Unofficial Christ's Hospital Forum

In the thread ‘The Manual School’, the suggestion was made of setting up a new thread about Smoking. Although I never smoked at CH, I’ll start it.

The area behind the Manual School was a favourite haunt for smokers, so the Manual School thread included plenty of references to smoking. But what intrigued me was the apparent deduction from Misterbee‘s post that he was expelled after “Mr Ingledew caught me selling five fags to friend outside the Manual School”.

Was smoking itself then an expellable offence, or was it the selling? What’s the smoking situation for pupils in 2014? Did girls smoke at Hertford?

Smoking was fairly widely practised on the last morning of term,generally on the trains going home,
Where did people obtain the cigarettes from .? I assume that parents would not have supplied them to their offspring
What were regulations about the selling of tobacco to juveniles in the forties and fifties? Was there anything in the school rules book about smoking not being permitted ?

I never smoked myself, then or since. But circa 1960, smoking was widespread. A widely used source was a filling station at Toat Hill on the A 264 beyond Itchingfield. The Bird Sanctuary was a venue for this among other nefarious activities.

Given how well the stink of cigarette smoke clung to CH garb, and given that in those days most cigarettes left noticeable brown stains on the hands, and given that most housemasters weren't totally stupid, I can only imagine that the problem was deliberately ignored unless you were foolish enough to be caught in flagrante.

But then in those days even the doctor smoked.

There was a section in the Rule Book: Section M (Various) The following are forbidden: -> clause 6: 'The purchase, possession or use of smoking materials.'

There was an earlier thread about masters smoking in classrooms.
Kit Aitken used to advise leaving Old Blues about not smoking in the day room when returning to visit C, H.
I am sure that visiting parents would have smoked in various enclosed areas but doubt whether they would have allowed their sons so to do.
I can remember Corks smoking his pipe in the dormitory.

When AH Buck was housemaster of Col B he would come into the dormitory smoking a cigar and tip the ash into his trouser turnup.

I remember Pat Cullen cleaning his pipe on the dayroom curtains in ThB. He looked suitably sheepish when this was pointed out to him.

The curtains were admittedly rather shabby, and I thought little of it at the time, but thinking back now... Really!

Kit Bartlett wrote:Kit Aitken used to advise leaving Old Blues about not smoking in the day room ...

Kit treated smoking very severely. On the other hand, he avoided noticing boys drinking if they didn't make it obvious. He was a formative influence on me. Thankyou, Kit, for keeping me away from tobacco, and thankyou for allowing me to start developing my taste for beer, wine and whisky.

Although it has to be said that the beer and the commercial whiskies of those days, and the wine that I could afford in my student days, meant that I developed a very poor taste, which it has been the study of decades to rectify.

I once had a bottle of retsina which Kit feigned not to recognise as a drink. He had a point.

I was thinking that most adult men smoked ca. 1960, but then thinking of the staff then, I suspect that smokers were a minority. There were the pipe men (Cullen, the doctor, Jack Massen, Seaman occasionally) and those notorious nicotine addicts Matthews, JH Page and Reggie Dean. But who else?

D.S.Macnutt smoked a pipe.

michael scuffil wrote: ....and those notorious nicotine addicts Matthews, JH Page and Reggie Dean. But who else?

Another chain smoker was Pongo Littlefield. But unlike others somehow he kept his fingers scrupulously clean.

Fal Matthews, probably the most addicted of them all (and called ‘Mustapha fag’ by some), once received a young Peele B OB, who was making a visit to CH a couple of years after leaving school. Fal offered him a cigarette. “No thank you Sir” was the reply. “I gave that up when I left school”.

C J Miller (Ba B Housemaster) smoked a pipe which he occasionally forgot to extinguish properly before putting it in his pocket during evening prayers.
Looking back, I can't recall anyone on my year in Barnes B who smoked, at least not at CH, nor on the year above, although the next year up had various smokers, Major, Mayheux as I recall.
I know there were smokers in other houses but it was rare for anyone to be caught or for the reprimand to transcend the house.
Not being a smoker, are pipes dummy substitutes?

I suspect Reggie Dean was the most seriously addicted, though as he played such a small role in CH life outside the classroom, it wasn't noticed so much. But there was no such thing as a 'double lesson' with Reggie, only two consecutive single lessons interrupted by his five-minute smoking break in the corridor, when he would chat with his classroom neighbour, Whitfeld (a non-smoker, I think).

Roger Martin regularly smoked a pipe and usually had a puff during the 5 minute break between lessons. One morning he came in having extinguished said pipe and put it in his jacket pocket. Ten minutes later his pocket was producing great plumes of accrid smoke. This was followed by a rather embarrassed Dr Martin stating

"Sorry folks - I seem to have set myself on fire!"

It took a couple of minutes for him to put it out and the rest of the lesson was sidetracked whilst we talked about various fire-related issues.

alterblau wrote: Did girls smoke at Hertford?

Yes they did. behind the chapel (so I believe!) was one of the places and possibly behind the science block.

My Dad had smoked a pipe; we had a close family friend, a country doctor, who smoked a pipe pretty well continuously all day long; so it seemed obvious to me that as I grew up, I would smoke a pipe too. It was a disappointment to find that it is a messy, wet and fussy business; and after a teenage party (during the holidays) when I bravely smoked an entire pipebowlful at one go and made myself quite ill, I gave up on the pipe dream.
Cigarettes never appealed to me. I tried them a couple of times and was unimpressed.
But then, around the age of 16, I discovered cigarillos, and was hooked; I smoked them on and off for the next forty years.
For its 1962 Shakespeare production, CH put on A Midsummer Night's Dream, and in addition to doing a show as usual in the Horsham theatre after the performances at the school, took it on tour in the Netherlands: to Amsterdam, Eindhoven, and Den Helder. (I think Mike Scuffil has written about this trip elsewhere on the Forum.) In the UK, cigarillos were still rather exotic, but in Holland, they were very common, and cheap. The staff in charge of the trip (David Jesson-Dibley was one, I don't remember who else was with us) seem to have simply decided that school rules about smoking didn't apply. (I don't remember about drinking, but probably they didn't apply either.) I tried a couple of different brands and then found a brand sold in wooden boxes of maybe 100, dirt cheap, and set about working my way through the box. They were terrible, but I'd invested in them ... Eventually I threw the box out of the train window to get rid of them and got myself a decent brand.