Sustaining the Lower Deck
Tobacco (and jam!)

Tobacco had a long identification with the Royal Navy’s lower deck in public perception. Indeed the Nottingham tobacco firm John Player built its substantial business on the image of the rating as a smoker of ‘Navy Cut’.

From 1798, just a year after the Spithead Mutiny, the Admiralty permitted ratings a monthly allowance of one pound of leaf tobacco. By the turn of the 20th Century this purchase cost an Able Seaman the equivalent of one day’s pay. Sailors turned the leaf into a ‘hard prick’ by marling it down in canvas and then heaving it up taut with a circular cord exterior. A ‘twist’ cut from this would then be smoked in his pipe.

Fast forward to 1903, on the eve of the Dreadnought age. The Navy was beginning to project itself as a technologically advanced service arm manned by an increasingly educated and technically sophisticated lower deck – the ‘new generation sailors’ as they were termed.

Concurrently, Players launched a lighter tobacco mixture - Navy Cut – sold in two half-pound tins and intended for cigarette making. It bore the image of a bearded matelot with a 'Hero' cap ribbon. Subsequently ready-made cigarettes were sold, initially in circular tins, the Able Seaman portrayed in ‘square rig’ uniform and with an indeterminate HMS…cap ribbon – sometimes represented as HMS 'Excellent' in advertisements. Tins were gradually replaced by cardboard packs.

The new mixture was promptly nicknamed ‘Ticklers’ as it was launched at the same time as a jam product supplied to the Navy by the firm of Ticklers. Aimed at recent recruits, the cigarette tobacco was popular with the new intake while old hands who preferred the ‘hard stuff’ ribbed their younger messmates as ‘Ticklers’. Conjuring up a new trend, this sobriquet stuck and Players’ Medium Navy Cut cigarettes became the firm’s most popular brand.

When Winston Churchill became First Lord of the Admiralty in 1911 and introduced significant improvements in conditions for lower deck ratings, his populist style was to make impromptu visits to ships and engage men in friendly conversation about their view of the Service. Tales were commonplace of him sidling up to a seaman on deck and asking in matey fashion ‘got a Tickler?’