Smoking

Abstract

Although the first taste of tobacco in Britain has been attributed to Sir Walter Raleigh, cigarette smoking was not a common habit until the late nineteenth century. This coincided with the introduction of cigarette making machines into Britain during the Crimean War. Perhaps unwittingly, the mood elevating properties of nicotine were widely used firstly during the Crimean War and then during both world wars, with extensive smoking amongst military personnel. More recently the Iraqi soldiers entrenched in the Kuwait desert still had their cigarettes even though no food was left — cigarettes also help abate hunger. The smoking habit was largely confined to men until the end of the Second World War and the smoking histories of women probably only date from the 1940s onwards. By the early 1960s almost half the adult population of Britain smoked, the habit still being more popular amongst men than women. The number of smokers had reduced to about one-third of the adult population by the beginning of this decade, women now constituting half the smoking population.