The Cigarette Book: The History and Culture of Smoking

By Chris Harrald and Fletcher Watkins

From A is for Aardvark—“We’re not allowed to tell you anything about Winston cigarettes, so here’s a stuffed aardvark”—to Z is for Zippo, the iconic American lighter, The Cigarette Book is the ultimate souvenir and celebration of the dying art of smoking. Encyclopedic in both layout and range, this is an ideal consolation gift for those who have stopped, an ideal aide de memoire for those who might, and a defiant puff of libertarian brilliance for those who won’t. Celebrate the Hollywood age of smoking when film stars lit up with glamorous abandon. Witty, illustrated, collectible, and up-to-date.

"… 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."

One day the last cigarette on earth will be smoked. One final puff will be sent heaven-bound, leaving a lingering, evanescent smoke ring. And the wise of this world will rejoice. Because logic demands that mankind is rid of this pernicious poison. And wasn’t that well-known logician Adolf Hitler the most virulent opponent of cigarette smoking in the last century? Until then, read this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Release date: Nov 1, 2010
• ISBN: 9781628732412

Book preview

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.

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.

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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 ...

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 non-smoker and one ends up with a 6.5-year difference in life expectancy advantage to the non-smoker.

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 socio-economic 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.