Life after Wills: barely a whiff of smoke in the cosmopolitan gateway to the west

At the time of his death in 1972 my father worked for WD and HO Wills, the Bristol tobacco people. Wills were huge and rather enlightened employers and even now plenty of Bristolians remember the days when everyone either worked for the company or had a friend or relation employed there. Wills produced a cigarette called ‘The Bristol’ but were most famous for cheap Woodbines and Wills Whiffs — small cheroots sold in packets of five. For the first three quarters of the 20th century, the company seemed unassailable — and synonymous with its home city. I remember a huge new tobacco factory being built and despite early rumblings about smoking being bad for your health it seemed inconceivable that Wills would not remain a pillar of the local economy, as important to it as the slave trade had once been.

My father ran the ‘special events’ section of the company, responsible for show-jumping at Hickstead, for powerboat-racing and for horse-racing all over Britain, all flamboyantly deployed as marketing tools. Imperial Tobacco, parent of both Wills and its Nottingham-based rival Players, lives on as the world’s fourth largest tobacco company and Wills’ fags are still available in the Indian subcontinent. Imperial’s head office is still in Bristol but Wills itself seems in effect to have gone up in smoke.

Strange how changes in habit can so dramatically alter lives. My mother’s family fortunes, such as they were, derived from a glove factory in Somerset — but then people stopped wearing gloves and the business collapsed. Then we were supported, like so many in Bristol, by people who smoked. Then they stopped smoking. I sometimes worry that before long people are going to stop reading words printed on paper. Such life-changing shifts in popular custom seem to be almost a family curse.