Page:Notes and Queries - Series 11 - Volume 9.djvu/257

 us. ix. MAR. 28, 1914.] NOTES AND QUERIES,

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WIFE OF ANTHONY JACKSON. Can any correspondent of ' N. & Q.' give me the name or lineage of Mrs. Jackson, wife of Anthony Jackson, student of the Inner Temple ; admitted 1616, and probably married c. 1626? Her husband was knighted 1650 at Breda in Holland, and interred in the Old Temple Church, London, 14 Oct., 1666. WM. .JACKSON PIGOTT.

Manor House, Dundrum, co. Down.

Sra MACKENZIE DOUGLAS. Who was the Scottish Catholic Jacobite of this name who was sent by Louis XV. to Russia on a secret mission in 1755, and as ^Minister Plenipotentiary in 1756 ?

JOHN B. WAINEWRIGHT.

RAILWAY SMOKING-CARRIAGES.

(11 S. ix. 129.)

DURING the first thirty years of their exist- ence a great tobacco persecution was waged by the railways of this country, when, with a few isolated exceptions, no accommodation was set apart in trains for smokers, and smoking was absolutely prohibited in railway carriages. This veto, which was productive of annoyance, diversion, and some hard knocks, was probably dictated, not by any lingering belief in the supposed noxious qualities of the herb, but by an apprehen- sion of danger from the carelessness of those who used it. Nevertheless, as early as 1839 Lieut. Peter Le Count, inspector of rolling-stock on the London and Bir- mingham Railway, recommended attach- ing a smoking-carriage to every train, " as this habit has become almost a necessary of life with many people." " This carriage," he added, " should be placed last on the train, except horse-boxes, and no platform should communicate with it, nor any connec- tion exist with the other carriages." The railway companies' by-law against smoking was vigorously enforced, and sometimes to a point of gross illegality, if we are to believe contemporary accounts. For example, The Mechanics' Magazine tells the story of the fate that befell a foreign gentleman who, while travelling from Brighton to London in 1842, insisted upon keeping his cigar alight after the guard had warned him to desist. At the next station he was met by a demand for his ticket, ordered out of the coupe, and the guard, addressing one of the officers on the platform, warned him that " that person was

not to be allowed to proceed to London by any train that night."

An amusing volume of reminiscences, written by an ex-station-master on the Great Western Railway in the " seventies," tells how that company once caught a tartar. The stationmaster at Didcot removed a passenger from an " up " express train, and handed him over to the police on a charge of smoking to the annoyance of a fellow-traveller. The next day the prisoner was brought be- fore the magistrates, and when asked what he had to say in answer to the charge, he replied :

" Gentlemen, the offence took place in the county of Wilts, whereas I am now charged in Berkshire. I am a solicitor ; I was specially engaged in a case which I shali now miss, and I shall sue the company for detaining me. I respectfully hold that you, in this county, have no jurisdiction over what occurred in another county."

He was released, and he did sue the com- pany, and got SOL damages.

The anti - tobacco fanatics did every- thing in their power to strengthen the companies' hands, and gave them no mercy if they evinced a disposition not to uphold the by-law. In 1853 a rabid old fogy sued the Edinburgh and Glasgow Railway merely because he smelt some one smoking, not in his compartment, but somewhere in the train. He ' based his claim on the danger he ran from fire and injury to his feelings, and he was actually awarded " restricted damages " to the tune of 81. 6s. Sd.

Guards, however, were venal, and inven- tors came to the assistance of smokers. Writing to The Times in 1846, a corre- spondent reported, with indignation, that tobacconists' windows were full of craftily contrived " railway pipes," adapted for instantaneous concealment. During the " fifties " and " sixties " the great railway smoking question was a standng jest in Punch : how the smoking traveller bribed officials, how he got rid of fellow-travel- lers who objected to pipe or weed, &c.

The first smoking-carriage was intro- duced on the Eastern Counties Railway in September, 1846. It was a first-class saloon, forty feet in length, the ends being converted into a kind of open lounge, while inside the "Divan," as it was termed, morocco -leather sofas, mahogany tables, and self-balancing lamps were found. It was officially stated that " the peculiarity of a portion of the Cambridge and Newmarket traffic suggested to the Company the forma- tion ^of such a description of carriage."