Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 10:

Sir G.W. Forrest, in his book on "The Indian Mutiny," tells how at the siege of Lucknow, as the month of August advanced, "the tea and sugar, except a small store kept for invalids, were exhausted. The tobacco also was gone, and Europeans and natives suffered greatly from the want of it. The soldiers yearned for a pipe after a hard day's work, and smoked dry leaves as the only substitute they could obtain." Mr. L.E.R. Rees in his diary of the same siege noted—"I have given up smoking tobacco, and have taken to tea-leaves and neem-leaves, and guava fruit-leaves instead, which the poor soldiers are also constantly using." The neem-tree is better known, perhaps, as the margosa. It yields a bitter oil, and is supposed to possess febrifugal properties.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 13:

A story is told of Sir Walter Raleigh by John Aubrey which seems to imply that at first women not only did not smoke, but that they disliked smoking by men. Aubrey says that Raleigh "standing in a stand at Sir R. Poyntz's parke at Acton, tooke a pipe of tobacco, which made the ladies quitt it till he had done." But this objection, whether general or not, soon vanished, for, as we have seen in a previous chapter, the gallant of Elizabethan and Jacobean days made a practice of smoking in his lady's presence. It seems certain, moreover, that some women, at least, smoked very soon after the introduction of tobacco; but it is not easy to find direct evidence, though there are sundry traditions and allusions which suggest that the practice was not unknown.

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