The Scrap book contains some old newspaper front pages and I will write about these later but just as interesting as the news item are the adverts on the other side.
Newspapers were once full of cigarette advertising all trying to lure people into a lifetime of addiction. But, a significant event in June 1965 was the banning of cigarette advertising on television and after that Marlborough could not peddle its macho cowboy image and Consulate could not claim that a menthol cigarette was as ‘cool as a mountain stream’ .
I am thankful for that because at eleven years old I was just about at my most impressionable age and I am quite convinced that I might otherwise have been seduced by the images that cigarette advertisements used to trap teenagers into everlasting tobacco dependency and debiltating illness.
It was about this time that I enjoyed, or perhaps more correctly endured, my first cigarette. My friend David Newman had slipped some woodbines from his dad’s half empty packet and we went into the fields behind his house at the Locks in Hillmorton for an adult smoke. David’s dad, Harry, wouldn’t have noticed a few fags going missing because he used to smoke about sixty a day and that certainly helped to bring his days on earth to a premature ending.
Woodbines were untipped and maximum strength and we lit up and I can clearly remember trying to adopt a grown up demeanour and puffing away without inhaling until an unfortunate combination of sucking in and speaking at the same time involuntarily drew the foul vapours into my lungs, filled my brain with noxious gasses and made me giddy and unsteady. I literally fell over as though someone had punched me in the head, turned an unpleasant shade of green and was violently sick, much to the amusement of my pals who simply stood around giggling.
I tried smoking a few more times after that, as we all did, but I have never forgotten that thoroughly unpleasant experience and gladly never became a real cigarette smoker ever after that.
These newspapers advertisements are from the Daily Mail on Saturday 30th January 1965. Tobacco advertising in newspapers was not banned in the United Kingdom until July 2001.
Age of Innocence 
Am I the only person ever, I wonder, never to have even put a cigarette in my mouth, let alone one that was lit? A lot of my friends smoked during my teenage years but somehow I never even felt the slightest desire to give it a go!
As for the above comment, nope not the only one, I’ve never smoked a cigarette either. Or put an unlit one in my mouth either.
Probably came from trying to eat breakfast with my dad sending obnoxious fumes over my food. Or maybe feeling sick in the car when my parents were smoking.
I take it the Formula One advertising finally stopped too?
F1 is complicated – banned in Europe but still allowed elsewhere but due to pressure no visible sponsorship anywhere since 2011.