Gurglings

A cavalry leader called Lasalle charged the enemy with his pipe clamped between his teeth, performing acts of valour in capturing a field marshal who had refused to hand over his meerschaum. "Lasalle came back to camp", Barthelemy says, "with the pipe and it's owner"

How about these slang terms for that pipe that you hold between your teeth, hod, barrel, furnace, smokestack, incinerator, burner, chimney, firepot, stove, weight, briar and my favourite tooth-breaker!.

Have you ever wondered why you cannot smell your tobacco while smoking? Well here's a solution, next time a friend asks for a "bowl" of your baccy look upon it as a favour to you.

Did you know it was once illegal to smoke tobacco in certain countries and that in one country it was a beheading offence? Well you do now.

An advert inserted by Rod Hull in the National Press on the so called "No Smoking Day" went like this "My Own Private Smoking Day not that I expect everyone to smoke but then I object to others telling me not to. Inserted by Rod Hull who enjoys a pipe"

Quote from the author of the Hobbit books, J.R. Tolkien: "Every morning I wake up and think, good another 24 hour's pipesmoking."

An officer of Victorian times visiting a pious aunt at Glasgow was loaded with tracts to distribute among his soldiers. This was embarrassing, but the corporal he consulted pointed out that they could be torn up and made into spills for lighting pipes. He was able to write to his aunt and tell her that "the light which dawned upon the soldiers" countenances when using her tracts was something wonderful.

Holland (in the nineteenth century) was no longer in the forefront of European life, and it's people seemed to have dropped into a permanent silence, as though feeling that talk was a waste of time that ought to be devoted to the prime business of life, smoking.

Smoking could not but add to a natural human proclivity to spitting, Johnson confessed that he had no passion for clean linen, but in Paris he was disgusted to see ladies spitting on the floor.

[My Greenhouse] wants only the fumes of your pipe to make it perfectly delightful. Tobacco was not known in the Golden Age. This age of iron, or lead, would be insupportable without it; and therefore we may reasonably suppose that the happiness of those better days would have been much improved by the use of it. William Cowper, letter to Rev. W. Bull 3 June 1783.

Tobacco I love and tobacco I'll take, And hope good tobacco I ne'er shall forsake. 'Tis drinking and wenching destroys still the creature; But this noble fume does dry up ill nature. (Massingham)

Tobacco has gone out. To be sure, it is a shocking thing, blowing smoke out of our mouths into other people's mouths, eyes, and noses, and having the same thing done to us. Yet I cannot account, why a thing which requires so little exertion, and yet preserves the mind from total vacuity, should have gone out. Dr. Johnson, St. Andrews, 19 August 1773 (Boswell, Hebrides)

Ancient pipes have often been unearthed, and it appears men have tried experiments with willow bark, roots, mushrooms, sawdust, hemp, rose leaves and other flowers. Onges tribesmen in the Andaman Islands learned to smoke certain dried leaves in crude pipes made from crab claws. Thank goodness the age of Tobacco and pipe are out of the dark ages, you can just imagine a conversation in the past along the lines of "what's that you smoking in that crabclaw Ug?" "Oh! just a bit of ready rubbed sawdust, I've gone off aromatics the flowers give me hayfever".

[Afghans on the road are always] stopping to gossip, to drink, or to pray…They seldom travel without their chilim, or water-pipe, at their saddle, for it is a punishment to them to pass a single hour without smoking. If they have not this indispensable article with them, they will make two little holes in the earth communicating subterraneously, fill one with water and one with tobacco, put a reed in the former, and, lying on their stomachs, smoke this primitive apparatus with as much pleasure as if it were the hookah of a nawab. J. P. Ferrier, Caravan Journeys and Wanderings.

He wore a filthy blanket on the day when first we met, And held between his dirty teeth, a pipe as black as jet; His footsteps had a lightness, and his voice a fiendish tone; He was thinking of the plunder, when we were gone to town(Scott, D.)

Blest leaf! whose aromatic gales dispense To Templars [lawyers] modesty, to Parsons sense. (Mansfield Park,)

With the same ease that blackguards feed on tripe Have 1, James Boswell, learned to smoke a pipe: For I am now a very Dutchman grown, As all at Utrecht cannot fail to own. My father smoked some thirty years ago, And I most wisely in his footsteps go.

A couple of strangers travelling in a third-class-smoking compartment: " I've been in America", says one, a trifle tipsy and impecunious 'There's a country now - they don't overtax you like they do 'ere!' 'There you 'ave touched a point - we're taxed past all common sense Why, this very tobacco I'm smoking is charged -''Talkin' of terbaccer, I don't mind 'aving a pipe along with yer myself.'

Excerpt from a Victorian Ballad: Don't ever marry an old man, I'll tell you the reason why, His lips are all tobacco Juice, And his chin is never dry.

It was his last pipe, and I believe he knew it; and it was a strange thing, without doubt, to leave the trees that he had planted, and the son that he had begotten, ay, sir, and even the old pipe with the Turk's head that he had smoked since he was a lad and went a courting. (Otto)

The Song of the Sad Pipe Maker, it was written in 1787 by John Frederick Bryant, a clay-pipe maker of Bristol, he was going blind and in an effort to help himself in his growing poverty he published a book of verse, in which these lines, "To a Piece of Clay", were included:

Rude mass of earth, from which with moiled hands, (Compulsive taught) the brittle tubes I form-Oft listless, while my vagrant fancy warm, Roves (heedless of necessity's demands), Amid Parnassian bow'rs, or wishful eyes, The flight of genius, while sublime the soars, Of moral truth in search, or earth explores, Or sails with Science through the starry skies-Yet must I own (unsightly clod) thy claim, To my attention, for thou art my stead, When grows importunate the voice of need, And in the furnace thy last change I speed: Ah! then how eager do I urge the flame, How anxious watch thee in that glowing fire, That treats my eyeballs with extinction dire!