Maybe our souls are just part of the shared spirit of
creation and, maybe, we also know, deep down, that all living things share in
it and that is why every shot bird or mammal and every landed fish touches us;
even though God gave man dominion over all creatures and they provide us with
food and clothing.
I also think that some inanimate objects can be
possessed of what we recognize as a kind of soul: look at, say a 1931 eight
litre Bentley (the last in the W O Bentley direct line and only one hundred
made); or a Joseph Manton musket; or the revolutionary 1875 prototype boxlock shotgun
(bearing a commemorative plate), patented by Anson & Deeley of Westley
Richards in 1875; or a fragile first edition (1859) of Edward FitzGerald’s
translation of the Rubiáyát of Omar
Khayyám.
Such things as these are also touched with a kind of spirit. It was even said
of Rosa Lewis’s old Cavendish Hotel ; in a fond farewell to the old place, in
October 1962, and before it went to join the Tabard and the Mermaid Inns, The
New Statesman said that the site of the hotel at the junction of Jermyn
Street and Duke Street had become a ‘mysterious space-time inn at a
metaphysical junction ’.
The great London tobacconists that I have been
privileged to have known had atmospheres, auras, presences: Sullivan Powell in
the Burlington Arcade, selling its majestic, great, tightly rolled, sweet,
robust and untipped sub rosa Oriental Cigarettes, in their black
and gold boxes of twenty five or a hundred, swathed in thick tissue paper; even
unlit their aroma wooed the nostrils of the gods. Benson & Hedges were in
Bond Street, with their elegant, oval Cairo Cigarettes, sold in
turquoise boxes, and venerable Fribourg & Treyer (est. 1720) were near the
top of Haymarket and in here, if you listened very carefully, you could still
hear Beau Brummell’s retreating footsteps after placing his very last order of
their Old Paris and Macouba snuffs.
Alas! All gone. Mercifully, at least, the frontage of
32 Haymarket is preserved and Wilsons of Sharrow took over the Fribourg &
Treyer snuff receipts and still produce their snuffs.
Sullivan Powell’s whole range of cigarettes and Benson
& Hedges’ Cairo Cigarettes were the sudden victims of
over-regulation by the European Union banning all cigarettes with more than
fifteen milligrammes of tar. The playwright John Osborne said in an
incandescent letter to The Times:
“As a schoolboy I narrowly escaped from ‘European’
bombs on my doorstep. I can forgive this eagerness, but not the compounding of
the insult by dashing the tobacco from my lips forty years on”.
Fribourg & Treyer, one of London’s oldest
surviving businesses, and still successful as a tobacconist and snuff chandler,
was taken over, in the early 1980s, by Imperial Tobacco, which moved them out
and then shut them down.
Every time that I first missed these shops, I felt the
same mingled disbelief, confusion and anger that I had felt when I first found
Sulka gone from Bond Street. Disbelief and confusion because it is difficult to
believe that such wonderful shops, that have been an important living part of
the London landscape, can just disappear without so much as a murmur of protest
or a tear of regret, and then anger that they have actually gone.
In the last year at least three more great
tobacconists have shut down: first, Shervington’s (formerly John Brumfitt, who
popularized Romeo y Julieta Havanas) in Holborn Bars; then S Weingott
& Son (where Rumpole most certainly must have bought his small cigars),
just outside the Temple, in Fleet Street and now G Smith & Sons in the
Charing Cross Road. I imagine that, with the coming into force of the total ban
on advertising and displaying tobacco products, most of the nation’s remaining
small tobacconists (often also sweet shops and newsagents), will fall like
ninepins; family businesses will be wiped out and their staff, in the midst of
national bankruptcy postponed, will be put on the dole, to join the thousands
already there by virtue of pub closures, in the wake of the public smoking ban,
which was ostensibly introduced to protect employees from pub patrons’ smoke.
Whoever dreamed up the policy for all this over-regulation lives, I warrant,
either down a rabbit hole or behind a looking glass.
Those who govern the nation tell us that we live in a
‘Big Society’ of tolerance, inclusivity, classlessness and liberalism but,
excuse me, I do not feel beneficially either ‘tolerated’ or ‘included’ when I
am encouraged, with so much misplaced and forcible enthusiasm, to give up good
tobacco, which John Osborne rightly described as “one of life’s few and
reliable pleasures”. Moreover, I deeply resent it when this misplaced
encouragement comes from ‘bullies’ who masquerade as ‘liberals’ in a society
which is most notably ‘Big’ in being in economic free-fall and social decay.
The legislative process has very swiftly moved from a position of tolerance
(say, in decriminalizing homosexual practices) to the point at which we may now
even marry our best male friend but, somehow, we may not lawfully join him in a
cigar in the smoking room of a private club which was established to provide a
place for men to sit around, and smoke, and drink and talk. The statute book
reflects a very queer state of affairs indeed, resulting from twisted,
tendentious reasoning, based on skewed or irrelevant evidence. A small,
unventilated and smoke-filled bar might well present a health risk to a barman
who works there all day, every day, for thirty years but show me a Carlton Club
servant who has developed a smoking-related illness as a result of the smoking
room activities of its members and note, as we pass, that at least one ‘New
Labour’ member of parliament wished to excuse working men’s clubs from the
smoking ban; presumably because they all agreed with John Osborne that smoking
is indeed one of life’s few and reliable pleasures.
Very shortly, most remaining tobacco sales will have
to be conducted through internet transactions and any remaining tobacconist
shops will become blank-fronted stores reminiscent of Soho’s seedy old
pornographers (before they felt able to set window displays suggestive of their
wares) and all remaining tobacco shop customers will feel obliged to dart in
and out of them in mufflers and macs, with hats pulled well down because,
gradually, smoking tobacco is being branded a perversion; one of the many
modern British taboos, dreamed up by tin-Hitlers and enforced by their
jobsworths who have jumped out of the walls at us: wagging their fingers,
rattling their clipboards and brandishing their regulations and cheap biros;
telling us that they presume to tell us what is best for us .
What is actually best for us is to reclaim the lost
land of true liberalism and true conservatism, which have been displaced by
policies of commercialism and popularity-at-any-cost, developed as Thatcherism
and taken to new highs (or lows) by the monstrous architects of so-called ‘New
Labour’ and now the current leaders of the consensus-coalition-in-conflict. For
me, reclaiming that lost land means revisiting the principles of J S Mill’s ‘On
Liberty’ and understanding the basis of Disrraeli’s Tory democracy, as well
as understanding and accepting that we are not all created equal in this world
at all. Such understanding and acceptance of the real diversity of
society is the foundation stone for our mutual compassion towards this “poor,
frail, fallen humankind”.
It is the rank intolerance which is behind all the
banning, as well as the control- freakery, that really sticks in my craw. Who
do these people think that they are? In his book “State of Fear”, Michael
Crichton mentions a woman who founded a movement to ban di-hydrogen monoxide
because “it can cause drowning”. A number of morons then supported her
'movement' to ban water, which very nicely suggests that those keen on
banning things are not necessarily armed with any knowledge or powers of
reasoning or even appreciation of all the consequences of what they are doing.
It seems that they are just empowering themselves at the expense of others’
enjoyments. That sounds more like a perversion to me than does smoking tobacco.
If the fox-hunting ban bribe to the chattering
classes, in return for backing Blair’s invasion of Iraq, had ever been
effective as legislation, thousands of hounds would, presumably, have been
destroyed (as they are not pet dogs) and all paid hunt staff would have been
put out of work; all for the sake of banning one effective means of controlling
a wantonly destructive pest which (most seem to agree) needs to be controlled
in some way.
The fact that the tastes and values of the urban
rabble and chattering classes are increasingly pandered to by ignorant and
thoughtless bullies most certainly does not make modern Britain a tolerant,
inclusive, classless or liberal society at all. It is time to take a real
stand against all the flummery and to support organizations such as FOREST; the
Countryside Alliance, and the British Association for Shooting and
Conservation; otherwise, you can bet your bottom dollar that it will not be
long before there are serious moves to outlaw the actual possession and use of
tobacco and to ban shooting.
Why not take a leaf out of the book of the distillers
and brewers? They, despite the devastation caused by alcohol abuse (ranging
from alcohol-induced dementia and sudden death to vehicle accidents causing
death and permanent injury to wholly innocent by-standers), seem to have done
rather better (by lobbying) than just to avoid tighter controls on the purchase
and consumption of alcohol and have even managed to abolish licensing hours
altogether. Where were the tight-lipped puritans then?
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