Description
Cigarette Cards – a cigarette card album issued in the 1930’s by John Player & Sons, a branch of the Imperial Tobacco Company (of Great Britain and Ireland) Limited.
A complete set of 50 colour cigarette cards illustrating common British sea fish species, and beside each card is an informative description.
The cards were issued with Player’s Medium Navy Cut Cigarettes and other similar albums and cards were issued such as freshwater fishes, birds, animals, film stars, aircraft, military uniforms.
More cigarette card albums available here at verycollectable.com
John Player & Sons – a history.
In March 1820, William Wright set up a small tobacco factory in Craigshill, Livingston, West Lothian. This business expanded and earned Wright a comfortable fortune.
John Player bought the business in 1877. He had the Castle Tobacco Factories built in Radford, Nottingham, just west of the city centre. He had three large factory blocks built, but initially only one was used to process and pack tobacco. The other two blocks were loaned out to lace manufacturers until the business had expanded enough to use the additional space.
One of John Player’s innovations was to offer pre-packaged tobacco. Before this, smokers would have bought tobacco by weight from loose supplies and cigarette papers to roll them in. He also adopted a registered trade mark as a guarantee to the public that the goods could be relied on.
John Player died in December 1884 and for the next nine years, the business was run by a small group of family friends until W G and J D Player were ready to take over the firm in 1893. The business became a private limited company in 1895, with a share capital of £200,000.
The business was run later by Player’s sons John Dane Player and William Goodacre Player.
In 1901, in response to competitive threats from the US, Player’s merged with the Imperial Tobacco Group. The largest constituent of Imperial Tobacco was W. D. & H. O. Wills and the new group was run from Wills’ head office in Bristol. Player’s retained its own identity with cigarette brands such as Navy Cut, No. 9, John Player Special, and Gold Leaf; loose tobacco brands such as No Name; and its distinctive logo of a smoking sailor in a navy-cut cap.
Player’s Medium Navy Cut was the most popular by far of the three Navy Cut brands (there was also Mild and Gold Leaf, mild being today’s rich flavour). Two thirds of all the cigarettes sold in Britain were Player’s and two thirds of these were branded as Player’s Medium Navy Cut. In January 1937, Player’s sold nearly 3.5 million cigarettes (which included 1.34 million in London).
The popularity of the brand was mostly amongst the middle class and in the South of England. It was smoked in the north but other brands were locally more popular.
Production continued to grow until at its peak in the late 1950s, Player’s was employing 11,000 workers (compared to 5,000 in 1926) and producing 15 brands of pipe tobacco and 11 brands of cigarettes.
In the UK in 1968, in response to an increase in tobacco duty in the budget, Player’s launched a new, cheaper brand, “Player’s No.10”. Priced at 3s 2d (16p) for 20, it was the cheapest cigarette on the British market.
A new factory (the ‘Horizon’ factory) was opened in the early 1970s on Nottingham’s industrial outskirts, with better road access and more effective floor space, next to the headquarters of Boots the Chemists. On 15 April 2014, Imperial Tobacco announced that the Horizon factory would close in early 2016, bringing an end to cigarette and tobacco manufacture in Nottingham after over 130 years.
The old factories in Radford, especially the cavernous No. 1 Factory which occupied the whole area between Radford Boulevard and Alfreton Road, bordered by Player Street and Beckenham Road, were gradually run down. The No.2 Factory, facing onto Radford Boulevard with its distinctive clock (now plinthed in the retail park on the site) and the No. 3 factory (which faced onto Churchfield lane) with its rooftop ‘John Player & Sons’ sign, were demolished in the late 1980s. The iron railings and gates onto Radford Boulevard from the present retail park are the ones that surrounded No. 2 Factory – the large gates (present vehicle access) were the entrance to the factory yard between No.2 and No.3 factories and the smaller gates were the pedestrian entrances to No.2 factory itself.
Extract from Wikipedia
Source for card issue dates – cigarettecards.co.uk
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