There’s no Smoke Without…..Pay! 

It soon transpired that the shortfall between the specified pay and what was actually received in the hand was caused by three factors.   The first, and most punishing, was the ‘hire-purchase’ of the sports gear.  We had been advised, of course, that we would have to pay a little each week.  What we were not told was that the repayment would be spread over the first year and not the period of the apprenticeship. The situation of penury in which most of the ‘sprogs’, or new entries, found themselves proved to be the joke of the establishment.   The abject misery that it induced in young men eager to stretch their wings caused enormous hilarity amongst the more senior apprentices.  Not least because it had happened to pretty well everyone else and most had had the opportunity either to come to terms with it or to make other arrangements.  So the evening of the sprog’s first pay day was filled with cruel jibes that served only to make the situation seem more desperate.  And that was the intention of course.  But having survived the initial crisis the priority of the new entries then became the development of a plan of action to ensure that, individually, they were able to get by on fractionally less than three and a half pence per day.     That’s three and a half old pence of course which, when translated into twenty-first century currency, is probably equivalent to about £1.20 per day.  It is still not a lot when you are 400 miles from home and have to provide for all your toilet requisites and other necessities with ready cash.  Consequently, for those who had bothered to work it out, the repayments were about five times what they had calculated.  Then there were the laundry and sundry charges.  Each apprentice was expected to keep himself immaculately turned out and the authorities, with some justification, had decided that it could not be left to the apprentices themselves to see to this.  Instead, provision would be made for apprentices to have their kit regularly and professionally cleaned.   There was a nominal weekly deduction for this and each item of clothing sent to the laundry by an apprentice was charged according to its type and set against his weekly deduction.  There was a similar arrangement for footwear and clothing repairs and haircuts.  At the end of each term any balance of accrued weekly deduction was repaid to apprentices as part of what had become known as ‘The Pay Down’.   Needless to say it did not take long for the new apprentices to cotton on to this and use the laundry as little as possible to ensure that they would have a reasonable amount of cash when they travelled home on leave.  Finally, the authorities insisted that a nominal weekly amount was set aside for each apprentice as ‘savings’ to ensure that they did not go on leave empty handed. This also became part of the Pay Down and sums of several pounds could be received by prudent apprentices.  This amount of uncommitted cash in 1949 represented an enormous sum to have in one’s pocket. 

It goes without saying that three and a half old pence per day did not go a long way.  Probably the biggest drain on financial resources was that most apprentices smoked tobacco and a substantial proportion of pay had to be channelled into this activity.  It was a peer group thing and the few that managed to stay clear of the habit were regularly ridiculed for their abstinence.   Besides, the Navy positively encouraged smoking by making a monthly ‘duty-free’ tobacco allowance of half a pound of  tobacco or two hundred ready made cigarettes.   This was offered to apprentices when they reached the appropriate age for the relatively small sum of two shillings, or thereabouts.   Since there was no cheaper way to smoke it was vital that apprentices entitled to the tobacco allowance were able to set aside the appropriate sum of money in order to take advantage of the issue when it was made.   It was a black day indeed if the tobacco money had to be spent on other necessities like tooth paste, for example. 

Naval tobacco was known as ‘tickler’ and it was a great many years indeed before it ever occurred to me why it should have been so called.  I’ll leave the answer to the reader’s imagination.  Tickler came in three varieties.  The most popular was rolling tobacco because, with practice, one could manage to produce around three to four hundred cigarettes, or more, from the monthly allowance.   The least popular was the pipe tobacco, a form of rough shag.  It was rough by nature and rough by taste and those apprentices who chose to give it a try, in the mistaken belief that it looked more mature to smoke a pipe, generally retired injured.   Ready made cigarettes were the middle way for many.   The allowance was two hundred per month and most apprentices tried them at least once when they were either, and rarely, flush with money or if they got tired of rolling their own.  The ready made cigarettes came in white packets emblazoned with the letters RN and with a broad blue line circling the packet.  Needless to say they were known as ‘blue liners.’  In my day there was never any manufacturer’s name or logo on blue liner packets probably for the very good reason that no self-respecting cigarette manufacturer would want to be associated with them.  The problem was salt-petre!  We used to say that blue liners were designed to be smoked, and remain lit, on deck in a force-eight gale.   To this end the cigarettes contained a significant quantity of salt-petre as an aid to the steady burning of the tobacco.  The difficulty was that the distribution of salt-petre in the mixture was uneven so that some cigarettes would not be able to remain alight even in ideal smoking conditions.   Others would explode into life with the application of a match and spew out sparks like a squib so that one was in two minds whether to suck it or run away from it.   I can recall on more than one occasion taking a draw from a blue liner and seeing a little dancing line of sparks burn in a line along the length of the cigarette with the effect that the cigarette would fall in half and deposit its remaining tobacco on the deck.   Still, beggars cannot be choosers and a fizzing blue liner was better than nothing at all.  

Most apprentices who smoked managed to acquire, sooner rather than later, a tickler tin.  Tickler tins came in many varieties but with a shared attribute in that they were all about the length of a cigarette.  The most common were metal Zube tins because the majority of apprentices who adopted the training establishment smoking practices required Zubes at some stage or another to allay their coughs or the pain of their sore throats.  The more affluent apprentices sported tins that had originally contained “Old Holborn” rolling tobacco.   But whatever the origin of the tins the contents were invariably the same.  There would be a packet of Rizla Red cigarette papers, two or three long dressmaker’s pins, an assorted variety of dog-ends of various sizes and the disgusting smell of twice, thrice or more, previously smoked tobacco.   The tickler tin came into its own when the money eventually ran out.   Which was often because no apprentice I ever knew was able to spread his shillings four over the full two-week period between pay-days!  The practice was always the same.  A minimum number of dog ends would be split open and the tobacco carefully re-rolled into a very thin ‘roll-up’.   When the resulting cigarette had burned down to about three centimetres in length it was impaled on a dressmaker’s pin two or three millimetres from the lip end so that the smoker could extract the maximum amount of smoke from the remaining tobacco.  Even then the tiny remaining dog-end would not be wasted but re-consigned again to the tickler tin to be included in another ‘roll-up’.    History does not record how many apprentices suffered later from lung disease as a direct result of this doubtful smoking practice. 

Because of the general shortage of cash, and the navy’s contribution to the apprentice’s tobacco consumption, the NAAFI canteen did not exactly do a roaring trade in cigarettes.    It was probably a red-letter day if and when the canteen sold a full packet of cigarettes in one go.  But entrepreneurship is a wonderful attribute and the canteen manager soon got round this little difficulty by maintaining two shoeboxes on the back counter.  One was emblazoned with the legend “CHEAP” and the other with “DEAR”.   The packet contents of Woodbines, Park Drive and other low cost “coffin-nails” were decanted into the Cheap box while the more up-market cigarettes such as Players, Capstan, Passing Cloud etc. found their way into the Dear box.  A Cheap cost a penny-ha’penny and a Dear cost two-pence and a visit to the canteen to buy one Cheap or one Dear was, by far, the most common way to acquire a decent smoke for at least the first year of an apprentice’s training.   The disadvantage of buying cigarettes which had been rolling around loose in a shoe box was that, in many cases, cigarettes proved to have lost variable amounts of their tobacco.   Cultivation of the affections of the NAAFI girls therefore became a ploy in order to get to “clean” the shoeboxes and harvest the loose tobacco.   So some lucky guys gained the double advantage of being able to improve their worldly education and get paid with tobacco for doing it. 

Smoking was the spur that encouraged apprentices to engage in a variety of doubtful activities.   The most common was borrowing against the ‘Pay Down’.   But even here  a degree of cunning was involved because the borrower would ensure that his borrowings were widespread and as low as possible so as to encourage the lender to forget about his due.   Farthings (one quarter of an old penny) were legal tender in those far off days and it was quite common for apprentices to go round seeking to borrow a farthing here and there until they had accumulated enough to buy one cigarette.   If all else failed another ploy was to go round to one’s friends and acquaintances and scrounge a ‘drag.’  Those that employed this method frequently, and there were quite a few, managed to develop a formidable degree of suction. It was not unusual to offer ‘draggers’ and to see a quarter of a cigarette disappear with that one puff.   I often thought that this particular talent of the dragger must have stood them in good stead when they eventually acquired a girl friend.  Some lucky young ladies must have felt the earth move just by lip-to-lip contact with these experts. Occasionally, however, there were other, more ambitious, schemes.

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