The air was redolent of snuff. Surely men didn’t still inhale this vile weed? On two walls, the one facing the customer and the one to his right as he entered the shop, were waist to ceiling-height glass-front cabinets, sporting every brand of cigarette and tobacco in the known world.
You could tell the display cases were old not just from the burnished wood of their frames but from the rippled, almost blue, of their glass windows, shimmering depending on how far you travelled in one movement. The cases, installed in 1878, had once been a deep brown but where handles had been missed and generations of proprietors’ fingers had rubbed their surface, the timber was shiny and chestnut.
Beneath these the tobacconist patrolled, dressed as a pharmacist in a white dust coat over a plain shirt and thin maroon tie that could have been from a cricket club. The man’s hands were soft and gentle but his fingers as dark as the original wood of his cabinets.
On his counter before him was the only sign of modern London in the shop. Wrigley’s spearmint chewing gum. A small cash register was another recent installation. It occupied some of the space formerly occupied by a black and gold Tannock, its keys the size of sixpences.
The distracting modern bits were in turn overwhelmed by the brands in the cases. Capstan and Peter Stuyvesant shouldered their neighbours Gitaines and Old Cossack. The Turkish Abdul shared a border with the Greek Bouzoukia and Craven A was beside Marlboro. Camel and even a few packets of Player’s were other easily recognised stars of the cigarette oeuvre.
To the left of the door was a small round table serviced by two nautical-looking chairs, their seats as shiny as the bottoms of the trousers that would have rubbed them perhaps over the nearly 80 years of the shop’s existence. No one sat there now but I imagined a young Leo McKern in one of them, lighting his pipe filled with Champion Ruby because this was the only place in London you could get it. The yellow packet resting on the table its flap open and several strands of golden tobacco spilling from it. A bleary-eyed Peter Finch was McKern’s companion, chain-smoking readymades, the brand of which changed with the seasons.
Above was a once white ceiling of no particular decoration now turned khaki from the years of rising smoke. A Brunswick-green three-pedestal lighting fixture hung from this and it shone like the cabinets, polished every day by the scrupulous tobacconist atop a step-ladder.
Behind the table for two were similarly dust-free frames of Players’ collectible cards, geometrically perfect attached to the green felt of the catalogue’s back. Most of the cards’ depictions were dressed in white but some wore bright blazers of a base colour and garish, thin, contrasting stripe. Closer inspection revealed they were cricketers. There was Hobbs, Tate, Rhodes, Larwood but no Dr Grace for these cards were from the early thirties. One Australian had insinuated his way into the pantheon and even then they knew how good he was. Bradman was to become synonymous with cricket for a century of enthusiasts no matter what nation they supported.
As I left I noticed the precise printing on the entry’s glass: WIGMORES, and in smaller writing, Tobacconist to the Prince of Wales. The famous one. He had been a Borkum Riff man. The door closed behind me and I was back in a jumble market to my left. A record player was loudly advertising Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. The new world.
I WRIGHT 