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Join Our Discord ServerTaken from… Preston Herald 4th April 1903.
According to the Master of Fulwood Workhouse the indoor paupers of Preston consume about a barrel of snuff and fourteen pounds of tobacco weekly, at a yearly cost of pounds 170 a year or more. These luxuries are not supplied to inmates under sixty years of age unless they are employed on some particularly disagreeable work.
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My warning…The use of the pounds symbol on this site cuts off all text after it.
Yeah, that’s a known issue. Also any non english letters like poschl’s umlaut. Anyway, very interesting history post. Glad they provided the old guys with taxpayer snuff anyway. Heh.
It wasn’t just the old guys, the old biddies got snuff at some workhouses.
I forget where it was, but I read recently about another Parish Union Workhouse supplying it to old ladies over the age of sixty if they were already using the stuff. Before the age of sixty quite a few received snuff by other means. Most probably from their visitors. A bit like visitors taking grapes to hospital patients nowadays or in the case of Stan and Ollie “Hard boiled eggs and nuts!”
How much volume in a barrel? With those amounts of tobacco, I assume the workhouse had a lot of inmates.
^Or a couple of guys (or ladies) like me.
If you use the “show source” option (top right of the comment box) you can use html for special characters. The you can replace the word pound with the code £ and it will show the symbol. In general if you are trying to post any text with symbols, diacritic marks or other things outside the basic roman alphabet, write your post in “show source” and add in the html codes you need:
http://www.starr.net/is/type/htmlcodes.html
And BTW, great news snippet. I picture crowds of old men standing around barrels of tobacco all day.
to demonstrate, “…at a yearly cost of £170 a year or more.”
It would be nice to have a Practice Posts Category were you can try out odd texts and adding photographs.
You could then see what happens to it all after you press the Post Comment button.
As for the barrel size, one article that I read was about a chap stealing two barrels of snuff. They were decribed as being about eight inches by fourteen inches in size.
@ArtChoo Thank you for those dimensions. I was picturing one of the really big ones. The size you stated would seem pretty appropriate for snuff. That is still a lot of snuff. These stories you post are really enjoyable. I hope that you will share more of them.
Just had a look on ebay UK and there are a couple of Wilsons snuff barrels.
One of them was fitted with a Bakelite lid in one end. I am not sure if loose snuff would have been kept in it or more likely the small pocket tins. The brass banded barrel being a shop display item.
They measure 7 x 5 inches.
@ArtChoo where do you find these fascinating stories?
It would make a nice collector’s item and the price isn’t bad at all.
If anybody wants it I don’t have the cash so go for it!
Aamon
That’s one of the barrels I was looking at.
The paper label has a small red tin of snuff in the centre, so I think these tubs did not hold loose snuff but were shop display items containing the small tins.
I find the newspaper articles on family history sites. Most give access to old newspapers going back to the 1700s .
Old libraries often have the local newspaper archives of the original printed article, but the internet has the bonus of a search engine.
I am watching this documentary on the workhouse. Dickens wrote about them but this documentary gets in-depth. For those of us in the US, this would be enlightening about how things were for the poor. Nice to see they were allowed some snuff, though. https://youtu.be/ikdlIMgFE6g