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Leisure, Leisure, Politics, Politics, and and the the Consumption
Consumption
of of Tobacco Tobacco in in Britain Britain since since the
the
Nineteenth Nineteenth Century
Century
Matthew Hilton
Historians of leisure in Britain have traditionally been concerned with two major
debates, both relating to power and control. First, there is the issue of control over
time. In the early nineteenth century, industrialists’ need for factory discipline ran
counter to long established work and leisure patterns, a theme best illustrated by
the persistence of St. Monday whereby workers extended their weekend leisure
pursuits into the first working day. 1 By the early twentieth century, struggles over
the control of time had taken a different turn, the rise of mass consumer society
polarizing labor demands into either those for shorter working hours – and hence
more time for leisure – or for more money with which to pay for the commodities
of the expanding market. 2 The second major issue in the history of leisure has been
over the control of minds. Various rational recreationists, evangelical organizations,
temperance reformers, and moral leaders sought to direct and influence the
content of working-class leisure. Traditional leisure pursuits – and especially those
relating to festivals formed around the agricultural calendar – were discouraged,
occasionally with the aid of legislation, and more uplifting, sober-minded and
respectable activities were promoted in a typically crusading spirit. 3
Much of this work on leisure has focused on those activities easily recognisable
as non-work time: the pub, the wakes festival, sport, the music hall, the seaside
holiday, and the cinema. Issues relating to the control of time and of minds has
been central to the means by which their histories have been written. But what,
perhaps, of the most popular leisure activity of all, an activity that by 1950 was
indulged in by 80 percent of the adult male and 40 percent of the adult female
population? 4 Tobacco smoking is hardly a leisure pursuit of the kind that was
enjoyed and anticipated as a specific time and site separate from work in the same
way as was the dance hall or the football stadium. Until the smoking and health
controversy of the 1950s, it inspired nothing like the protests against drink that
had occurred in the nineteenth century. 5 It had, of course, been the subject of
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