Smoking-related sick leave costs British industry 34 million working days each year.
Christopher
Columbus first came across tobacco in the fifteenth
century when he landed on the island of San Salvador.
From that time sailors brought tobacco back to Europe
as a luxury for the rich, who smoked it in pipes
or rolled it into cigars.
Cigarettes were invented in
the 16th Century by beggars in the Spanish city
of Seville. They picked up the cigar stubs from
the street, crumbled the old tobacco into scraps
of paper, and then smoked them.
The British took up smoking
in a big way during the Crimean War in the mid nineteenth
century. The soldiers picked up the habit from the
Turkish gunners, who rolled tobacco in paper and
used it to light the gunpowder in their cannon.
In between firings they sucked on the ‘cigarette’
to keep it alight.
In both the First and the
Second World Wars soldiers were given a ration of
cigarettes. The habit continued after the end of
the war.
Now nearly twice a many Britons die every year from
cigarettes than died per year in the Second World
War. (120,000 deaths compared to around 65,000).
