CIGARS FOR WOMEN

Wairarapa Times-Age, 7 February 1941, Page 8

CIGARS FOR WOMEN

STORIES OF VICTORIAN DAYS. The arrival of the centenary year of the first making of cigars in England brings to mind a curious fact about feminine smoking. The general belief about early and middle Victorian women, a writer in the "Manchester Guardian" observes, was that they not only did not smoke themselves but that with a few exceptions, such as in the Frith family, they would not allow men to smoke in their rooms and demanded that their husbands and sons, if they must smoke, should wear a special dress for the purpose. But against this there is Lady Battersea (in "Lady de Rothschild and her Daughters") with this remarkable entry of the eighteen-fifties, when she herself was about fifteen: "We talked about ladies smoking in general and about Julia’s in particular. We all agreed that we did not like a lady to smoke regularly day after day but that at times a chance cigar is very pleasant"

Probably those “chance cigars’’ would not be of English manufacture, for English-made cigars had a hard struggle for recognition. I remember fifty years ago (writes a correspondent) staying in a Swiss hotel. My father, temporarily without Havanas, smoked for a day or two the long Swiss cigars Flor Vevey. Then supplies of his usual brand were obtained and he was greeted on the terrace by a compatriot woman with, "How delightful to smell your nice English cigars again!" lie was not pleased.