When I was a student, I somehow got a Christmas job at Belfast’s most up-market tobacconist, an impressive emporium called Leahy, Kelly and Leahy, right next to where the original English castle of Belfast stood, at Castle Junction, where most of the trams and buses passed.
I served behind the counter, selling tins and packets of pipe tobacco (plug, sliced and ready-rubbed) such as Three Nuns (which I smoked), St Bruno (which I and a friend smoked), Condor, Escudo, Ardath, Erinmore, Mick McQuaid, Murray's Mellow Mixture, Walnut Plug, mouth-numbing War Horse, St.Julian, Dunhill, Balkan Sobranie, Rich Dark Honeydew. Some of these were made by Gallahers in Northern Ireland, others were made by Carrolls in Dundalk on the other side of the Irish border. They were blends of tobaccos such as Burleigh, Latakia, Shag, Truffle...Some were grown in Turkey, some in Yugoslavia (Bosnia & Herzegovina).
Many had rum added, and sometimes other flavours. If tobacco dried out, a slice of apple in the plastic-lined leather pouch or tin revived it overnight.
I sold hundreds of packets of cigarettes, and once escorted a customer to the Cigar Room, where Mr Leahy and a humidor on an impressive mahogany table received him.
I also dispensed snuff to old women in black shawls.
Business was brisk at Christmas and, though I was always bad at counting and doing sums in my head, I think most people got the right change. But snuff had to be carefully weighed in a delicate old-fashioned balance with weights and a pan. Ever sympathetic to poor ‘shawlies’ I gave them generous amounts above the quarter-ounces they asked for. I liked being carelessly generous at the expense of a thriving business.
But of course, a day of reckoning was bound to come…when a shawlie refused the services of a colleague and asked for me personally, telling her shawlie friend that she always got good measure from the man with the beard and glasses.
So I was dismissed, having relieved the august establishment of several pipes, several ounces of tobacco and a handful of half-coronas. The old women missed me.
I gave up pipe-smoking in my forties, but occasionally now, in my eighties, I savour a wonderful American mix generously donated by a friend, calling itself Black Truffle. I follow it up with mellow cognac, and continue reading my book.
The unforgettable Joseph Stalin was a heavy cigarette smoker, but he thought pipe-smoking would add to his stature.
So he took up the pipe. filling it with cigarette-tobacco, which he probably and heinously inhaled.
Britain's prime minister Harold Wilson also used his pipe to great effect.
 |
| Old tin and my current meerschaum + amber pipe. |
 |
| Belfast's Castle Place in the 1950s with two types of tram, trolleybus and diesel bus. |
 |
| Leahy, Kelly and Leahys emporium on left, somewhat earlier. |
 |
| Ad from New York's Saturday Evening Post in 1942 |
No comments:
Post a Comment