Having watched a few old movies over the Christmas break it really emphasised to me the dominant part played by smoking in everyday life as depicted by the film stars and then imitated by everyone else. It really was cool and sophisticated to light up and be enveloped in tobacco smoke whilst in general conversation, a dramatic or life threatening situation or even in the foreplay process with the opposite sex pending inter and post war love-making in fully clothed form and with both feet firmly planted on the ground.
As a youngster I ,of course, experimented with cigarettes but found it an unsustainable hobby on a cost basis. It was not so much the price of buying a packet of ten number six brand but the add-on's of a number of packets of Polo Mints to disguise the filthy habit from my parents. My smoking career started and ended within a matter of wheezy, catarrh inducing weeks at the age of 11.
I like to think that I gave it up on health grounds and with aspirations to be an athlete whereas in reality my Mum found me out.
In the last three decades there has been a squeeze on smoking to such an extent that it appears that only the hardcore participants and new starters are active. The ban on smoking in public places was the death knell for any social benefits that had long since been associated with it. Being able to offer a ciggy to a girl on a train, for example, was a good way of making an introduction and I saw it practiced successfully many a time on rail journeys in the 1980's whilst sat on my own at the other end of a carriage.
Nowadays, and as far from the golden age of smoking as possible, there is a distinct ugliness about someone holding a lit cigarette, standing forlornly outside their place of work or hiding in a smoking shelter in the beer garden of a public house. The only refuge now for a smoker may be in their vehicles whilst driving but don't get me started on my viewpoint of a dog-end being ejected out of an open car window into the street.
Unfortunate collateral damage for the decline in smoking cigarettes has been the virtual disappearance of the far more genteel and civilised art of pipe smoking.
I have a vested interest in mourning the demise of this activity in that my Grandad Dick was a lifelong pipe smoker.
The aromatic tobacco smell was very distinctive to our young noses but gave a overall sense of calm and contemplation whenever we were around our Grandad.
It was a ritual and art form to prepare the pipe to receive the tobacco. In the first instance it had to be cleared and cleaned of any residual debris from an earlier smoke and the paraphernalia for that was, to my memory, a small penknife blade and a wired, flexible pipe cleaner. I do not think that they are even manufactured today but were both fit for purpose and also to create sculptured figures of people or animals.
The tobacco was stored in small yellowish coloured metal tin with a tight fitting lid either bought as such or refilled from loose tobacco purchased at the local tobacconists. We would often give a new supply of his favourite brand, Erinmore, on birthdays and at Christmas.
I got the impression from watching my Grandad light up that this was the most skilful bit and warranting concentration and not a little huffing and puffing to force the mix to ignite under the flare of the match. Once active the sweet odour would waft and drift about. In the back of the black Austin A30 or A35, on a trip out, it was all pervading but we were happy to inhale and participate in the whole ceremonial performance that was smoking a pipe.
The risks associated with passive smoking in this way were, I am now led to believe, only 10% higher than non smokers. So, it was comparatively healthy as well as very civilised.
My Grandad lived up to the image of a pipe smoker. In much the same way as it is said that the rate at which you clean the lenses of your glasses is the speed at which your mind is operating, the pipe induced an opposite feeling of working to an altogether different set of conventions of time and effort.
My Uncle David told me about two such incidences of the place that the pipe held in his father's life.
When, as a young Carpenter working on a building site in Croydon, South London, he was summoned by the Foreman who, splendidly attired in a bowler hat, remarked officiously "If you knocked in as many nails as you light matches, we'd have finished the job by now".
In his later employment as Chief Rent Collector for Dunstable Town Council in Bedfordshire his job was to visit each house on the various residential estates to collect, in cash, the weekly rents. On foot, this gave him plenty of time to light up his pipe and in the resulting helpful and sociable frame of mind he would spend time with the tenants over a cup of tea in their kitchens or even help with little tasks drawing on his carpentry and gardening skills. His Manager at the Rent Office complained at the time it took for my Grandad to do his rounds. Unfortunately any plausible explanation of distances walked or the absence of tenants being responsible was spoiled by the fact that the Relief Collector, filling in whilst my Grandad was on holiday, completed the same task by mid afternoon.
The heyday of the pipe culminated in an Annual Award presented to a prominent public figure and from 1965 to 2003 the winners included Harold Wilson (1965), Peter Cushing (1968), Magnus Magnusson (1978), Ian Botham (1988), Rod Hull (1993) and the last recipient, Stephen Fry. The Award was scrapped in 2004. Iconic images of the pipe remain with fictional characters such as the detective and genius Sherlock Holmes and a lot of Hobbits and Dwarf's in the image of their creator, J R R Tolkein, a known partaker. The innocence of a tobacco pipe has also been hijacked by the negative images of use in drug culture.
My own memories around the art of pipe smoking are however strong and unsullied. I can still conjure up the smell of my Grandad's regular tobacco and the tap-tap sound of the pipe on a door jamb or fence post when exhausted of its contents.
Half hearted revivals have been attempted by fresh faced college graduates and beardy weirdo poseurs but I contend that pipe smoking was of a certain period and suited a specific temperament and character of person who enjoyed life and the company of others to the full. As they say, if you do not agree with my theory then "put it in your pipe and smoke it!".
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