AND ANOTHER THING
Filthy foreigners going up in smoke
PAUL JOHNSON
Few people combine knowledge, ele- gance and common sense as effortlessly as Drusilla Beyfus, and it is no surprise that her new book on etiquette, Modern Man- ners (Hamlyn, £16.99), is a model of practi- cal wisdom. Of course one can argue with some of her rulings. She is not tough enough, in my view, on adulterers and homosexuals, especially the latter. Why should a hostess make special provision for `gays' who come to stay bringing their `friends', or indeed invite them in the first place? After all, other guests may not like living in the same house with people who could have Aids. On the other hand, she deals with the smoking issue judiciously. She rules that even 'considerate hosts' may `draw the line at smoking'. Well, so I should think. Some people still light up in your drawing-room without permission or apolo- gy, or puff smoke at you from the next table in a restaurant just as you are beginning your meal. But opinion is moving fast against smokers in both America and Britain: on this issue the Atlantic is narrow- er than the Channel. Dr Johnson observed in 1778: 'The French are a gross, ill-bred, untaught people: a lady there will spit on the floor and rub it with her foot.' In his day, courtiers would urinate in the stair- wells at Versailles but they did not dare smoke in the salons. Today, he would be forced to notice, even members of the Academie Francaise will smoke all through dinner in a three-star restaurant without the smallest consideration for their neigh- bours. Italians are just as bad, the Spanish still worse; even the Scandinavians have not yet got the point. Differences over smoking are resurrecting all the old distinctions between Anglo-Saxons and filthy foreign-
ers.
What neither the smokers themselves, nor cowardly people who put up with them, will admit is that smoking, by its nature, is an outdoor activity, like playing football or walking a dog. It crept indoors only for a comparatively brief period. James I, in his Counterblaste to Tobacco (1604), thought it unconscionable that anyone should smoke in a house. Most men, he argued, only took up smoking because they saw others doing it, and as for women, he blamed the wicked smoking husband who may 'reduce thereby his delicate, wholesome and clean-complex- ioned wife to that extremity that either she must also corrupt her sweet breath there- with, or else resolve to live in a perpetual stinking torment'. Most opinion agreed with him. Even many alehouses forced smokers to sit on a bench outside. Houses were sacrosanct. As late as 1855, Bishop Murray of Rochester wrote to a correspon- dent: 'Yes, it is true that I have appointed Mr — to Wouldham. But oh! If 1 had only known ... that when he came here the other day to be instituted he actually smoked in the bedroom! He never would have had that living!' A perfect gentleman did not do such a thing or at least puffed the smoke straight up his bedroom chim- ney. If he smoked on the house steps or ter- race, which was allowed, he took care 'not to allow the faintest whiff of smoke to pen- etrate into the hall'.
In the view of one historian, Jill Franklin (The Gentleman's Country House and its Plan, 1835-1914), the rot indeed set in with a filthy foreigner, in the shape of the Prince Consort. Osborne, which he designed and had built in the 1840s, was perhaps the ear- liest house in England with a smoking room. At first these places were deliberate- ly made remote, at the end of Stygian corri- dors or up towers: to get to the 'summer smoking room' in the castle William Burges designed for Lord Bute at Cardiff in 1868, you had to climb 101 steps, no easy matter if, as was likely, you were already suffering from emphysema. Disaster really struck when the smoking room was put next to the billiard room, thus bringing together two bad habits — not for nothing did the great Herbert Spencer lay down: 'A proficiency in billiards is a sure sign of a misspent youth.' According to Miss Franklin, fast women had made forays into the billiard `We are a recording artiste...' room as early as the 1840s. They invaded it en masse in the 1860s. In the 1870s, they stepped through the communicating door into the smoking room, and there whipped those nasty little mother-of-pearl cigarette cases out of their velvet reticules and lit up shamelessly.
Once women were party to the indoor smoking conspiracy the rules began to break down completely. Men now smoked openly in front of ladies and in any part of the house. On the eve of the first world war, the stiffer element was fighting a los- ing battle and, in the general slaughter, the anti-smoking barriers went down every- where. By the 1920s, Bright Young Things were smoking even in dining-rooms. The climate of opinion in the inter-war age was such that advertising campaigns were run to persuade flappers to take up smoking for the sake of their health, as an alternative to fattening chocolates. In the 1950s, people, led by women, were beginning to smoke between courses and by the 1960s they thought nothing of dropping cigarette stubs on carpets during parties.
In short, indoor smoking has lasted only a century, is a matter of cumulative small encroachments, and is marked by an accompanying rise in gross and disgusting behaviour. What we need to do is put the clock back equally persistently and firmly. I am no enemy of the right to smoke. Last week's US Supreme Court ruling that printing health warnings on cigarette pack- ets is no defence against suits for damages, which will set off an avalanche of vexatious litigation by cancer victims or their heirs against tobacco companies, is a disastrous denial of the fundamental moral doctrine of personal responsibility. Our own domes- tic restrictions on cigarette advertising are a form of censorship and the European Com- munity proposals of the gruesome Madame Papandreou are absolutely outrageous. While approving EEC subsidies of £600 million a year to the Greek tobacco indus- try, she is simultaneously waging a cam- paign against Anglo-American advertising agencies and wants to force old-fashioned tobacconists to take down charming metal signs which have been part of our streetscapes for 150 years. All this fanati- cism, especially when it is self-interested, must be fought by tolerant, fair-minded people, smokers and non-smokers alike. But let us bring the habit where it belongs, out into the open.
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