Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 12:

Barry's original plan for the Travellers' Club, erected in 1832, shows no smoking-room on the ground floor. It was probably some inconvenient apartment of no account. The early "Travellers" did smoke, for Theodore Hook, satirizing them and the club rule that no person was eligible as a member who had not travelled out of the British Islands to a distance of at least 500 miles from London in a direct line, wrote:

The travellers are in Pall Mall, and smoke cigars so cosily,
And dream they climb the highest Alps, or rove the plains of Moselai,
The world for them has nothing new, they have explored all parts of it;
And now they are club-footed! and they sit and look at charts of it.

The present-day smoking-room at the Travellers' is a noble apartment, which was originally the coffee-room. It occupies the whole of the ground-floor front to the gardens of Carlton House Terrace, and is divided into three bays by the projection of square piers.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 11:

Among the chief strongholds of the old ideas and prejudices were some of the clubs. At the Athenæum the only smoking-room used to be a combined billiard-and smoking-room in the basement. It was but a few years ago that an attic story was added to the building, and smokers can now reach more comfortable quarters by means of a lift put in when the alterations were made in 1900. This new smoking-room is a very handsome, largely book-lined apartment. At the end of the room is a beautiful marble mantelpiece of late eighteenth century Italian work. At White's even cigars had not been allowed at all until 1845; and when, in 1866, some of the younger members wished to be allowed to smoke in the drawing-room, there was much perturbation, the older members bitterly opposing the proposal. "A general meeting was held to decide the question," says Mr. Ralph Nevill, in his "London Clubs," "when a number of old gentlemen who had not been seen in the club for years made their appearance, stoutly determined to resist the proposed desecration. 'Where do all these old fossils come from?' inquired a member. 'From Kensal Green,' was Mr. Alfred Montgomery's reply. 'Their hearses, I understand, are waiting to take them back there.'" The motion for the extension of the facilities for smoking was defeated by a majority of twenty-three votes, and as an indirect result the Marlborough Club was founded. The late King Edward, at that time Prince of Wales, is said to have sympathized strongly with the defeated minority at White's, and to have interested himself in the foundation of the Marlborough; where, "for the first time in the history of West End Clubland, smoking, except in the dining-room, was everywhere allowed." By "smoking" is no doubt here meant everything but pipes, which were not considered gentlemanly even at the Garrick Club at the beginning of the present century. The late Duc d'Aumale was a social pioneer in pipe-smoking. His caricature in "Vanity Fair" represents him with a pipe in his mouth, although he is wearing an opera-hat, black frock-coat buttoned up, and a cloak.

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