The changing image and eventual triumph of the cigarette over other forms of tobacco consumption during the fifty years prior to the Great War and its supply to British troops on the Western Front are examined here, along with with abundant examples of branding and packaging materials illustrative of the different types of appeal manufacturers sought to associate with cigarette smoking.
This omission is in all probability due to the sparsity of military archival material relating specifically to tobacco supply, to the ephemeral nature of most packaging and advertising material, to the disappearance of thousands of small tobacco manufacturers and retailers and to the relative absence of anything but passing allusions to tobacco from official histories and personal accounts. This study is an attempt to bring together a quantity of information drawn from many disparate and unconnected sources.
Our standard of height in the army was 5ft. In forty-four men in every thousand recruits weighed under 7st. B-P has the following advice for would-be juvenile smokers:. On a more psychological level, he states:. No boy ever began smoking because he liked it, but generally because either he feared being chaffed by the other boys as afraid to smoke, or because he thought that by smoking he would look like a great manβwhen all the time he only looks like a little ass. That will show you to be a man much more than any slobbering about with a half-smoked cigarette between your lips.
Boys who smoke appear ridiculous and cause permanent damage to their health. Baden-Powell, op. However, in order to attempt to answer this question more precisely we need to look back to some of the events and attitudes of the nineteenth century.
Prior to that, tobacco consumption had been a matter of chewing, snuff-taking and usually clay- pipe-smoking. This new fashion associated a patently phallic icon with the image of the glamorous rakishness of a militarised but idle elite cf.
