Ordered to Smoke.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVI, Issue I, 5 January 1901, Page 47

Ordered to Smoke.

The heroic perversity which induces so many boys to defy the command of parents, the rules of schools, and the protests of their own stomachs for the sake of learning to smoke, remains still the despair of fathers anti the marvel of mothers. There would be lively remonstrances and pathetic pleas, indeed, if the lad who cheerfully proceeds to turn himself ghastly, green and limp with his first cicgai were obliged to take a dose of medicine that would make him haif as uncomfortable.

One element in the attraction is, no doubt the very flavour of forbidden fruit. The one case on record in which a large body of boys were prescribed tobacco, tends to prove this. The prescription was far from being popularly welcomed. In England, in 1665, when the Great Plague was raging, tobacco was regarded as an excellent prevention against infection; and the boys at Eton were officially ordered to smoke! Nor was the prescription confined to their hours out-of-doors. If it would have looked odd to see some hundreds of boys, ranging in age from six and seven to eighteen and nineteen, playing at all the school games from peg-top and hopscotch up to the earlier forms of football and cricket, each with cigar or pipe between his lips, it must have been stranger still to see the class-room work progressing in a dense blue cloud —master and pupils puffing away together. The prize scholar removed his “weed” to construe a passage from Homer; the master laid his pipe carefully aside to thrash the dunce, who dropped his cigar to howl!

But Mr Lionel Cust, who. in a recent history of Eton recalls this curious period, adds that there were rebels against the tobacco rule. Neither shirking nor disobedience, however, was tolerated. The boy who wouldn t smoke, the boy who couldn’t smoke, the boy who would very much rather not try to smoke —all alike had to smoke." Those who did not were promptly and thoroughly' flogged - and doubtless given a cigar afterward. The choice for a qualmy little fellow in the lower class between immediate nausea or the immediate birch must certainly have been a trying one. There is no doubt that the repeal of the tobacco rule, when it came, was joyfully' welcomed. The plague did not reach the school, but whether it was smoked out or otherwise warded off would be a difficult matter to prove, after more than two centuries.