The Chief Scout Talks

Taranaki Daily News, 5 October 1929, Page 25 (Supplement)

The Chief Scout Talks

ABOUT SMOKING. WHY SCOUTS DON’T SMOKE. (By Lt.-Gen. Lord Baden-Powell.— -Copyright.) Scouts do not smoke. Captain John Smith, the famous old Scout and explorer did not; nor, in more modern times did Selous the Hunter, Burnham the Scout, and many others that I could name. They knew that smoking spoils your eyesight and your wind, and also your sense of smell, which is a most important thing for a scout to have and preserve, especially for scouting at night, when ,he has to use his .nose as well as his ears and eyes for finding out things. I myself have never taken to smoking. I was once ordered to do it to prevent me catching fever when I was being sent out on an expedition to Ashanti, on the West Coast of Africa in 1895. . Lord Wolseley, who was Commander in Chief at the time, had formerly been on service out there, and knew the very unhealthy nature of the jungle, so, though he was a non-smoker himself, he advised me to take to smoking in order to disinfect -the air around me that I might avoid catching the fever. So I took out a pipe and tobacco with me, and for the first few days I smoked like a house on fire. But the climate there is very damp and moist, and my etore of tobacco soon

got mildewed, and was so unpleasant that I threw it and my pipe away, and never took to smoking again. - Incidentally I was one of the very few who went right through that expedition without ever getting a day’s sickness. SMOKING COMPULSORY. . Chigwell School in Essex has just celebrated its Tercentenary—or three hun-

drcdth year of existence. In 1629, when the school was started, and was looking about for masters, one of the qualifications for' a master was that ho should not- be a “tippler ‘or haunter of alehouses, nor a puffei* of tobacco.” At another school, Eton, at the time of the Great Plague, the boys were ordered to smoke, for it was thought then that smoking might be a preventive of that terrible .disease. One old writer states: “I heard Tom . Rogers say that he was a schoolboy at Eaton at the time when the Plague raged and all the boys were obliged to smoake in school every morning and that lie was never whipped so much in all his life as he was one morning for not smoaking!” This question of smoking or not smoking has always been the subject of much argument, but in these days I do not think anyone would recommend boys to smoke; indeed, it is against the law of {he land. HOW SMOKING BEGAN. It is very interesting to look back and see how smoking first began. Two sailors belonging to the ship commanded - by Columbus—the man who discovered America 400 years ago—-were sent ashore to scout the island of Cuba, and they came beck and reported that th : e people there carried little torches with them from which'they blew smoke. These “torches” were, of course, cigars, leaves of the tobacco plant carefully dried, and rolled un into a little stock which they set light to and etuck be-, tween their lips so as to isuek in all the /smoke. That was in the year 1492. Some years later a Trench explorer named Nicot brought some of the seeds of the tobacco plant to Europe and grew ’ it, so that it soon came, into use in France and Italy. The old British Admiral, Sir Francis Drake, is said to be the first great Englishman who smoked —that was in 1585. HOW RALEIGH WAS'TUT. OUT.” , But the usual story is that Sir Walter Raleigh, who had explored Virginia in,": America, first smoked tobacco in Eng,land at about that time. The; actual 1 spot .where he .smoked was in the garden of the Virginia Inn at Henstridge Ash, in Somersetshire. . The waiter, teeing smoke coming out .of his mouth, thought that he must be on fire, and rushed and threw a bucketful of water over him to ’‘put him out.” I should think it did “put him out” too —very considerably! In a few years time people began to discover that smoking wag harmful to the health, as well as being unpleasant > to those who did not smoke. In Turkey the Sultan ordered that anybody caught smoking should have a hole bored through hie nose and his pip© stuck through it, across, his face, as a > warning to others. . Our King James I, in 1602, issued an order against smoking, as being “loathesome to the eye, hateful to the nose and harmful to the brain.”