‘I’m glad I don’t have to explain to a man from Mars
why each day I set fire to dozens of little pieces of paper
and put them in my mouth’
Mignon McLaughlin1
It’s anti-social, very bad for you and you really should cut down. But enough about your sixty-a-day email habit – there is an everyday addiction with a much more undistinguished history. Imagine for a moment that Britain is a remote island, inhabited by an eccentric tribe of people yet to encounter any other civilisation. An anthropologist, arriving on this island for the first time in order to study our way of life, would be puzzled and intrigued by a ritual that occurs in workplaces several times a day. Every so often, a few workers break off from whatever they are doing in order to huddle outside the office buildings, perhaps looking slightly sheepish and put-upon as they do so. This seems to happen regardless of the weather: in the battle between the unkind elements of this island and the ferocity of the habit, the latter always wins. The sharp-eyed anthropologist would soon note that there is one unifying characteristic of these semi-detached workers. They are all carrying small, thin, white cylinders, which are burning at one end, and every so often they put them to their mouths and inhale.
What the anthropologist would not know, of course, is that these puffing pariahs have only been a common sight outside offices over the last decade or so. As scientific evidence and public opinion have ganged up on smokers over the last two decades, the lit cigarette has been gradually expelled from indoor public spaces. In 2006, after much debate about respective rights and liberties, Parliament voted to ban smoking from all indoor public places, including workplaces, pubs and restaurants, with a few exceptions such as private clubs. The smoking room and the communal ashtray were to become instant historical relics, with all smokers exiled to private houses or the open air.
While some smokers consider themselves to be the recently persecuted minority of a politically correct ‘nanny state’, there is nothing new about their banishment outdoors. Smokers began to be segregated from nonsmokers in Britain as early as the 1830s. Smoking was seen as a masculine, private pleasure, and doing it in public places was associated with a boorish disregard for ladies’ delicate throats. William Thackeray chivalrously advised his nephew that ‘a cigar should be considered, not as preferable to [women’s] company, but as consolation for their absence’.2 At the dinner table, gentlemen had to wait until the ladies had withdrawn before settling down with their cigars and rough talk. Even smoking in the street in the presence of women could have one classed as a cad, and notices in public parks asked cigar smokers to extinguish them when requested by a lady.3 Smoking was routinely banned on railway stations and trains from the beginning, although this rule was often ignored. Finally, an 1868 Act of Parliament decreed that trains must have special smoking carriages – a clause sponsored by the great libertarian philosopher and MP John Stuart Mill. Smoking carriages were specially marked with a large ‘S’ painted on the door.4
It was the mass-produced cigarette, arriving in Britain in the late nineteenth century, which turned smoking into a more public activity. Male connoisseurs of the pipe and cigar were united in their loathing of the cheap, tasteless ‘Virginia cigarette’ (named after the state from which the tobacco originated), which they dismissed as ‘the finicking toy of the foreigner’ and ‘a miserable apology for a manly pleasure’, suited only for the ‘effeminate races of the Continent and the East’.5 Cigarettes were not only unisex, they were also classless – indeed, their ready-rolled, quick-fix pleasure was suited to the more communal smoking of the working classes in the pub or factory. Smoking was now part of the mundane routine of daily life rather than the after-dinner pleasures of the drawing room. The First World War also saw a huge acceleration in demand for cigarettes because, unlike other smokes, they took no time to prepare and could be enjoyed quickly – the same qualities that still make them ideal for work breaks.
In the inter-war years, the nicotine habit was so rife that hardly anyone campaigned against smoking in public places. With little firm evidence that it was a serious health hazard, opponents of smoking stressed that it was a public nuisance, which linked them in the public mind with the puritanism of the temperance movement.6 The National Society of Non-Smokers, founded in 1926 to campaign for more non-smoking places, was commonly seen as the last refuge of milksops, killjoys and life-deniers. One Times leader even objected to the expression ‘non-smoker’, which, it argued, suggested something quite different from ‘a person who does not smoke’: ‘It is an aggressive, interfering phrase. A non-smoker not merely does not smoke; he will try to see that no one else shall smoke.’ 7
Mass-Observation was particularly interested in smoking at this time because it seemed to divide society into two groups, smokers and non-smokers (or people who did not smoke), which cut across all other divisions of age, class, sex, occupation and belief. Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson argued that ‘if we find sectarian feeling between smokers and non-smokers, it will be significant of man’s tendency to distinguish socially between those who share his habits and those who do not’. Sure enough, Mass-Observation found that smokers believed that there was something ‘queer’ about men who did not smoke. They had ‘a milky babies’ breath smell’ and were ‘not quite a man’ or ‘not one of us’. Refusing the offer of a cigarette created a minor social embarrassment and set up ‘a barrier of intimacy’, even though, to cover up the awkwardness, the smoker often went on to compliment the smoker on being free of the habit.8
By 1949, 81 per cent of men and 39 per cent of women smoked.9 Even during these years of post-war austerity and shortages, cigarettes were seen as a special, unration-able commodity. After a punitive American loan agreement of Christmas 1945 ended the so-called ‘cigarette famine’ by allowing the importation of cheap tobacco, the Tory MP Bob Boothby lamented that ‘we have sold the Empire for a packet of cigarettes’.10 By then, many of Britain’s smokers were so desperate for a fag that they probably thought this a fair bargain.
The popularity of smoking meant that, even as clear evidence about the link between smoking and lung cancer emerged from the early 1950s onwards, governments focused on measures like increased tobacco taxes and stronger health warnings on cigarette packets rather than the policing of public space. Exhortations not to smoke in public were flexible and permissive. On double-decker buses, smoking was banned on the lower deck and the front seats of the upper deck – but where exactly did the front seats end? The question ‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ was heard even in non-smoking sections of buses and trains, and since the requester had usually taken the cigarette out of the packet already, it was a brave soul who answered, ‘Yes’. (It was a braver soul still who gave the answer suggested by a letter-writer to The Times in 1941: ‘Not at all, Sir, if you don’t mind my being sick.’11)
There were many ways of asking or ordering people not to smoke through signs. ‘No smoking please’ started to replace ‘Smoking’ signs on trains in the 1920s,12 although these could always be hilariously defaced to say ‘smoking please’ instead. Hospitals employed the educative ‘No smoking, lungs at work’. ‘Thank you for not smoking’ was seen in taxis and restaurants from the 1970s, an excessive politeness which ended up irritating militant smokers by assuming they had already refrained when they had every intention of partaking. Such niceties were superfluous by the 1990s, when the simple image of a red bar running through a cigarette was universally understood. For a brief period, even this minimalist sign was an endangered species. There was no need to order people not to smoke when it was hardly allowed anywhere, just as there was no need to tell people not to set fire to the building. Under the 2006 Health Act, however, ‘no smoking’ signs have to be displayed in all smoke-free premises, even if no one has been allowed to smoke in them for years.
If smoking was increasingly frowned upon in public places, smoking in offices was common until the late 1980s. In a survey conducted in 1969, only 3 per cent of young male office workers said they would be prepared to give up smoking at work if threatened with the sack.13 Smoking was presumably tolerated at work on the same principle that bays are smaller in office car parks than in municipal ones: colleagues are supposed to be able to negotiate more easily than strangers over the etiquette of shared space, an optimistic view of office politics. This all changed with the new anxiety over passive smoking and the arguments about whether and to what extent it causes lung cancer. The campaign against workplace smoking began in Britain in 1988, when the government published Passive Smoking at Work, a booklet which urged employers to introduce no smoking policies in consultation with employees. One of the first companies to do so was the UK division of the Ford Motor Company, which in January 1990 banned its office staff from smoking except in designated areas and only then provided it did not ‘adversely affect those in the non-smoking areas’.14 Employers’ fears of being sued by non-smokers were a powerful catalyst for change. In 1990, an asthma-suffering social security worker from Luton won a landmark ruling that she had been made ill by her colleagues smoking at work, and that this could be classed as an industrial accident.15
By the early 1990s, the government was publishing stricter guidelines and targets for reducing smoking at work. The phrase ‘second-hand smoke’ became the preferred way of describing what passive smokers inhaled, a term somewhat loaded with the charity-shop connotations of ‘second-hand’, which implied that this kind of smoke was inferior to the spanking new kind that smokers themselves enjoyed. Passive smoking moved up the political agenda not simply because of firmer medical evidence about its dangers, but also because the most influential classes in society had been most successful at kicking the habit. In June 2004, the health secretary John Reid said that smoking had become ‘a middle-class obsession’ and was one of the few pleasures available to some working-class people.16 He was at least accurate demographically. Since the 1970s, smoking among higher social classes has fallen much more sharply than among lower ones, and today unemployed people smoke most of all.
There was no defining moment in the regulation of smoking, just a slow, incremental extension of indoor bans. As the American precedent shows, regulations beget more regulations because of the logical inconsistencies of partial rules. When New York City began to crack down on smoking in the late 1980s, the authorities initially planned to impose smoke-free zones in common areas and allow smoking in enclosed offices. But this would have meant depriving secretaries of a perk granted to executives, so smoking had to be restricted throughout the workplace.17 British employers began to introduce smoking rooms (nicknamed ‘sin-bins’) in the early 1990s. But these rooms, which required separate ventilation shafts, were often prohibitively expensive. Banning all smoking indoors was the simpler solution.
The ethical and legal ambiguities do not end with a blanket indoors ban. An American Benson & Hedges advert from the mid-1990s showed smokers sat at work desks resting precariously on window ledges, with the caption: ‘Have you noticed finding a place to smoke is the hardest part of your job? For a great smoke, put in for an office window.’ This neatly illustrated a problem raised by the ban on indoor smoking in public places: what constituted a public place, and where did the ‘indoors’ end? When the small Californian town of San Luis Obispo initiated the modern trend for banning smoking in public places on 2 August 1990, it simply covered all bars, restaurants and workplaces. In the most car-polluted state in America, the legislator joked that ‘in San Luis Obispo you have to go inside to get some fresh air’.18 But other Californian local councils went further, banning smoking from sidewalks and public parks. The statewide law prohibiting smoking inside any public building in California, introduced in 1994, extended to within five feet of the doors and windows of buildings, and ten years later this was extended to twenty feet.19
In any case, some employers do not like the entrances to their buildings being cluttered up with smokers, particularly when important clients might be using them, so they order workers to stand well back from the doorways. In one British firm, smokers were banished to a red square painted on the ground at the far end of the backyard.20 For other employees, the office was everywhere: sales reps were banned from smoking in their cars (a surely unpo- liceable rule, unless they tested for nicotine on the uphol-stery), and hospital workers from smoking in uniform, even when they were off-duty.21 The 2006 Health Act also inspired a series of discussions about what constituted an ‘enclosed public place’. The government made it clear that it could include vehicles used as a workplace by more than one person, bus shelters, covered train platforms and even entrances to office buildings.22
Workplace smoking bans did benefit some, however. Firms like the No Butts Bin Company emerged to sell the paraphernalia of outdoor smoking that has been such a ubiquitous feature of office courtyards and doorways since the mid-1990s: wall-mounted external ashtrays with narrow openings at the top for fag-ends and an internal ‘baffle’ system to prevent smoke emissions; and, to protect al fresco smokers, smoking canopies or even glass-panelled ‘smoking shelters’ that look exactly like bus shelters. The promotional literature for the No Butts smoking shelter claims that forcing workers to stand out in the wind and rain ‘can have a bad effect on morale, damaging productivity and threatening your profits. Put a roof over smokers’ heads and you will be surprised at how grateful they will be.’ 23 Whether or not they are grateful, smokers in these shelters cut rather forlorn figures, as if they are being imprisoned in pens rather than offered protection from the elements. But they seem prepared to put up with these minor indignities for the sake of a smoke.
Smoking has become so entrenched in daily life because it is both a habit and a ritual – something that is done routinely and unthinkingly but that also has elements of self-display and social bonding. As Mass-Observation noted in 1938, there are different stages of developing the habit. People start to smoke to join in and be sociable, but then ‘the social cause is forgotten in the nervous need’. Even the smoker could not tell you how much ‘the pleasure of the senses’ is mingled with ‘the pleasure of social conformity’.24 It was the non-verbal rituals of smoking that made it such a good subject for the kind of visual observation in which Mass-Observation specialised. Tom Harrisson began his career as an ornithologist, and he carried this observational technique over into the study of people, always believing you could learn more by carefully watching than asking endless survey questions. Like drinking (another favourite M-O topic), smoking was actually difficult to do while talking at the same time.25 Mass-Observation noted in the late 1940s that many smokers found the look and feel of the cigarette, and its accoutrements such as matches and lighters, intensely pleasurable, and did not enjoy smoking in the dark when they could not be seen.26 Harrisson was fascinated by the largely middle-class ritual of tapping the cigarette before lighting it, a redundant gesture because factory-made cigarettes did not need their tobacco packed any more tightly.27 Some smokers put the end they had tapped in their mouths; others lit the tapped end in the belief that it would light more evenly. Tapping was rendered still more superfluous by the post-war spread of filter tips. It is uncommon now, but I remember seeing friends doing it as late as the early 1990s, perhaps in unconscious mimicry of their parents.
Non-smoking policies now have to contend with these long-standing rituals. Few companies, however, have developed firm policies on smoking breaks. If smokers have six cigarette breaks a day at five minutes each, for example, they will be spending half an hour more away from their desks than their non-smoking colleagues. Should they be forced to clock off when taking a smoking break, and will non-smokers feel resentful if smokers are not made to do so? Since smoking is addictive, employers have generally decided to tolerate smoking breaks to maintain morale. Just as cigarette consumption has always been encouraged in wartime as the nervous soldier’s friend, there is now an implicit acceptance that some people need to smoke to cope with the boredom and stress of work. Workplace smoking is also an ideal way of creating camaraderie because it brings together people of different hierarchies and ranks to gossip and network. But the workplace fag break undermines one of smoking’s chief pleasures. A cigarette has traditionally been a fermata, a pause in the treadmill of daily life, the inhalation and exhalation of smoke being repetitive but not quite rhythmic, always within the smoker’s control. Now people will say, ‘I’m just popping outside for a ciggie’ or ‘Have I got time for a fag?’ during a break in a meeting, and rush out to get their nicotine hit. A smoke is a snatched moment rather than a leisurely interruption.
Also new are the impoverished rituals inspired by open-air smoking. What has traditionally made smoking such an attractive sight for lifetime non-smokers like myself is its absent-minded, peripheral quality. Smoking can be effortlessly combined with other activities, like holding a drink, typing with one hand or talking on the telephone. In his breathless ode to smoking, Cigarettes are Sublime, Richard Klein argues that cigarettes are ‘never what they appear to be, may always have their identity and their function elsewhere than they appear’.28 The cigarette carries such a freight of meaning because it is an apparently meaningless thing, identical to the thousands of others that the smoker has smoked and will smoke: people rarely claim ownership by referring to ‘my cigarette’.29 But outside, the cigarette and the smoker are suddenly all too visible, not that perfect alignment of unselfconsciousness and conspicuousness that makes multitasking smokers so charismatic. The outdoor smoker becomes somehow self-conscious and furtive rather than nonchalant and self-possessed.
Klein argues that cigarette smoking is a way of extending the limits of the body so that it is ‘no longer fixed by the margin of your skin’. You feel the smoke penetrate deep into your lungs, then you exhale it into a kind of halo which surrounds the body and can be wafted away with graceful hand gestures.30 Such languorous motions – posing as a Rive Gauche intellectual in cafés, blowing smoke rings, double-tapping delicately on the ashtray and waving the cigarette around like a burning wand – are now less common as indoor smoking declines. Mass-Observation claimed that middle-class smokers tended to hold their cigarette between the first and second finger, so that it could be wafted about imperiously, whereas working-class smokers, who were more likely to smoke outside, tended to hold the cigarette between thumb and finger with the lit end facing the palm.31 This latter now seems to be the default option, not because smokers are disproportionately working-class (although they are) but because outdoor smokers often have to protect their cigarette from the elements. Until quite recently, smoking also inspired an elaborate apparatus – ashtrays, spittoons, tobacco pouches, cigarette cases – which extended the smoker’s personal space. Smoking outdoors, by contrast, needs to be quick and unfussy. Even loose tobacco and cigarette papers take too long to prepare, are difficult to light and likely to go out. Smoking’s accessories are now communally provided, nailed to the wall and designed to dispose of the smoke and ash cleanly. Smokers are left almost empty-handed, with only their cigarette packet and lighter for company.
You might wonder why people still bother to smoke at all, if the poetry of lighting up has been so compromised. But legal restrictions and ethical imperatives are always coming up against the persistence of social habits. In certain parts of America, the smoker is a virtual moral outcast; in France, le pause café-clope, the coffee and cigarette break, is such a national ritual that legislation to ban indoor smoking has only dented it slightly. Britain falls somewhere between these two extremes: smoking might be an increasingly endangered practice but it still penetrates everyone’s daily life – both smokers and nonsmokers – in subtle, pervasive ways.
My office at work is directly above a terrace where students, and some members of staff, congregate to light up between classes. Smoking has been banned from inside all the university buildings for several years. Actually, it is banned from the terrace as well, which is technically part of the building, but a tacit acceptance that this constitutes ‘outside’ means that smoking is tolerated there. Looking out of my window, I can see people gossiping, laughing, exchanging cigarettes and lighters, and blowing their smoke into the air. Instead of cigarettes being offered, people now ‘cadge’ fags off each other because they have given up and have just momentarily lapsed (again). But the esprit de corps is the same. The smokers’ club may be more exclusive these days, but perhaps that adds to its allure. The rituals and sociability of smoking cannot simply be rationalised or legalised out of existence. Smoking is an international, wordless language that breaks down – if only for a few brief moments – the inevitable awkwardness between people who are not quite strangers and not quite friends. For now, you will have to stub that fag out. It is time to go inside for the one immovable event of the modern working day: the staff meeting.