Something to be sniffed at
Snuff, once considered the preserve of fops and old fogeys, is finding favour with a younger crowd in need of a nicotine fix
Roger Field tries snuff
Stephen Fry uses it – why am I not surprised? – as does Sean Bean, the distinctly unfogeyish star of Sharpe and Game of Thrones. These two, however, are the modern exception rather than the current rule and we have to go back a couple of hundred years to find a time when taking snuff was seriously cool for cats, much as cigarettes were for so many in the past century. A list of famous “users” includes arch-enemies Wellington and Napoleon,
who used to hoover up an astonishing 7lb of the stuff every month, whilst Marie Antoinette, who many blame for getting the whole revolutionary thing started, also enjoyed a snort.
Over on our side of the Channel, Georges III and IV both required their daily hit, although the former was put well into the shade by his wife, Queen Charlotte, known as “Snuffy Charlotte” – not surprising when you learn that she had an entire room at Windsor given over to her cache of snuff.
It can also give inspiration: Mozart, famous for the speed at which he wrote Don Giovanni, credited his “Seville snuff” as one of the stimulants for this particular burst of inspiration – along with a bottle of wine, coffee and the ministrations of his 16-yearold chambermaid, so maybe not…
And infuriate: in 1643, Tsar Michael got so wound up by all the sniffing, snorting and sneezing at court – let alone the fortunes being spent on importing the powder and buying ever-more elaborate snuff boxes, which had to be airtight to retain the
expensive aroma – that he decreed that users would have their noses cut off; persistent offenders executed.
All making snuff sound somewhat arcane and old-fashioned today. However, snuff is making a recovery – albeit from a very low base. This has been brought about by the smoking ban and the needs of those who want a nicotine hit without the social issues and illegalities of lighting up a fag indoors – just look at the massive success of vaping.
Snuff’s recorded history in the West starts with Christopher Columbus. Franciscan monk Ramon Pane, who was on the explorer’s second voyage to the Caribbean, saw the locals enjoying it. He brought some back to Spain in 1493 and, in so doing, launched a worldwide addiction, although it had clearly been enjoyed in South America long before we Europeans arrived, much like other powders that rip through the sinuses giving the user a lift along the way: white Colombian “marching powder” being another everpopular South American export.
Spanish explorers came across locals in Brazil growing tobacco, which they ground up into a very fine powder in rosewood mortars. The result was a rose-scented product. Snuff, to this day, comes in all sorts of “flavours”, a key part of its charm to connoisseurs. However, it was the Dutch, who had turned into heavy users by the mid1500s, who named it snuif, or snuff. In the time it took you to sneeze it had spread from Europe to Africa, China and Japan.
SNUFF V TOBACCO
Even as snuff and tobacco contagion overtook Europe during the 1500s, an English settler called John Rolfe, who was married to Pocohontas – Disney’s innocent, huge-eyed ingénue – and who had started growing tobacco in Virginia, is credited with introducing the powder to North America in about 1610. However, our American cousins, even then busy developing nonconformity as a national trait as a prelude to kicking out we Brits, did not much care for the way the high-fallutin’, Old World landowners took their snuff in such a regal way and decided to chew their tobacco instead. I don’t suppose The Man With No Name, Clint Eastwood’s perennial cowboy, would seem half as rugged and threatening if instead of chewing a wad of baccy – to be accurately spat onto the boot of his next victim – he whipped
out a snuff box, carefully prised it open, took a delicate pinch between forefinger and thumb before taking a sniff, handkerchief at the ready in case he sneezed, popped said box away and then said: “Draw!”
That said, both George Washington and his wife, Martha, were keen snuff takers, as were Benjamin Franklin and Abraham Lincoln (“a fine brownish powder which appeared to be snuff” was found in his pocket after his assassination). But, then again, the Washingtons were part of the land-owning, slaveowning classes, the very people those loutish baccy chewers and spitters out on the wild frontiers were getting away from.
A QUEEN’S HERB
So, while nasal snuff died a death in North America, doubtless along with any gunslingers who insisted on using it, it continued to go from strength to strength in Europe. Wondrously, given the ever-growing health problems we have to thank tobacco for, part of snuff’s appeal was its supposed healing properties. Catherine de Medici , Queen of France from 1547 to 1559, suffered from headaches. She started taking snuff and – hey presto! – they stopped. She deemed snuff so efficacious she renamed it Herba Regina, Queen’s Herb (possible hints of Bob Marley and his beloved “’Erb” here?). In a trice, most of the French nobility was hooked, and that remained the situation for the next few centuries. Whilst the poor smoked, the wealthy sniffed.
Because, and this is the point to remember about snuff, it really does give you the nicotine hit that smokers crave. A chum of mine, let’s call him Tom, told me about taking snuff regularly in the late ’70s and early ’80s. My instant impression was of Tom as a young fogey, because that is how we tend to see those long-ago snuff takers today: either foppish aristos taking a delicate sniff, intricate lace handkerchief flowing decorously from one cuff in case of an involuntary sneeze, or red-nosed parsons taking massive shots up the hooter and to hell with the consequences. Wrong. There was nothing old fogeyish about it, said Tom. He, like so many back then, was a fiendish cigarette smoker. However, he worked in an auction house and was aware – and this was long before the smoking ban – that if he smoked inside it annoyed non-smoking colleagues. If he went outside, it was noted that he, a lowly valuer, was absent from his desk (having a non-smoking boss did not help) and, of course, afterwards his clothes stank of fags. Something his clients did not necessarily appreciate. Wandering into Fribourg & Treyer’s tobacco emporium in London’s Haymarket – founded in 1720, the shop is long extinct although the snuff brand continues and can be bought on the internet – to buy some of their Turkish gaspers, a salesman suggested he partook of some snuff from one of the rows of large jars of the stuff they had on their many shelves. Tom tried and found his nicotine solution, as had so many before him. Snuff gave him his muchneeded post lunch hit with two good sniffs; all without anyone seeing him and no smelly evidence thereafter. Three or four of those in
A younger set is buying snuff again, a direct result of the smoking ban
the afternoon and evening – he never took it in the morning – got him through the day. What is more, the hit is direct and the lift near instant. Charles Darwin, another ardent snuff user, once gave it up for a month and wrote that he felt, “Most lethargic, stupid and melancholy.” So there you have it: scientific proof it jolts both body and brain.
For Tom, much of the pleasure was in the exotic blends and smells of the different varieties; some flowery, others peppery, his favourites. He was shocked to hear about the modern trend for menthol flavours – he doubted Pocohontas or Catherine de Medici would have had much truck with those. Tom, however, does have one caveat. Those Regency fops were not necessarily being foppish as only a fool (or perhaps one of those Victorian parsons) does not have a handkerchief to hand in case the brown stuff “goes up the wrong way”. Asked to explain how this could happen to a well-practiced snuff snorter, he described how, when swallowing water it can, very occasionally and for no explicable reason, go down the wrong way. Cue much coughing and choking. Ditto snuff. An inadvertent mis-sniff can result in anything from a discreet and manly sneeze to a full on and highly embarrassing spraying of snuff coloured, exotically flavoured snot. Handkerchiefs really are essential.
A SNIFF OF RED BULL
Today, however, snuff is struggling somewhat. At James J Fox in St James’s Street, I sat in Churchill’s chair, where he once liked to sample a cigar (he seems to have been an occasional snuff taker but not a regular user) and checked the six flavours they have on offer: a far cry from those multiple jars in Fribourg & Treyer. Yes, the good news was that they saw a younger set buying snuff again, a direct result of the smoking ban. Their most popular brand is also their strongest one: Red Bull, a menthol infusion (£2.50 for a 10g packet). Nic Barker showed me how to clench my fist and form a “snuff dimple”, a natural depression at the top of my wrist. Take a pinch of snuff, place in dimple, sniff.
And women? A few, but nothing like those grand snorting dames of yesteryears. However, when I visited the Segar & Snuff Parlour in London’s Convent Garden Market, I came across a woman who had just taken her first pinch of snuff: Mature Crumbled. It was Francesca Coffey’s second day working in the shop – an old-fashioned specialist tobacconist – and she felt she should try it before she sold it.
“And?”
She had sneezed instantly and still had a tear in her eye because it was very “sharp”. Not unpleasant, but once was probably enough. The manager, Marlene Bartel, told me much the same as they had at Fox’s; there was a younger crowd trying to wean themselves off cigarettes but needing that nicotine kick that snuff could give them, as well as the older traditionalists. They stock four “Old Favourite” flavours and seven “Kendal Brands”, aimed at the younger audience and offering such diverse flavours as G&T (gin and tonic) and Café Royal (coffee and Tia Maria), each 25g tin costing £5.75. The shop also supplies livery companies and clubs, although it is something of a niche trade these days and, from what I saw, I suspect that is not going to change any day soon.