Cigarette cards offer glimpse of past

This article was published in Trinity News on 24 February, 2009, the ninth 'Old Trinity' column.


Cigarette cards offer glimpse of past

UNTIL THE 1940s, the man who enjoyed a cigarette could look forward to finding an attractive printed card in his ten pack. That era’s love of cataloguing and classification saw sets of cards on every imaginable topic being printed and included in these packs, and the sets have made an inadvertent but valuable contribution to history.

Cards on the subject of Trinity College are not particularly numerous. Those shown here constitute a virtually complete collection – missing are those rugby caricature cards which depict DU Football Club men Sugden and Cussen. But these few cards are particularly interesting because their subjects are so specific.

The “Vanity Fair” card is probably the oldest Trinity-related cigarette card. Printed in 1902, it shows Edward Carson, MP for Dublin University, in full oratorical flow. The “Vanity Fair” sets reproduced many of the caricatures printed weekly in Vanity Fair magazine. Carson is one of several Trinity men to have appeared in Vanity Fair.


The Gallaher Ltd card showing the college’s facade also dates to the first decade of the 20th century. It would have taken a lifetime of smoking to complete the set of Gallaher “Irish View Scenery” cards: this Trinity example is number 98 in a set of 600!

The smaller heraldic card, from Wills’s “Borough Arms” first series, was to be found in cigarette packs from around 1903 to 1906. It contains two mistakes: these are the arms of Trinity College, not the University of Dublin; and the “bible closed, clasps to the dexter” of the college’s arms should be in gold, not the dark colour shown here.


Depictions of the university’s arms are very rare, making the card showing the University of Dublin arms particularly interesting. The text on the rear of the card tells us that the DU arms “were granted by Sir Bernard Burke, Ulster King of Arms, on March 28, 1882.” I have not encountered this piece of information anywhere else.

The DU arms card is from Wills’s 1923 “Arms of Universities” set. The complete set of 25 also includes the coats of arms of the Queen’s University of Ireland, the Royal University of Ireland, the Queen’s University of Belfast and the National University of Ireland, the former two of these being defunct, and the latter two now no longer using their legitimate coats of arms as their chief symbols.


The 1926 “University Hoods and Gowns” set contains two Dublin University cards, depicting the BA and MA degree hoods. Oddly, these do not seem to correspond to the hood shapes in use at the time. Drawings of our university’s hoods in Haycraft’s Degrees and Hoods of the World’s Universities and Colleges show that these cards probably depict the hood shapes in use here before 1909.


The TCD Association tie, better known as our graduates’ tie, is depicted in the Churchman’s Cigarettes “Well-Known Ties” second series set. These cards were issued in 1935, which shows how popular the Trinity tie had become just eight years or so after its introduction.

JOHN LAVELLE, BA 2008, Gold Medallist, a Scholar reading for the Magister in Utroque Jure degree, tells me that the DU Association Football Club celebrates its 125th anniversary this year. The club’s first team will be visiting Oxford and Cambridge next month to play the Blues teams. Good luck, Trinity, and best wishes to DUAFC in its quasquicentennial year.

It is a shame that the soccer club’s five-letter acronym, in use since 1883, has recently been poached by another outfit. The college’s American footballers have been referring to their as-yet-unrecognised club as “DUAFC”, to the confusion of the student masses. Let us hope that this Gridiron group will acknowledge tradition and adopt a more appropriate moniker.

IT WAS REASSURING to read in the last Trinity News that the new “semesters” will retain the old term names. Trinity had four terms of widely varying lengths until 1834, when Easter term was abolished. It would have been truly disappointing had a hasty decision killed off Michaelmas, Hilary and Trinity terms in 2009.