December 10, 2009

Noble powder of Jacobites, Despised by tyrants

Your evocative illustration of Gawith’s snuff on your last post and reference to “clouds of snuff” took me back nostalgically to my own snuff-taking days. For anyone interested in the lore of this form of self-indulgence, the virtually unobtainable volume Snuff Yesterday and Today, by C W Shepherd is a vade mecum. Published in London in 1963 by G Smith & Sons, the wonderful old snuff shop at 74 Charing Cross Road (“Price One Guinea”), it is an encyclopaedia of the noble powder.

Shepherd describes how Sultan Amurath IV of Turkey made snuff-taking punishable by death, while a Czar of Russia prohibited it under pain of having the offender’s nose cut off. Hitler, of course, was himself a vehement anti-smoker. So today’s anti-tobacco fanatics are in a long tradition. When I was an undergraduate I was invited to supper with Sir Compton Mackenzie, with whom I had been corresponding about Jacobitism. The day of my invitation coincided with his birthday, so I thought it appropriate to take him a present.

Having recently read his book Sublime Tobacco, with its chapter on snuff, I took him a box of Red Cardinal. “That is very thoughtful, dear boy,” he said, “but unfortunately I don’t take snuff.” Seeing my dismay, he added: “However, I shall decant it immediately into this presentation snuff box that was given to my father by his theatre company – which I have looked at every day for fifty years with the intention of filling it, without getting around to doing so – and it will quickly be guzzled, the next time that James Robertson Justice visits me.”

My one meeting with Lord Dacre, whom you so entertainingly address on your post, was much less auspicious. You will recall that he had unfortunately authenticated the “Hitler Diaries”, which subsequently transpired to be forgeries, for The Times, and for the rest of his life was sensitive about the matter.

Years later, when I as working as social diarist on The Sunday Times, to celebrate an anniversary of the Royal British Legion the railway carriage that had been Field Marshal Earl Haig’s mobile headquarters in France during World War I was hitched to a train and carried the contemporary Lord Haig and his family on a special journey from Berwick to Edinburgh, where there was to be a service at the War Memorial in Edinburgh Castle.

Dacre, who had married into the Haig family, was aboard the train, as was a pack of journalists. We were invited into the historic railway carriage to interview the various family members. Just before we retired from the fray, I found myself confronting Dacre. Believing he was suspicious of journalists, I tried to emphasise the innocuous, non-newshound nature of my journalism.

The train was making a lot of noise, so I raised my voice as I introduced himself. As he seemed to have trouble hearing me, I shouted even louder, just as the train suddenly quietened down. The whole carriage stared as I bellowed in Lord Dacre’s face: “…From the Sunday Times Diary… I said diary!” Oops. Realising the misunderstanding was beyond repair, I beat a hasty retreat. It was a lovely old train, though…