Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 7:

Another foreign visitor to England, the Abbé Le Blanc, who was over here about 1730, found English customs rather trying. "Even at table," he says, "where they serve desserts, they do but show them, and presently take away everything, even to the tablecloth. By this the English, whom politeness does not permit to tell the ladies their company is troublesome, give them notice to retire.... The table is immediately covered with mugs, bottles and glasses; and often with pipes of tobacco. All things thus disposed, the ceremony of toasts begins."

The frowns and remonstrances of Quarterly and Monthly Meetings of Friends had not succeeded in putting the Quakers' pipes out. In a list of sea stores put on board a vessel called by the un-Quaker-like name of The Charming Polly, which brought a party of Friends across the Atlantic from Philadelphia in 1756, we find "In Samuel Fothergill's new chest ... Tobacco ... a Hamper ... a Barrel ... a box of pipes." The provident Samuel was well found for a long voyage.

Read More

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

One of these old brass penny-in-the-slot tobacco-boxes was included in the exhibition of Welsh Antiquities held at Cardiff in the summer of 1913.

In the Colchester Museum is an automatic tobacco-box and till of japanned iron. On the lid of the box is painted a keg of tobacco and two clay pipes; and on that of the till the following doggerel lines:

A halfpeny dropt into the till,
Upsprings the lid and you may fill;
When you have filled, without delay,
Shut down the lid, or sixpence pay.

Read More