Alfred Dunhill as a brand was borne from a sort of ultimate exclusivity, well-intended to be finely discriminating, but often ridiculed for the uppercrust aura of rarified airs.
As early as 1920 this perception was evident, as most well noted by A.A. Milne with this essay:
"Smoking as a Fine Art"
My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight, when, finding a small piece of somebody else’s tobacco lying unclaimed on the ground, I decided to experiment with it. Numerous desert island stories had told me that the pangs of hunger could be allayed by chewing tobacco; it was thus that the hero staved off death before discovering the bread-fruit tree. Every right-minded boy of eight hopes to be shipwrecked one day, and it was proper that I should find out for myself whether my authorities could be trusted in this matter. So I chewed tobacco. In the sense that I certainly did not desire food for some time afterwards, my experience justified the authorities, but I felt at the time that it was not so much for staving off death as for reconciling oneself to it that tobacco-chewing was to be recommended. I have never practiced it since.
At eighteen I went to Cambridge, and bought two pipes in a case. In those days Greek was compulsory, but not more so than two pipes in a case. One of the pipes had an amber stem and the other a vulcanite stem, and both of them had silver belts. That also was compulsory. Having bought them, one was free to smoke cigarettes. However, at the end of my first year I got to work seriously on a shilling briar, and I have smoked that, or something like it, ever since.
In the last four years there has grown up a new school of pipe- smokers, by which (I suspect) I am hardly regarded as a pipe- smoker at all. This school buys its pipes always at one particular shop; its pupils would as soon think of smoking a pipe without the white spot as of smoking brown paper. So far are they from smoking brown paper that each one of them has his tobacco specially blended according to the colour of his hair, his taste in revues, and the locality in which he lives. The first blend is naturally not the ideal one. It is only when he has been a confirmed smoker for at least three months, and knows the best and worst of all tobaccos, that his exact requirements can be satisfied.
However, it is the pipe rather than the tobacco which marks him as belonging to this particular school. He pins his faith, not so much to its labour-saving devices as to the white spot outside, the white spot of an otherwise aimless life. This tells the world that it is one of THE pipes. Never was an announcement more superfluous. From the moment, shortly after breakfast, when he strikes his first match to the moment, just before bed-time, when he strikes his hundredth, it is obviously THE pipe which he is smoking.
For whereas men of an older school, like myself, smoke for the pleasure of smoking, men of this school smoke for the pleasure of pipe-owning—of selecting which of their many white-spotted pipes they will fill with their specially-blended tobacco, of filling the one so chosen, of lighting it, of taking it from the mouth to gaze lovingly at the white spot and thus letting it go out, of lighting it again and letting it go out again, of polishing it up with their own special polisher and putting it to bed, and then the pleasure of beginning all over again with another white- spotted one. They are not so much pipe-smokers as pipe-keepers; and to have spoken as I did just now of their owning pipes was wrong, for it is they who are in bondage to the white spot. This school is founded firmly on four years of war. When at the age of eighteen you are suddenly given a cheque-book and called “Sir,” you must do something by way of acknowledgment. A pipe in the mouth makes it clear that there has been no mistake—you are undoubtedly a man. But you may be excused for feeling after the first pipe that the joys of smoking have been rated too high, and for trying to extract your pleasure from the polish on the pipe’s surface, the pride of possessing a special mixture of your own, and such-like matters, rather than from the actual inspiration and expiration of smoke. In the same way a man not fond of reading may find delight in a library of well-bound books. They are pleasant to handle, pleasant to talk about, pleasant to show to friends. But it is the man without the library of well-bound books who generally does most of the reading.
So I feel that it is we of the older school who do most of the smoking. We smoke unconsciously while we are doing other things; THEY try, but not very successfully, to do other things while they are consciously smoking. No doubt they despise us, and tell themselves that we are not real smokers, but I fancy that they feel a little uneasy sometimes. For my young friends are always trying to persuade me to join their school, to become one of the white-spotted ones. I have no desire to be of their company, but I am prepared to make a suggestion to the founder of the school. It is that he should invent a pipe, white spot and all, which smokes itself. His pupils could hang it in the mouth as picturesquely as before, but the incidental bother of keeping it alight would no longer trouble them.
..............................................................................................................
...I recently came across another excellent example of Dunhill parody circa 1945 from the New Yorker as written by S. J. Perelman.
"Whose Lady Nicotine?"
At approximately four o'clock yesterday afternoon, the present
troubador, a one-story taxpayer in a wrinkled alpaca jacket and a
repossessed Panama, was gaping into the window of Alfred Buntwell,
Inc., the celebrated tobacconist in Radio City. Above his balding,
gargoyle head floated a teathery cloud containing a Mazda bulb labeled
"Idea!", Buntwell is a name revered by pipe smokers everywhere; his
briars have probably penetrated farther into the earth's far places
than the Union Jack. From the steaming jungles of the Gran Chaco to
the snows of Kachanjanga, from the Hook of Holland to the Great
Barrier Reef, the white dot on the Buntwell pipe stem is the sign of
the sahib. Deep in equatorial Africa, surrounded by headhunters,
Mungo Park clenched a Buntwell pipe between his teeth to maintain his
fortitude; it was a battered Buntwell mouthpiece that yielded up the
fate of the Franklin Polar Expedition.
Peering into the shop, jostled by crisp, well-fed executives hurrying
toward million-dollar deals, it suddenly struck me that a Buntwell
pipe was the key to my future. Here at last was a magic talisman that
would transform me from a wormy, chopfallen cypher into a forceful,
grim-lipped tycoon. A wave of exultation swept over me; I saw myself
in the club car of the Twentieth Century Limited puffing a silver
mounted Buntwell and merging directorates with a careless nod. I too
could become one of those enviable types who lounged against
knotty-pine interiors in four color advertisements, smoking their
Buntwells and fiercely demanding Old Peg-Leg whiskey. "Give me Old
Peg-Leg's satin smoothness every time", I would growl. "I like a
blended rye."
I squared my tiny shoulders and, baring my teeth in the half-snarl
befitting a major industrialist, entered the shrine. to my chagrin,
no obsequious lackey sprang forward to measure my features for the
correct model. A cathedral hush enveloped the shop, which had the
restrained elegance of a Park Avenue jeweler's. At a chaste showcase
displaying a box of panetellas marked down to a thousand dollars, a
glacial salesman was attending a fierce old party with white cavalry
mustaches redolent of Napoleon brandy. In the background,
another was languidly demonstrating a cigarette lighter to a dowager
weighed down under several pounds of diamonds. I coughed
apologetically and gave the salesman a winning smile to indicated that
I knew my place. The old grenadier scowled at me from under beetling
brows. "Confound it, Sir", he roared, "you're not at a cockfight!
Blasted place is gettin' noisier than the durbar." I cleared my
throat, in which a fishbone had mysteriously lodged, and made
myself as inconspicuous as possible. The salesman hastily explained
that the war had brought an influx of foreigners, but his client
refused to be mollified.
"Should have caned the bounder," he sputtered. "Country's goin' to
the demnition bow-wows, dash it all! Now then, Harkrider, what's this
infernal nonsense about my Burma cheroots?" He waved aside the
salesman's excuse that a convoy had been sunk, commanded that Buntwell
himself be summoned.
"But Mr. Buntwell's been dead sixty years, Major", Harkrider
protested.
"None of your poppycock!" barked the Major. "You tell Buntwell to
bring 'em around personally by noon tomorrow or I close my account!"
He stamped out, his wattles crimson with rage, and I sidled forward
timidly. In a few badly chosen words, I indicated that I required a
pipe.
"H'm'm'm'm'm", murmured Harkrider grudgingly, surveying my clothes.
"Just a moment." He disappeared through a curtain and engaged in a
whispered consultation with the manager. I dimly overheard a phrase
that sounded like "butter-snipe"; the two were obviously discussing
their lunch. At length, the salesman reentered and conducted me
sullenly to a showcase. After some deliberation, he extracted what
appeared to be an old sycamore root fitted with a steel flange that
covered the bowl.
"Know anything about pipes?" he inquired patronizingly.
"Well, not exactly," I hesitated. "I had a corncob when I was a
little boy -"
"I'm not interested in reminiscences of your youth," he snapped.
"Hold still." With a quick gesture he jammed the root into my mouth
and backed off, studying my face critically.
"Wh-What is it for!" I stammered.
"Big-game hunting," he returned loftily. I was screwing up my courage
to enquire out which end the bullet came when he suddenly plucked it
from my teeth. "No, I don't care for you in that. Let's see now --
what's your club?"
"Why - er - uh - the Williams After-Shave Club," I replied politely.
"You know, for men whose skins welcome that zestful, bracing tang----"
"No, no," he broke in irritably. "Where do you keep your yacht?" His
face darkened and he took a step forward. "You have a yacht, haven't
you?"
"Oh - why - er - bub - certainly", I lied skillfully. "He's - I mean,
she's laid up right now, the man's scraping her chimney. It got full
of seaweeds."
Harkrider glared at me, clearly unconvinced.
"Yo, heave ho, blow the man down," I hummed nonchalantly, executing a
few steps of the sailor's hornpipe. "Thar she blows and sparm at
that! A double ration of plum duff for all hands, matey." The
stratagem was successful; with a baffled grunt, Harkrider produced a
green velvet jewel case and exhibited a small, charred stub encrusted
with salt.
"That's been used before, hasn't it?" I faltered.
"Of course, it's been used." he grated. "You don't think you're going
to get a new pipe for sixty-seven dollars, do you?"
"Oh, no, naturally," I agreed. "Tell you the truth, I had in mind
something a bit smaller."
"Smaller?" snorted Harkrider. "You ought to have a calabash to go
with that jaw of yours!"
"That's just what I was telling the wife only this morning," I
chuckled. "Gee, did you ever see anything like it? It's worse than
an English bulldog's."
"Well, do you want a calabash or not?" he interrupted. "They're
twenty dollars - though I guess you don't see that much money in a
year, do you?"
Blushing like a long-stemmed American Beauty rose, I explained that I
merely wanted something to knock around in, a homely old jimmy pipe I
could suck on while dispensing salty aphorisms like Velvet Joe. After
a heart-rending plea, he finally consented to part with a factory
second for thirteen dollars, equipped with an ingenious aluminum coil
which conveyed the nicotine juice directly to the throat before it
lost its potency. To prove my gratitude, I immediately bought a
tobacco jar in the shape of a human skull, two pounds of Buntwell's
Special Blend of chopped amethysts and attar of roses, and a cunning
all-purpose reamer equally useful for removing carbon from a pipe or
barnacle from a boat. Peeling eighty-three rugs from my skinny little
roll, I caught up my purchases and coursed whistling gems from The
Bartered Bride. Right after dinner, I disposed myself in my favorite
easy chair, lit a cheery blaze in the pipe and picked up the evening
paper.
When I regained consciousness, there was a smell in the apartment like
a Hindu suttee, and an angel in starched denim was taking my pulse and
what remained of my roll. If I go on improving at this rate, she's
promised I can get up tomorrow. That means I can go out Wednesday and
go to jail Thursday, because in the meantime I've got a date to heave
a brick through a plateglass window in Radio City. See you in
Alcatraz, bud.
As early as 1920 this perception was evident, as most well noted by A.A. Milne with this essay:
"Smoking as a Fine Art"
My first introduction to Lady Nicotine was at the innocent age of eight, when, finding a small piece of somebody else’s tobacco lying unclaimed on the ground, I decided to experiment with it. Numerous desert island stories had told me that the pangs of hunger could be allayed by chewing tobacco; it was thus that the hero staved off death before discovering the bread-fruit tree. Every right-minded boy of eight hopes to be shipwrecked one day, and it was proper that I should find out for myself whether my authorities could be trusted in this matter. So I chewed tobacco. In the sense that I certainly did not desire food for some time afterwards, my experience justified the authorities, but I felt at the time that it was not so much for staving off death as for reconciling oneself to it that tobacco-chewing was to be recommended. I have never practiced it since.
At eighteen I went to Cambridge, and bought two pipes in a case. In those days Greek was compulsory, but not more so than two pipes in a case. One of the pipes had an amber stem and the other a vulcanite stem, and both of them had silver belts. That also was compulsory. Having bought them, one was free to smoke cigarettes. However, at the end of my first year I got to work seriously on a shilling briar, and I have smoked that, or something like it, ever since.
In the last four years there has grown up a new school of pipe- smokers, by which (I suspect) I am hardly regarded as a pipe- smoker at all. This school buys its pipes always at one particular shop; its pupils would as soon think of smoking a pipe without the white spot as of smoking brown paper. So far are they from smoking brown paper that each one of them has his tobacco specially blended according to the colour of his hair, his taste in revues, and the locality in which he lives. The first blend is naturally not the ideal one. It is only when he has been a confirmed smoker for at least three months, and knows the best and worst of all tobaccos, that his exact requirements can be satisfied.
However, it is the pipe rather than the tobacco which marks him as belonging to this particular school. He pins his faith, not so much to its labour-saving devices as to the white spot outside, the white spot of an otherwise aimless life. This tells the world that it is one of THE pipes. Never was an announcement more superfluous. From the moment, shortly after breakfast, when he strikes his first match to the moment, just before bed-time, when he strikes his hundredth, it is obviously THE pipe which he is smoking.
For whereas men of an older school, like myself, smoke for the pleasure of smoking, men of this school smoke for the pleasure of pipe-owning—of selecting which of their many white-spotted pipes they will fill with their specially-blended tobacco, of filling the one so chosen, of lighting it, of taking it from the mouth to gaze lovingly at the white spot and thus letting it go out, of lighting it again and letting it go out again, of polishing it up with their own special polisher and putting it to bed, and then the pleasure of beginning all over again with another white- spotted one. They are not so much pipe-smokers as pipe-keepers; and to have spoken as I did just now of their owning pipes was wrong, for it is they who are in bondage to the white spot. This school is founded firmly on four years of war. When at the age of eighteen you are suddenly given a cheque-book and called “Sir,” you must do something by way of acknowledgment. A pipe in the mouth makes it clear that there has been no mistake—you are undoubtedly a man. But you may be excused for feeling after the first pipe that the joys of smoking have been rated too high, and for trying to extract your pleasure from the polish on the pipe’s surface, the pride of possessing a special mixture of your own, and such-like matters, rather than from the actual inspiration and expiration of smoke. In the same way a man not fond of reading may find delight in a library of well-bound books. They are pleasant to handle, pleasant to talk about, pleasant to show to friends. But it is the man without the library of well-bound books who generally does most of the reading.
So I feel that it is we of the older school who do most of the smoking. We smoke unconsciously while we are doing other things; THEY try, but not very successfully, to do other things while they are consciously smoking. No doubt they despise us, and tell themselves that we are not real smokers, but I fancy that they feel a little uneasy sometimes. For my young friends are always trying to persuade me to join their school, to become one of the white-spotted ones. I have no desire to be of their company, but I am prepared to make a suggestion to the founder of the school. It is that he should invent a pipe, white spot and all, which smokes itself. His pupils could hang it in the mouth as picturesquely as before, but the incidental bother of keeping it alight would no longer trouble them.
..............................................................................................................
...I recently came across another excellent example of Dunhill parody circa 1945 from the New Yorker as written by S. J. Perelman.
"Whose Lady Nicotine?"
At approximately four o'clock yesterday afternoon, the present
troubador, a one-story taxpayer in a wrinkled alpaca jacket and a
repossessed Panama, was gaping into the window of Alfred Buntwell,
Inc., the celebrated tobacconist in Radio City. Above his balding,
gargoyle head floated a teathery cloud containing a Mazda bulb labeled
"Idea!", Buntwell is a name revered by pipe smokers everywhere; his
briars have probably penetrated farther into the earth's far places
than the Union Jack. From the steaming jungles of the Gran Chaco to
the snows of Kachanjanga, from the Hook of Holland to the Great
Barrier Reef, the white dot on the Buntwell pipe stem is the sign of
the sahib. Deep in equatorial Africa, surrounded by headhunters,
Mungo Park clenched a Buntwell pipe between his teeth to maintain his
fortitude; it was a battered Buntwell mouthpiece that yielded up the
fate of the Franklin Polar Expedition.
Peering into the shop, jostled by crisp, well-fed executives hurrying
toward million-dollar deals, it suddenly struck me that a Buntwell
pipe was the key to my future. Here at last was a magic talisman that
would transform me from a wormy, chopfallen cypher into a forceful,
grim-lipped tycoon. A wave of exultation swept over me; I saw myself
in the club car of the Twentieth Century Limited puffing a silver
mounted Buntwell and merging directorates with a careless nod. I too
could become one of those enviable types who lounged against
knotty-pine interiors in four color advertisements, smoking their
Buntwells and fiercely demanding Old Peg-Leg whiskey. "Give me Old
Peg-Leg's satin smoothness every time", I would growl. "I like a
blended rye."
I squared my tiny shoulders and, baring my teeth in the half-snarl
befitting a major industrialist, entered the shrine. to my chagrin,
no obsequious lackey sprang forward to measure my features for the
correct model. A cathedral hush enveloped the shop, which had the
restrained elegance of a Park Avenue jeweler's. At a chaste showcase
displaying a box of panetellas marked down to a thousand dollars, a
glacial salesman was attending a fierce old party with white cavalry
mustaches redolent of Napoleon brandy. In the background,
another was languidly demonstrating a cigarette lighter to a dowager
weighed down under several pounds of diamonds. I coughed
apologetically and gave the salesman a winning smile to indicated that
I knew my place. The old grenadier scowled at me from under beetling
brows. "Confound it, Sir", he roared, "you're not at a cockfight!
Blasted place is gettin' noisier than the durbar." I cleared my
throat, in which a fishbone had mysteriously lodged, and made
myself as inconspicuous as possible. The salesman hastily explained
that the war had brought an influx of foreigners, but his client
refused to be mollified.
"Should have caned the bounder," he sputtered. "Country's goin' to
the demnition bow-wows, dash it all! Now then, Harkrider, what's this
infernal nonsense about my Burma cheroots?" He waved aside the
salesman's excuse that a convoy had been sunk, commanded that Buntwell
himself be summoned.
"But Mr. Buntwell's been dead sixty years, Major", Harkrider
protested.
"None of your poppycock!" barked the Major. "You tell Buntwell to
bring 'em around personally by noon tomorrow or I close my account!"
He stamped out, his wattles crimson with rage, and I sidled forward
timidly. In a few badly chosen words, I indicated that I required a
pipe.
"H'm'm'm'm'm", murmured Harkrider grudgingly, surveying my clothes.
"Just a moment." He disappeared through a curtain and engaged in a
whispered consultation with the manager. I dimly overheard a phrase
that sounded like "butter-snipe"; the two were obviously discussing
their lunch. At length, the salesman reentered and conducted me
sullenly to a showcase. After some deliberation, he extracted what
appeared to be an old sycamore root fitted with a steel flange that
covered the bowl.
"Know anything about pipes?" he inquired patronizingly.
"Well, not exactly," I hesitated. "I had a corncob when I was a
little boy -"
"I'm not interested in reminiscences of your youth," he snapped.
"Hold still." With a quick gesture he jammed the root into my mouth
and backed off, studying my face critically.
"Wh-What is it for!" I stammered.
"Big-game hunting," he returned loftily. I was screwing up my courage
to enquire out which end the bullet came when he suddenly plucked it
from my teeth. "No, I don't care for you in that. Let's see now --
what's your club?"
"Why - er - uh - the Williams After-Shave Club," I replied politely.
"You know, for men whose skins welcome that zestful, bracing tang----"
"No, no," he broke in irritably. "Where do you keep your yacht?" His
face darkened and he took a step forward. "You have a yacht, haven't
you?"
"Oh - why - er - bub - certainly", I lied skillfully. "He's - I mean,
she's laid up right now, the man's scraping her chimney. It got full
of seaweeds."
Harkrider glared at me, clearly unconvinced.
"Yo, heave ho, blow the man down," I hummed nonchalantly, executing a
few steps of the sailor's hornpipe. "Thar she blows and sparm at
that! A double ration of plum duff for all hands, matey." The
stratagem was successful; with a baffled grunt, Harkrider produced a
green velvet jewel case and exhibited a small, charred stub encrusted
with salt.
"That's been used before, hasn't it?" I faltered.
"Of course, it's been used." he grated. "You don't think you're going
to get a new pipe for sixty-seven dollars, do you?"
"Oh, no, naturally," I agreed. "Tell you the truth, I had in mind
something a bit smaller."
"Smaller?" snorted Harkrider. "You ought to have a calabash to go
with that jaw of yours!"
"That's just what I was telling the wife only this morning," I
chuckled. "Gee, did you ever see anything like it? It's worse than
an English bulldog's."
"Well, do you want a calabash or not?" he interrupted. "They're
twenty dollars - though I guess you don't see that much money in a
year, do you?"
Blushing like a long-stemmed American Beauty rose, I explained that I
merely wanted something to knock around in, a homely old jimmy pipe I
could suck on while dispensing salty aphorisms like Velvet Joe. After
a heart-rending plea, he finally consented to part with a factory
second for thirteen dollars, equipped with an ingenious aluminum coil
which conveyed the nicotine juice directly to the throat before it
lost its potency. To prove my gratitude, I immediately bought a
tobacco jar in the shape of a human skull, two pounds of Buntwell's
Special Blend of chopped amethysts and attar of roses, and a cunning
all-purpose reamer equally useful for removing carbon from a pipe or
barnacle from a boat. Peeling eighty-three rugs from my skinny little
roll, I caught up my purchases and coursed whistling gems from The
Bartered Bride. Right after dinner, I disposed myself in my favorite
easy chair, lit a cheery blaze in the pipe and picked up the evening
paper.
When I regained consciousness, there was a smell in the apartment like
a Hindu suttee, and an angel in starched denim was taking my pulse and
what remained of my roll. If I go on improving at this rate, she's
promised I can get up tomorrow. That means I can go out Wednesday and
go to jail Thursday, because in the meantime I've got a date to heave
a brick through a plateglass window in Radio City. See you in
Alcatraz, bud.
:
