Cigarette Products:

The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 5:

Tobacco-pipe making was a flourishing industry at this period and throughout the seventeenth and following century in most of the chief provincial towns and cities as well as in London.

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The Social History of Smoking

George Latimer Apperson

Chapter 9:

A curious and popular variety of tobacco-box often to be found in rural inns and ale-houses was made somewhat on the principle of the now everywhere familiar automatic machines. The late Mr. Frederick Gale, in a column of "Tobacco Reminiscences," which he contributed to the Globe newspaper in 1899, said, that at village outdoor festivals of the 'thirties and early 'forties, respectable elderly farmers and tradesmen would sit "round a table, on which was an automatic, square, brass tobacco-box of large dimensions, into which the smokers dropped a halfpenny and the lid flew back, and the publican trusted to the smoker's honour to fill his pipe and close the box." When the pipes were filled they were lighted by means of tinder-box and flint, and a stable lanthorn supplied by the ostler. A penny would appear to have been a more usual charge, for a frequent inscription on the lid was:

The custom is, before you fill,
To put a penny in the till;
When you have filled, without delay
Close the lid, or sixpence pay.

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