My dad likes to say that in our family we don’t have hobbies, we have obsessions. My dad has planes, my brother has Scouts and I seem to have Girl Guides. I always get excited when one of these crosses over with another so you can imagine my excitement when my brother gifted me a Girl Guide and Scout cigarette card set. My love for controversial Girl Guide items made this the perfect gift.
Cigarette cards have more or less become a collectible of the past and were largely produced between 1875 and the 1940s, with some modern sets coming out in the early 2000s. These collectible cards documented popular culture and would come in the pack of cigarettes. Many different companies used this selling technique and the set I own is from John Player and Sons. After creating a successful agricultural fertilizer, John Player bought William Wright tobacco in 1877 naming it John Player and Sons. Player’s was one of the first English tobacco companies to include general interest cards in their packs and released around 200 sets of cards with most sets including 25 to 50 cards. Some of their more popular sets saw a reprinting in the 1990s.
The Girl Guide and Boy Scout set was printed in 1933 and consisted of 50 cards with 25 focused on Girl Guides and the rest on Scouts. Each card has a patrol emblem with realistic artwork on the patrol's namesake below with corresponding nature facts on the back. It has been difficult to track down just how many patrols there were then, but currently, there seem to be dozens in the UK Guiding with some fun ones including animals like penguins and elephants.
So what would have the Baden-Powel thought of these cards? Probably nothing great. I couldn't find any documents written by the Baden-Powells addressing the cards but in Kristine Alexander’s book, ‘Guiding Modern Girls: Internationalism in the 1920s and 1930s” it states that Lord Baden-Powell did warn against the physical and modern dangers of smoking in an article called ‘Scouting and Smoking’ published in the 1904 issue of the Brigadier. This was four years before ‘Scouting for Boys’ was published and I would imagine the same anti-smoking message was presented in this early Scout Manual.
I love these cards and I’m super happy to have them in my collection. I can totally see a parent finding them in a pack of cigarettes and then giving them to their child who was involved in the movement. Cigarettes cards are truly an item of the past and I doubt we will ever see a reprinting of this set.
Thanks for reading!
EM
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