud, the rats and the insane waste of life, cigarettes became one of the few symbols of humanity to be had in the hell of the trenches.

Tobacco’s importance in maintaining morale was summed up in 1917 when the USA entered the war. General John Pershing, commander of the American Expeditionary Force, observed, ‘You ask me what we need to win this war, I answer tobacco, as much as bullets. We must have thousands of tons of it without delay.’ His request was granted, with Camels and Lucky Strike being the favourites of the American troops and Woodbines the choice of the British. Troops developed a new way of smoking, with the lit end facing into the palm, so that the glow did not mark them out as a sniper’s target. Few who went into the First World War as a non-smoker came out one.

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.

What’s the use of worrying?

It never was worthwhile.

So, pack up your troubles in your old kit bag

And smile, smile, smile.

First World War song

When the mentally and physically scarred war heroes returned to Britain in 1918, few still dismissed cigarettes as ‘a miserable apology for a manly pleasure’. What’s more, the cigarette had acquired a new and lucrative market via the conflict. It had become increasingly apparent that the support and co-operation of women were essential to achieving victory. War gave British women what militant suffrage had not, the vote and some equality with men, and the cigarette allowed them a public, not to mention delicious, demonstration of their hard-fought victory. Cigarettes now accounted for the majority of tobacco sales, and by 1928 the USA was producing 100 billion cigarettes a year to satisfy demand. Even the Wall Street Crash and the subsequent Great Depression did nothing to halt the triumphant rise of tobacco and its cost. Those who could not afford the inflated prices charged by the tobacco companies picked fag butts off the street to enable themselves to carry on indulging their habit. In 1930, the tobacco historian Count Conti remarked, ‘A glance at the statistics proves convincingly that the non-smokers are a feeble and ever dwindling minority.’ Smoking crossed the barriers of age, sex and class, as demonstrated by Eleanor Roosevelt who, as the First Lady of the United States of America, delighted smokers everywhere by lighting a cigar in public.

At the start of World War II, President Franklin D Roosevelt made tobacco a protected crop as part of the war effort, and the popular practice of inserting collectable cigarette cards in packets was discontinued to save paper. As the war developed into a truly global conflict, cigarettes were declared essential wartime material. The Yanks further inflamed the grumblings of the British soldiers that they were ‘over-sexed, over-paid and over here’ by receiving a much larger cigarette allowance than their allies. So internationally widespread had the smoking habit become that spies had to be taught in detail how to smoke in the manner of the country to which they were sent. The smallest mistake could blow an otherwise painstakingly constructed cover.

Field Marshall Montgomery to Sir Winston Churchill: ‘I do not drink, I do not smoke. I sleep a great deal. That is why I am 100 per cent fit.’

Churchill to Montgomery: ‘I drink a great deal. I sleep little, and I smoke cigar after cigar. That is why I am 200 per cent fit.’

Cigarettes became the black market’s most valuable currency, and it was the only commodity in post-war Germany that was to retain its value. There was nothing that cigarettes could not buy, especially as they had the obvious advantage of only being usable once. A carton of American cigarettes laid out properly could buy anything from a fur coat to a camera, not to mention a little cheap love from a half-starved girl. It was the old story of supply and demand, and in the ruins of the Third Reich there was little of the former and a great deal of the latter. Once again, war had done for cigarettes what a million adverts could not accomplish. A huge number of people, soldiers and civilians alike, had taken up smoking during the conflict, prompted in no small measure by the glamorous escapism offered by their idols on the silver screen, whether in battle or the bedroom. Health concerns about tobacco had been forgotten: the only serious research on such matters had been done by the Nazis, and no one was taking too much notice of their opinions at the time.

FACT

In 1949, Britain had the highest percentage of smokers in the world: 81 per cent of all men smoked, and 39 per cent of women.

However, as the Fifties approached, the ground-breaking work begun by the Third Reich scientists was picked up by a British scientist, Richard Doll. In 1949, Doll produced findings that suggested smoking was linked to lung cancer, but only in 1957 did the government ask for advice based on further research he had carried out. Shortly afterwards, one of the first tobacco lawsuits was brought by a smoker in the USA, who died of cancer during the case. In his absence the jury found he had been killed by lung cancer caused by Lucky Strike cigarettes, but a retrial exonerated the company. Nevertheless, by order of a federal act, on 1 January 1966 cigarette packets began to carry the warning ‘Cigarette smoking may be hazardous to your health’. It seemed that no one quite believed it, though, the year saw a rise of 7.8 billion in US ciggie sales. What’s more, the century was soon to offer up another major war, timed beautifully to boost tobacco’s sales and image. Who cared about government health warnings on cigarette packets when you were a terrified rookie in the hell of Vietnam, especially when the fags were being supplied freely by the people behind the deadly cautions?

FACT

Chairman Mao chain-smoked ‘Double Happiness’ cigarettes throughout his Cultural Revolution, during which 30 million Chinese starved to death.

At about the time the US government was putting warnings on American cigarette packets, Prime Minister Harold Wilson was named Britain’s ‘Pipe Smoker of the Year’ and The Beatles were swinging their MBEs in one hand with a fag in the other. But in both countries tobacco’s glory days were reaching an end. Throughout the Seventies the anti-smoking movement grew in influence and zeal, with non-smokers demanding their rights to ‘clean air’ in the form of segregated smoking establishments. The first nationwide ‘Great American Smokeout’ was held in 1977, to persuade smokers to give up their fags and donate the money saved to charity, and a burgeoning industry developed in the shape of counsellors and self-help books to aid the errant smoker in kicking his or her habit. In Britain, government money was made available for the creation of the anti-smoking organisation ASH (Action on Smoking and Health), and for research showing that smoking was responsible for just about every death on the planet. The relentless attacks bore fruit, as in the early Eighties the percentage of male smokers had dropped below 40 per cent, and a survey revealed that the average smoker had been made to feel thoroughly ashamed of himself and his addiction to the weed.

But there still remained a hard core of puffers who, despite being continually bombarded with smoking fatality statistics, simply refused to be slapped into shape by the anti-tobacco brigade. Whatever pathetic underclass the likes of ASH and its followers considered the smoker to inhabit, there was still the matter of that little thing called freedom, which so many smokers had fought so hard to defend throughout the centuries. After all, whose life was it anyway? The answer to the anti-smokers’ prayers appeared in the form of ETS, or ‘Environmental Tobacco Smoke’, that’s passive smoking to you. No more was the smoker simply an inadequate and feeble-minded victim of a filthy habit, he was harming others too. The anti-smokers could throw off accusations that they were interfering busybodies and killjoys. Their role was to protect the innocent and defenceless from the selfish smoker.

FACT

A smokeless cigarette called Premier was released in the USA in May 1988.

Yet although the anti-smoking movement has undoubtedly gained ground, with smoking banned on all forms of public transport and in the work place, it has failed to prove conclusively that smoking kills non-smokers. In 1997, a massive study of 250,000 people, by the American Cancer Society, failed to establish a link between passive smoking and lung cancer. Even more embarrassing was a report, reluctantly published in 1998 by the World Health Organisation, showing that passive smoking could even have a protective effect. Unsurprisingly, an ASH spokesman called the findings ‘surprising’.

And, while cigarette smoking has declined significantly over the last few decades, it hasn’t all gone the antis’ way. In 1996, smoking amongst British women rose for the first time in 25 years, and a staggering 56 billion cigarettes are still smoked by Brits every year. Cigar sales are actually on the increase.

Perhaps the final word on the subject should go to the world’s wisest and greatest playwright. Shakespeare never made mention of the weed in any of his works – no character smokes it or refers to it – but in his dark play ‘Measure for Measure’ the rogue Lucio says “it is impossible to extirp it quite, till eating and drinking be put down.” He was, in fact, talking about sex, but it might just as well have been tobacco. As long as there are people to eat, drink and draw breath, there will be smokers.

VARIATIONS OF THE WORD TOBACCO: The weed, snuff, maccabooy, plug of tobacco, quid, fid, twist, flake, shag, cigar, cheroot, smoke, cigarette, coffin-nail, reefer, joint, tobacco-pipe, churchwarden, briar, tab, fag, snout, rollies, baccy, sotweed, bidi.

A ‘fag end’ was the coarser part of a cloth that hangs loose, and came to be applied to the last and poorest part of anything. It was first used to describe inferior cigarettes about 1883.