Same here, and as an ex smoker I have to admit I wasn’t any better… Referring to inhaling of pipe and cigar smoke.
Let me cheer you up, I had a pipe… Even whole two of them, actually. Or… Rather one and a half, for one was really small, made from cherry wood by a friend of mine; I mostly smoked rolling tobacco in it.
My grandfather had a pipe. He mainly smoked rustica with it. Rarely, though, for he was a cigarette smoker. I had spotted him filling his pipe with cigarette tobacco a couple of times. Literally, a tobacco taken out of a cigarette… He never had a proper pipe tobacco, not a single pouch. That is, as far as I remember. I doubt he knew anything about different types of tobacco, for him it was just either “mahorka” or cigarettes (and papiross, a thing of a bygone century).
My father, a cigarette smoker, had a pipe, too. He got it as a gift from some pipe-smoking friend of his, along with a pouch of Amphora, I believe. Or was it CB Cherry… Back then I was too young to notice if he inhaled the smoke, but it’s safe to assume so. Most probably he was warned to not inhale the smoke, yet… As far as I remember, he hadn’t bought a third pouch. He still has that pipe. It has seen things, but not in the hand of its owner. Heaps of mugwort and what not, blame me and my brother in our silly -eens…
“Puffing is a sinful waste of good thing” kind of approach is still prevalent where I’m at. Of course, it feels either suffocatingly strong or harsh, inhaled, so pipes and cigars aren’t popular here.
ahahah.pipes are misunderstood.I like that pipes “cool” the smoke ,making the smoke tolerable for the gums and tongue.and great taste.those damn cigs,they stain other forms of taking tabacco.Good for you that you stopped inhaling,life is a bit better now,eh?
Mahorka.I think i heard some stories from my father and my great grand father about it.Old people used it.It disapeared after 1989,never to return again.Maybe in the form of rustica snuff,who knows!
“Puffing is a sinfull waste” sounds eerily like a cigarette ad :))))
What about toque?aren’t they a new producer which is doing rather fine in past years?
Toque Snuff was dissolved 16 April 2020. It was wound up by the provisions of the Insolvency Act 1986. The brand name is now owned by Sneeshyn whoever he is or they are.
Companies House holds records on UK businesses. Both Wilsons of Sharrow and McCrystals are floating along for now but net assets and profit/loss demonstrate just what a tiny and vulnerable niche the UK snuff manufacturing ‘industry’ is today.
Oh I did enjoy the hit of pipe tobaccos and cigars, as well as loved the taste and smell of smoke. Inhaled smoke, I mean. It’s a shame it’s really not suited for inhaling, tho. I tried really hard - mind you, most of my pipe tobaccos haven’t met a pipe. Maybe 1/5 of all the baccy I had I smoked properly, and by “properly” I only mean smoking it in a pipe. The rest part was turned to rollies and snuff. However, rolled up it wasn’t any easier on lungs. I wasn’t aware back then that Scandinavian pipe tobaccos which I gave a whirl to contained quite a few more ingredients than aromas… I wish I knew of the existence of pure, non-flavoured pipe tobacco blends when I still was a smoker.
The shrinking snuff clientele becomes even more apparent when compared with output in the late 18th century. In 1789/1790 the Excise Officer (John Harding) recorded 208,000 lbs of manufactured snuff by Sales & Pollard from mid-October 1789 to mid-March 1790. Based on these figures, their annual output, therefore, would have been just shy of 500,000 lbs. This, by just a single manufacturer of many, compares with 273,742 lbs total output in 1982 as recorded by The Society of Snuff Grinders, Blenders and Purveyors (of which Vivian Rose snuff-man of G. Smith’s was a member).
Toque have moved to the Isle of Man some years ago, when they found the new annual mandatory notification costs of all the tobacco products they… sell, let’s put it like this, too high to continue carrying on their business in a proper manner. Roderick was fairly open about it here on Snuffhouse.
One (most probably) wouldn’t find a single Toque product on a List of tobacco and related products notified under SI 2016/507. However, I managed to find only a couple of files - from the year 2017 and 2020, and I’m not sure if the latter is the latest and up-to-date.
Cost reduction relocation.If it makes sense,why not?
If a company can reduce their operating costs and keep a good end user price,go for it.It isn’t like it affects the job market,most snuff manufacturers have less than 10 employees,right?
I still remember the impact of TPD in the UK with the reduction in ranges and renaming of some of the surviving varieties. It seemed like the beginning of the end then but we’re still here.
In my country, Argentina, I met snuff during the COVID pandemic. I know a guy who got fond of it in that time too. Anyway, I do not think it will become popular in the future: as I learned in another thread here on the forum, the snuff that we legally get is old (though it smells better than some neftobak that I tried years ago) and the company is currently not importing new snuff.
Besides this, a couple of things I want to share:
When I showed my snuffbox to a friend of mine, he told me that the jewish branch of his family always kept a box for some occassions. Now he gets some of my snuff and it brings him good memories his childhood.
There is some people who makes a religious ritual use of snuff. I refer to shamans and the like. I think this mode of using snuff is on the rise in my latitudes. It is even the only form of fresh snuff that I can get (the so-called “Amazonian snuff”), although my religious beliefs go other ways.
I believe young people these days dont appreciate traditions and they might low key want to change/ destroy them… And appreciate more the spiritual boo-hoo “woke/ awakened/ enlightment” bullshit fairytales… Many of them see tradition as the stem to all their problems (problems with their parents usually lol).
Thats why Amazonian snuff is becoming more popular in youngsters than traditional snuff.
They are treating it like the other drugs they swallow like candy (pills, coke etc.).
They want to feel some form of a drug effect from it and combined with the “shaman/ spiritual” bullshit it is the perfect marketing for this confused generation.
They advertising it like it is magic and you are gonna feel so much deep shit and also the high pricing for small quantity bottles that they are selling is spot on. This generation might think it deserves to be that high priced probably because they treating it like a drug and it make sense to their head that if they pay 80 bucks for a gram of coke then 10g of Amazonian spiritual powder with magical effects for 40 bucks is reasonable price for them…
Try to talk to young man about F&T High Dry Toast and its history/ tradition and then try to talk to them about “spiritual/ woke” bullshit and Amazonian snuff rituals… They are gonna choose the second one and get hyped about it like its a miracle… This is sad because it shows me that young guys nowadays are seeking a quick fix to their life problem maybe (?) and clearly the majority of them dont even know themselves or what life is about…
I am 32 years old and back when I was younger we all have the common sense to separate the frauds from the reals… if anyone pushed those woke spiritual magical bullshit (that these days is a trend) back then they will all laugh at him because these are Middle-Age stuff really… If back in the day I was offered an Amazonian snuff with the spiritual descriptions and effects they claim to have I will probably not even accept to try it because it stinks fraud from kilometers away…
Not to mention health warnings. I was dismayed sometime in the late 1980’s (or early 1990s, I forget the year) when snuff containers were suddenly marked, straight out of the blue, with the words CAUSES CANCER.
The advertisement campaign had a positive effect but it was short-term. Geoff Capes (the World’s Strongest Man) endorsed Hedges L260 snuff at athletics events and his picture appeared on advertisements with the caption Lift Sales by a clear head. J&H Wilson’s, meanwhile splashed out advertisements claiming that they were more famous for pinching than the Italians. (For anyone born in the PC era, unlike old duffers like me, this referred to the Italian habit of pinching desirable ladies’ bottoms.) I’ve dug down into my archives to show the advertisements which were displayed.
Imagine the furious backlash if these advertisements went out today. The Geoff Capes advert equates physical health and mental well-being with tobacco while the J&H Wilsons advert is demeaning to woman.
The figure of 273,742 lbs I supplied earlier was for domestic sales (UK) in 1981. Export sales were slightly less at 233,893 lbs. The total manufactured output of snuff in 1981 was therefore 507,635 lbs. J&H Wilsons and Illingworth’s made up the bulk of output. Both Houses are no more.
Although the Society which compiled the figure no longer exists it would be revealing to know output in 2023.
There were 247,000 coal miners in the UK in the late 1970’s. According to a contemporary trade journal miners would consume a small box/tin of snuff per shift. Obviously not every miner was a smoker/snuffer but taking a conservative estimate of 100,000 snuffing miners over a week with five shifts meant around half a million containers of snuff consumed each week. According to the journal, Illingworth’s was the largest supplier to the mining industry followed by J&H Wilsons. The collapse of the coal industry together with the tobacco retail market slump was the death warrant for many snuff manufacturers including the two mentioned above.
Another loss which I forgot to mention was Tranter’s. Although they have survived, Tranter’s no longer offer, to the best of my knowledge, snuff. They once sold snuff in the same tall tins as Fribourg & Treyer albeit with a paper label on a plain tin.
Anyway, here are 1965 price lists for some of those business’ that no longer survive. Some readers may find them interesting and they make for nostalgic reading for older ones who remember the old shillings and pence.
My word! Thirty bob for a snuff tin. Just goes to show how inflation has soared. Here is the Sharrow List for 1965, my earliest.
The ‘Bottom Mill’ brand by Wilsons of Sharrow was an attempt to duplicate the popular ‘Top Mill’ by J & H Wilsons. Note how much more expensive Sharrow’s highest grade snuff (Gold Label) was - made exclusively from Kentucky leaf.
If Mark Chaytor’s 1962 claim that ‘Gold Label’ is the company’s oldest snuff which has remained unchanged is to be believed (and there is no reason why it shouldn’t) it is Britain’s oldest snuff brand, beating ‘Kendal Brown’ by around ten to twenty years. The name Gold Label (like ‘Royal George’) is, I believe, unique to Sharrow. It possibly derives from the colour of the paper label glued to snuff containers upwards of 10lb which became mandatory in the 1770s, the gold denoting the highest grade of American leaf used by Wilsons. (Perhaps someone with knowledge of revenue labels can chime in here.) Gold Label is mentioned by Roy Genders in his ‘History of Scent’ as among the very earliest of Sharrow snuffs. Rappee snuff is older but of course that’s not a brand name.
Closure of Sharrow just doesn’t bear thinking about and one can only admire the Wilson family at Sharrow Mills for their tenacious survival and business acumen in the face of adversity since 1737. They survived the bankruptcy of Joseph Wilson the First, the Lundy Affair, the very damaging Top SP Affair, German incendiary bombs in 1940 and tax hikes. They also survived the mortal threat when their doorstep rivals (J & H Wilson) was taken over by a tobacco Colossus in the shape of Imperial. And they have survived the collapse of those industries associated with snuff-taking as well as the wholesale closure of tobacco retailers.
Frankly, I’m a little surprised that they are still with us – but am profoundly grateful they are, and may they continue snuff-making for many, many years to come.
Thank you for all your inputs on this thread.It is a great source of snuff debate,history and predictions!
Every member of the snuff world can learn a thing of two from this.I learned a lot,great people here!
