TAX MEN TRIED TO BAN SMOKING IN N.Z. 70 YEARS AGO

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 15, Issue 3, 27 February 1950, Page 3

TAX MEN TRIED TO BAN SMOKING IN N.Z. 70 YEARS AGO

Though irked at the thought of someone else spending his money, John Citizen would resent it even more if the tax collectors told him not to smoke in their various offices. But that’s just what New Zealand postal employees (as agents for the tax men) were doing 70 years ago.

John Citizen’s grandpa didn’t like it, of course, and his attitude is reflected in the official correspondence of the day.

Troubled Postmaster Here is what a troubled southern postmaster had to say about smoking in a letter written to the head of the Post and Telegraph Department in 1881:

“I experienced considerable* difficulty in putting down the practice among the public of smoking in the public office. “Several persons, some of them of some commercial and social standing in the town, have taken considerable umbrage on being civilly asked to remove their pipes. The general excuse is that they are not lighted. One person indeed, refused point blank to remove his pipe. Unfortunately he had been attended to before I saw him.

“The practice seems to have been in a measure tolerated in the past and the clerks seem now to lack the moral courage to check it. I have instructed them to decline to serve any person at the counter until the pipe has been removed and would ask whether you would endorse my action in this respect, also whether it would be desirable to take any further action, say by the exhibition of a notice prohibiting smoking. Lowering Office Dignity

“I am rather averse to the adoption of the latter course as insulting to those who know better and admitting the existence of an abuse, lowering to the dignity of a public office.

“It is humilating to have to admit that the office has been made so cheap to the public. Such a thing would never be dreamed of at a bank counter or at the R.M. Courts.”

During the last 30 years, while the population of the United States has increased by about 40 per cent, enrolments in colleges and universities have increased more than 300 per cent. x x x x Bicycle riders in the United States are applying strips of luminous tape to the whels of their vehicles to make them easier for motorists to .see at night.