STARTED WITH HALF-POUND OF TOBACCO

Evening Star, Issue 19775, 27 January 1928, Page 13

STARTED WITH HALF-POUND OF TOBACCO

ROMANCE OF CIGARETTE INDUSTRY.; Many firms have started with small capitals, but surely the smallest is half a pound of tobacco! It seems incredible, yet that small quantity of tobacco popularised the cigarette habit in England ahd built up a great industry. A poverty-stricken Russian fled-—a refugee—from his homeland to London forty-five years ago. Ho was Abraham Drapkin, the cigarette pioneer, who died recently. Other Russians equally poor fled with him, and for a living they began to make cigarettes at a time when the readymade article was almost unknown in England. Young Drapkin bought, with almost his last coins, half a pound of tobacco, making his cigarettes by hand and teaching the trade to his friends. They had to gum a piece of parchment on to the table on which to roll the tobacco, and fearing their landlord would object, worked with the door locked. Becoming suspicious that a conspiracy was afoot, the landlord brought two policemen, who burst open the door and revealed the “ plot.’'