Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Another correspondent of the same journal, Colonel W.F. Prideaux, also replying to a query of mine, wrote: "Before briar-root pipes came into common use clay pipes were of necessity smoked by all classes. When I matriculated at Oxford at the Easter of 1858 ... University men used to be rather particular about the pipes they smoked. The finest were made in France, and the favourite brand was 'Fiolet, Saint Omer.' I do not know if this kind is still smoked, but it was made of a soft clay that easily coloured. In taverns, of course, the churchwarden—beloved of Carlyle and Tennyson—was usually smoked to the accompaniment of shandygaff. At Simpson's fish ordinary at Billingsgate these pipes were always placed on the table after dinner, together with screws of shag tobacco, and a smoking parliament moistened with hot or cold punch according to the season, was generally held during the following hour. Of course, in those days no one ever thought of smoking a pipe in the presence of ladies."

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

But although many pipes were smoked at the Universities, there were occasionally to be found odd survivals of old prejudices. Dr. Shipley, in his recent memoir of John Willis Clark, the Cambridge Registrary, says that even in the 'seventies of the last century there was an elderly Don at Cambridge who once rebuked a Junior Fellow, who was smoking a pipe in the Wilderness, with the remark, "No Christian gentleman smokes a pipe, or if he does he smokes a cigar." The perpetrator of this bull was the same parson who married late in life, and returning to his church after a honeymoon of six weeks, publicly thanked God "for three weeks of unalloyed connubial bliss."

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