In remote English and Welsh parishes men seem occasionally to have smoked in churches without any intention of being irreverent, and without any consciousness that they were doing anything unusual.  Canon Atkinson, in his delightful book “Forty Years in a Moorland Parish,” tells how, when he first went to Danby in Cleveland—­then very remote from the great world—­and had to take his first funeral, he found inside the church the parish clerk, who was also parish schoolmaster by the way, sitting in the sunny embrasure of the west window with his hat on and comfortably smoking his pipe.  A correspondent of the Times in 1895 mentioned that his mother had told him how she remembered seeing smoking in a Welsh church about 1850—­“The Communion table stood in the aisle, and the farmers were in the habit of putting their hats upon it, and when the sermon began they lit their pipes and smoked, but without any idea of irreverence.”  In an Essex church about 1861, a visitor had pointed out to him various nooks in the gallery where short pipes were stowed away, which he was informed the old men smoked during service; and several of the pews in the body of the church contained triangular wooden spittoons filled with sawdust.

A clergyman has put it on record that when he went in 1873 as curate-in-charge to an out-of-the-way Norfolk village, at his first early celebration he arrived in church about 7.45 A.M., and, he says, “to my amazement saw five old men sitting round the stove in the nave with their hats on, smoking their pipes.  I expostulated with them quite quietly, but they left the church before service and never came again.  I discovered afterwards that they had been regular communicants, and that my predecessor always distributed the offertory to the poor present immediately after the service.  When these men, in the course of my remonstrance found that I was not going to continue the custom, they no longer cared to be communicants.”

Nowadays, if smoking takes place in church at all, it can only be done with intentional irreverence; and it is painful to think that even at the present day there are people in whom a feeling of reverence and decency is so far lacking as to lead them to desecrate places of worship.  The Vicar of Lancaster, at his Easter vestry meeting in 1913, complained of bank-holiday visitors to the parish church who ate their lunch, smoked, and wore their hats while looking round the building.  It is absurd to suppose that these people were unconscious of the impropriety of their conduct.

XV

TOBACCONISTS’ SIGNS

    “I would enjoin every shop to make use of a sign which
    bears some affinity to the wares in which it deals.”

          ADDISON, Spectator, April 2, 1711.