In the 1951 girls' career novel Front Page Ann Thorne by Rosamond Bertram, our eponymous heroine is in a bit of a scrape. Caught up in an international stamp-theft scam, she has been kidnapped and is being held prisoner in cellar in a seaside town.
Suddenly her captor appears with succour. “I brought you some cigarettes,” he said. “I quite understand how, if one is a smoker, one craves the fragrant weed.”
Ann undergoes various humiliations in the cellar – she is tied up, gagged, slapped and generally mistreated. But almost the most shocking thing to our 21st-century eyes is that it’s expected that a fictional teenage role model in a children’s book should not only be a smoker, but should be craving tobacco.
Times have obviously changed, and children’s fiction with them. It’s unthinkable that Harry Potter should spark up behind the broomstick sheds with Ron and Hermione, and quite right too. If children’s books reflect the era in which they are written, then their treatment of smoking is presumably a barometer for society’s views.
Reporter Ann Thorne (aged 19 by the time of this book) was a modern young woman with a career, living in a snazzy flat in London and travelling the world by aeroplane; smoking cigarettes was a kind of shorthand for relaxation, smartness, being à la mode. Just ten years later, however, the tide was definitely turning.
This week marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of Smoking and health, a groundbreaking report from the Royal College of Physicians (RCP), which was the first major piece of work linking smoking with lung cancer, bronchitis and coronary heart disease. Using the research of Sir Richard Doll and Sir Austin Bradford Hill, the report made the case for a raft of public health measures to reduce cigarette smoking and called on doctors to advise patients on illnesses caused and worsened by smoking. It also called for doctors to help patients to quit.
Predictably, the report caused a bit of a media storm, according to the RCP’s own website. There was “an ambivalent, even hostile response from some parts of the media, government and society,” the college notes. Today there is little argument with its conclusions.
But there is still a way to go. To mark the anniversary, the college held an event to hear from researchers and others about what will have to happen to make tobacco a quaint relic from the past, rather than a scourge of the present. I was particularly touched by a comment from Sir Richard Thompson, the RCP president. “I hope,” he writes, “that in another 50 years, smoking, like slavery, will have passed into history.”
There has been huge progress in the last half-century. This has come partly from top-down action – such as the highly successful ban on smoking in public places and other policies at a national level – measures from the so-called nanny state. But altered cultural expectation has also played into this.
Change has been obvious even in the last couple of decades: like Ann Thorne’s office in the 1950s, smoking was the norm in my first newsroom in 1990 (technically it was banned, but people on the newsdesk smoked, so that made it OK); there is no way that would happen now. And of course pubs and restaurants are smoke-free, but so are most people’s houses – even houses of smokers.
And expectations are different: maybe I lead a sheltered life, but I’m now slightly surprised when I meet middle-class, middle-aged smokers – it just seems a bit weird, although it used to be unremarkable or perhaps even the other way round.
So we’ve come a long way – but, as the RCP, ASH Scotland and doubtless many others warn us, there’s still room for improvement. Sure, the statistics look good: back in 1961, 70 per cent of men and 43 per cent of women smoked. In Scotland today, 26 per cent of men and 23 per cent of women smoke – and, encouragingly, smoking among 13–15-year-olds is now at its lowest level in 30 years.
Those figures sound encouraging but still mean that around one in four adults smokes; go to any town centre, large or small, and it feels as though this is an underestimate. Living in the sticks as I do, a trip to Stirling (our nearest metropolis) is blighted by clouds of tobacco which intensify outside stations and pubs.
So how will we reach Sir Richard Thompson’s utopia where smoking is as unthinkable as slavery? Probably the answer is more of the same – more legislation, such as the ban on vending machines and point-of-sale displays which are already in the pipeline; and, with a fair wind, further steps such as introducing plain packaging should be next.
We also need more of the same in terms of cultural change, and I actually think we might be getting there. Several years ago, shortly after the release of The Royal Tenenbaums, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, whose character smoked most alluringly, I heard world-leading scientist David Lane speaking on how to tackle tobacco. His feeling then was that it was hard to talk girls out of smoking because it was seen as glamorous. His gist was that public health messages were beaten “by Gwyneth Paltrow in a fur coat”.
In contrast, if a character lights up on television or in films during 2012, it’s likely to be a signifier not so much of glamour but of being a bit of a loser. In Coronation Street, for example, it’s people such as alcoholic bookie Peter Barlow and his stressed-out stepmother Deirdre who turn to tobacco. Even in Mad Men, where smoking is made to look impossibly beautiful, it’s done knowingly and with a strong health message. Had the programme actually been made in the 1960s when it was set, do you think that Don Draper would really have written to the New York Times explaining why Sterling Cooper Draper would no longer be taking tobacco accounts?
It’s the same in cinema. In the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck, set in a 1950s television newsroom, the characters smoked willy-nilly. One of the DVD “extras”, however, described how many of the original cohort of journalists had died of tobacco-related disease.
Perhaps that would have been Ann Thorne’s fate. She would be 80 years old now – assuming she had lived this long and that she wasn’t, well, fictional. She might have escaped from the stamp thieves, but would she have been so lucky against tobacco? Provided, that is, she didn’t read the RCP report and quit.
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