Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 14:

A clergyman has put it on record that when he went in 1873 as curate-in-charge to an out-of-the-way Norfolk village, at his first early celebration he arrived in church about 7.45 A.M., and, he says, "to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes. I expostulated with them quite quietly, but they left the church before service and never came again. I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service. When these men, in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 4:

One inference at least may be fairly drawn, I think, from this document, and that is that smoking was very popular north as well as south of the Tweed.

Tobacco was certainly cheap in Scotland. The following entries are from a MS. account of household expenses kept by the minister of the parish of Eastwood, near Glasgow, the Rev. William Hamilton. They cover two months only and show that the minister was a furious smoker. The prices given are in Scots currency, the pound Scots being worth about twenty pence sterling:

It may perhaps be interesting to compare with these prices, from which, apparently, it may be inferred that near Glasgow tobacco could be bought for some 5d. a pound, which seems incredibly cheap, the occasional expenditure upon tobacco of a worthy citizen of Exeter some few years earlier. Extracts from the "Financial Diary" of this good man, whose name was John Hayne, and who was an extensive dealer in serges and woollen goods generally, as well as in a smaller degree of cotton goods also, were printed some years ago, with copious annotations, by the late Dr. Brushfield.

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