Smokers' paradise lost as pipes are pocketed for good
Aphotograph of Tony Benn putting out his pipe and emitting clouds of smoke reminded me of what an old-fashioned Englishman he is. For who dares to smoke a pipe nowadays? When I was a boy in the Thirties, the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin, not only flourished his pipe publicly but also wrote essays about its benevolent effect on his thinking and actually endorsed his favourite mixture in advertisements.
In those times Popeye the Sailor Man smoked his pipe while demonstrating the virtues of healthy food such as spinach. Rudyard Kipling's pipe lay within easy reach of his left hand while he wrote, in Philip Bunie-Jones's famous portrait; J.B. Priestley described in detail how he fiddled with his pipes to get himself in the mood for work each morning, and the image of a thrillerwriter — Simenon or Raymond Chandler, for example — was incomplete without jaws firmly gripped round a briar.
Writing and pipe-smoking had by this stage become inseparable, the fashion having been set by Charles Lamb, whose prodigious feats of smoking, no less than his perennial attempts to 'leave off (as he put it), punctuate his letters and essays. Carlyle and Tennyson, the two emblematic Great Victorians in prose and verse, were both heroic pipe-men, and there is a treasured photograph of them, taken in the back garden at Carlyle's house in Cheyne Row, showing them sitting side by side and emitting volumes of dense smoke. Their instruments were long-stemmed clay pipes. Tennyson had a dozen or two at a time and smoked them in order, according to a weekly calendar. Carlyle was more particular. In the first place he would have nothing to do with English clay pipes and insisted on smoking Scotch ones sent down in quantity by his family. Moreover it was his one extravagance never to smoke a pipe more than once. When he retired to bed he placed his evening pipe on his Chelsea doorstep so that a poor man might find and enjoy it, I don't like pipes and grew to give pipesmokers a wide berth before I gave up smoking myself, 30 years ago. Pipe-men, I think, are insensitive and unaware of the discomfort they cause by their fumigations. In my office, decades ago, there was a fertile and fluent writer called Mervn Jones, son of Freud's biographer, and the only man I came across who could write a leader faster than I could. Mervyn had two characteristics: one was that he imagined a telephone was a hollow cord requiring strenuous vocal effort to get the voice to the other end, so that his phone calls could be heard all over Lincoln's Inn Fields. The other was his pipe, or rather his tobacco. It was not shag, but something far worse, which expanded indefinitely when exposed to the naked air, creating not so much a brumous haze as a caliginous microclimate. Once, when I had a cottage in the lower reaches of Glen Strathferrer in the northern Highlands. Mervyn came to stay for a few days and puffed contentedly within, while I sat outside gasping for air. When he finally left. I opened every door and window in the place, allowing the colossal winds that roar down the glen full permission to scour the place in a futile attempt to defumigate it. All to no avail. In the end, I summoned the priest who served the little church up the glen, and he brought his thurible and cense(' the house from top to bottom in a nicotine exorcism unique in the liturgy. That did the trick.
In my New Statesman days in the Fifties, pipes were common among the intelligentsia, being seen as 'democratic'. Did not Uncle Joe smoke one? Bertrand Russell certainly did, adding another dimension to the compound aroma of sartorial fustiness, halitosis and cerebral dandruff he carried around with him. The most technological of the smokers was Ritchie Calder, appropriately our science correspondent. He assembled with other luminaries every Monday at 10.30 a.m for our editorial conference. There were Dr Balogh and Barbara Castle, Professor Patrick Blackett, the defence expert (an object of intense interest to me for he had served as a midshipman in B Turret of Admiral Beatty's flagship at the battle of Jutland), and Gerald Gardiner, later lord chancellor, with others including Russell himself, though he was not often asked as Kingsley Martin, the editor, thought him 'too disruptive'. All these magi or magots eventually ascended to the House of Lords, on their way to oblivion. Calder was a Scot with an accent Kingsley occasionally found impenetrable, so that their dialogues were exasperated misunderstandings. 'That reminds me, Kingsley, of John Boadoor's fudbuds."Are you talking about Sir John Boyd Orr?"Aye, to be sure, and why not?' 'No reason at all, but I never knew him to take the slightest interest in football.' No, no, no, Kingsley, not fute-bul, fud-buds — Fucl-btards.' Food boards. It was never explained what these were — festive spreads?
Calder took the opportunity of these Monday conferences to conduct the weekly dismantling, inspection and cleaning of his smoking machine. This had thick and thin steel pipes in addition to Bakelite or wooden ones, and was a miracle of modern invention designed to protect the Calder lungs from nicotine. While the rest of us argued and thundered about female circumcision in Kenya, homosexual offences in the Mandated territories, monkish enormities in the Tibetan lamaseries and other topics dear to our readers' hearts, Calder would set about his task according to an immemorial routine. Kingsley did not like this at all, and sometimes said, 'Do you have to do that here, Ritchie?' `Aye, I dhu, Kingsley, so I have more time to devote to science and the interests of humanity.' But as the dismantling proceeded, pipe-cleaners were brought into nauseous use, and metallic bits were spread over the spotted handkerchief on Calder's lap, our interest shifted to the editorial business in hand, and the discussion became animated, not to say acrimonious, sometimes producing tears from Barbara and roars of rage from Balogh, clouds of steam rising from his bald pate. What we, and especially Kingsley, always forgot was that Calder, his excavations and scourings complete and the pipe reassembled, would celebrate the fact by producing a powerfulpe-ee-ee on its steel intestines. This penetrating whistle, rather like a bo'sun's pipe, blew the tops off our heads and reduced Kingsley to helpless rage, so that he sometimes made what we called his dying camel noise, strode from the room and took refuge with his gruesome cronies in the Savile Club.
A few left-wing women smoked pipes. Naomi Jacobs did, and Dorothy Sayers perhaps. So did Mrs Patrick Campbell, the divine Stella, though she preferred a 'stogie'. Such women are a vanished breed, and I have to search my mind hard to think of a single male friend who stills pulls his pipe and pouch from his pocket. I do not miss them. But I regret the passing of those old tobacconist's shops, redolent of ancient cuts, twists and shags, with the giant japanned tins, humidifiers and gas-jets and their ambrosial flavour of harmless luxury. Some were known as divana.
One, round the corner from my house, in Westbourne Grove, was called 'Smokers' Paradise'. It now serves thimblefuls of fiercely black coffee to politically correct single mothers and the like,
Previous page
