WINDSOR CASTLE FAGS
1918

Nowadays, one doesn't hear the slang 'fags' used for cigarettes. However, the term was in common usage, especially in England, during the early decades of the last century. Pictured below is a 1918 flyer for the P. Lorillard Company's new military cigarette, Windsor Castle Fags. The flyer features the popular poem "Fags," written by a British corporal who found comfort in his cigarette while stationed at the front during the First World War. The following is the first verse:
When the cold is making ice cream of the morrow of your bones,
When you're shaking like a jelly and your feet are dead as stones,
When your clothes and boots and blankets, and your rifle and your kit,
Are soaked from Hell to Breakfast, and the dugout where you sit
Is leaking like a basket, and upon the muddy floor
The water lies in filthy pools, six inches deep or more;
Tho' life seems cold and mis'rable and all the world is wet,
You'll always get thro' somehow if you've got a cigarette.
cigarette flyer packs cigarette flyer


Lorillard advertised their new military cigarette as "Extra Long Fags." At twenty cents a pack, Windsor Castle Fags was an expensive smoke. By the way, cigarettes made during the First World War have a Series of 1917 federal tax stamp.


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