by Elisa New
Also one of the richest.
Uncle Baron’s spectacular early success owed a lot to his clever machine that turned loose tobacco into cigarettes at a previously unheard of rate and price, as well to another infant industry—advertising. Uncle Eddie specialized in refining the advertising machinery of brands, packs, niches, and market shares at a moment when the cigarette faced an uncertain future. Pipes and cigars—imported, expensive, hand rolled—had been the nineteenth century’s talisman of the ruling male classes, giving a particular image of class security and bourgeois solidity. If a machine-made cigarette could put a cheap smoke in the hands of everyone, the British understood something the Americans did not: Smokers wanted something cheap that smelled and tasted expensive. If the apparently limitless market that mass production of an affordable cigarette put within reach of all was ready for the plucking, the trick was to give social cachet to a product available for just a penny.
J. M. Barrie’s Lady Nicotine might well have passed into the fin de siècle, a relic of an earlier era. But as Barrie, darling playwright of the London stage, prospered, so prospered the brand—Craven A—he called the Arcadia mixture.
The boost that Barrie gave Baron’s upstart firm was invaluable, setting the course for half a century of marketing the Carreras brands as the only choice for the boldly metropolitan, socially independent, and exuberantly modern smoker. Barrie helped the blend’s new purchasers expand their market from gentlemen to, say, the gentlemanly, making their cigarette the talisman of the self-possessed young fellow on the way up.
The Craven A and Black Cat blends brought with them a high reputation for smokeability and the reassuring bona fides of the Carreras shop, a tony gentleman’s haunt. To this combination J. M. Barrie added a dash of reckless urbanity and fugitive youthfulness that would make him, by 1907, not only patron of the bon vivant in the London hit, When a Man Is Single, and sponsor of the Grub Street chain-smoker featured in My Lady Nicotine, but liberator of every boy who, like Peter in Kensington Gardens, wanted out of his pram.
Advertising vehicle promoting Black Cat cigarettes introduced in 1904. From the collection of Stephen Croad.
It was at roughly Barrie’s own pace that Carreras ventured to coax girls out from under the parental wing and persuade men to tolerate their smoking. In his book My Lady Nicotine, Barrie had the Arcadia blend perfume a duel of the sexes not yet Shavian—not a sexy contest of young equals but a tug of war between Victoria’s rule and manly prerogative. The book’s title hinted at what the first chapter, “Matrimony and Smoking Compared,” made clear, namely, a modern chap’s need to walk around the block for a smoke, to maintain the poise a gentleman owed his darling. Her sentiments were well-known: “The smell of tobacco is abominable, for one cannot get it out of the curtains, and there is little pleasure in existence unless the curtains are all right. As for a cigar after dinner, it only makes you dull and sleepy and disinclined for lady’s society.”
Making forbearance to ladies a gentlemanly trait, Barrie admitted all those who suffered such scenes with noble grace into the exclusive club of the twentieth century, the club of boys plotting escape from fans, pianos, mothers, and also long work days and the usual paternal pieties: family, empire, England. Carreras tobacco followed his lead, offering tantalizing images of the urban, especially London, scene and eschewing the more parochial markers of social class and status—titled aristocracy, imperial possession, the fetishes of service—on which most other companies depended.
Which is to say the Craven A smoker left it to his more gauche brother to light up a Prince Charming, a Belted Earle, an Iron Duke, a Windsor, a Crown Jewels, a British Standard, a Three Castles, a Palace, a Park Drive, a Country Club, a White Rolls, a Pall Mall, a Raleigh, a Waverly, a Chesterfield, or—touchingly—a Gentleman.
Such passé appeals to pedigree were not for the Carreras smoker, who breathed in the bracing air of metropolitan venues—the theater, Whitehall, Epsom Downs racecourse, St. James Place. He smoked a Craven A. Or he touched his match to a Passing Show, a Piccadilly, a Club, a Consulate, or a Turf, or, with a wink at English regalia as he passed the Palace Walk, a Guards. But it was another image, one transferred from the window of a Wardour Street shop to his cigarette case, and eventually to the massive Carreras factory facade, that appeared when he lit up Carreras’s signature brand—the urbane, luxurious, lucky, sloe-eyed, and increasingly androgynous Black Cat.
The Carreras Black Cat had many lives. Sometime around the 1920s the cat’s art nouveau roundness in early advertisements gave way to a deco appearance, the well-fed look stylized, the cat’s rounded haunches drawn up into points to approximate more closely the black cat god of the Nile. And then in the next two decades he fattened again. But in all its guises the Black Cat on the Carreras pack boasted city suavity and modern sangfroid. Its expressions included urbane and bemused, careless and sportive, decadent, content, and even frivolous, but always the cat was knowing, wise, unsurprised; this cat knew more than he let on. The Black Cat answered to various aliases, including some in other languages (black cat number nine; Three Cats; Schwartz Katz), and though he was many things, he was never earnest, preachy, timid, parochial, or stuffily English, never old-fashioned, prudish, or—what summed up the rest—bourgeois.
Sized for hands extra large, large, medium, or small, Black Cat cigarettes brought a whiff of pheromones with them, a gamy, intelligent, adult air that seemed to whisk Wendy and Peter out of Mr. and Mrs. Darling’s parlor and into the street in a single feline bound. The cat’s sleekness and look of exotic mystery, which turned Barrie’s man about town into a bona fide flaneur, increasingly appealed to young women weary of piano duets on fusty themes, who were not about to withdraw from the table while the gentleman trimmed their cigars for a long night of port and the Corn Exchange. Secure in its modernity, Black Cat offered women the chance to throw off encumbrances, to be surprising—donning sequins one night and a “smoking” the next, trading the dressmaker’s notions for that marcelled, edgy look that could change as fast as the shutter blinked: Call it style.
Highly stylized, the black cat on the cigarette packs went from cartoonish to sleekly abstract. The campaign to launch Chick, a “gentleman’s smoke,” for instance, featured an image of a befeathered and bosomy bird singing an aria while standing atop the mock gallant cat’s head, a circle of black face with two footlights for eyes. Look again, though, and this same bird appears to have emerged full grown from between this same cat’s fuzzy black ears.
As abstract as the best poster art and sustained for longer and across a wider range of media was the ad based on the color red used by another new brand, a woman’s smoke, Cerise. Born out of the discontinued Sweet Kiss, itself the lipstick red of the Black Cat’s neck ribbon, Cerise’s brilliant red hue was the same as the one that drew the eye up over the Hampton Road in the spring of 1928. Workers on scaffolds were applying the last coat of thick hand-ground pigment to the burned crimson slash spelling out C-A-R-R-E-R-A-S on the huge new factory building. Along with two massive Egyptian-looking cats guarding either side of the doorway, the Carreras letters represented the last touches on the great factory that Jerry and Earle arrived in time to see completed in the spring of 1928 and which, in their homesickness, they dreamed of showing to their Uncle Emil and grandfather as soon as they arrived.
To help counter their homesickness, Uncle Eddie took the boys to Asprey’s and there, among the heaviness of sterling and wood, allowed them to choose as a gift a beautiful cigarette case with E-L on the corner, which Eddie planned to present to his brother Emil when he came to London. The brushed silver of its beveled lid, fine but with a crosshatch like linen, the tiny invisible catch at the front lip (one can imagine Eddie showing them, the gift in his own palm, the lid springing up with a bounce of his thumb) made this gift exactly the thing for a man to produce from a pocket, starched cuffs slipping back on a manly wrist.
“Cigarette?” Uncle Eddie would have teased the boys, extending t
he case, then putting it on his Asprey’s tab and into his own pocket.
Fourteen years gone from Baltimore and long out of his father’s good graces, Eddie must have considered it a lucky break that his father was coming to see his young nephews in London just as Eddie was entering his glory. The boys’ eagerness to welcome their uncle and grandfather and show off their new lifestyle would give Eddie opportunities to reveal, with all modesty, how very nicely he had done at embracing chances that didn’t come around for every Baltimore boy.
It hadn’t taken much to entice him into the tobacco business. The “musical education” that the papers routinely cited as his reason for coming to London quickly fell by the wayside, and his early resistance to Uncle Baron’s entreaties that he try the cigarette business were about what one could expect of a twenty-one-year-old boy with a taste for the good life. But Eddie did try the cigarette business and soon discovered he had a knack for the advertising side of things.
By Eddie’s twenty-fifth birthday he had begun to contribute to the steady growth of Carreras, supporting its transition from a national to an international brand that eventually necessitated the building of Arcadia Works’ brand-new factory. By the time the great “temple of Tobacco” was built, Eddie at thirty-five was poised and managerial. He was looking forward to telling his father that in the settlement house going up at the same time, the Barons would not only teach boys and girls the trade of making cigarettes, but in their factory they would implement the most progressive set of worker benefits ever attempted in the tobacco industry. They would also fund the most liberal social welfare program for Jewish youth in the United Kingdom—and all without a whit more, but also not a whit less, noblesse oblige than the case required.
His father would be sure to notice, and he hoped be reassured, that Eddie did not disguise his origins. He still—and would always—pronounce Tuesday, Toos-dee, as those from Baltimore did. But he’d also mastered attributes one couldn’t learn in Baltimore: magnanimity without patronage; self-deprecating modesty; the jaunty, boyish, affectionate yet respectful note one could draw out of the appellation “Guv’ner.”
No one watching the Arcadia Works factory on Hampton Road come out from under its scaffolds and drop cloths would accuse it of subtlety. No one, certainly not the architectural critics who weighed in as soon as the building, built by a tobacco merchant of “Hebrew extraction,” was finished, thought its architectural statement possible to ignore.
It was without a hint of rabble rousing or grandstanding that the Barons, with young Paul in charge of this phase, had hired thousands of North London workmen at twice the going rate, and moved thousands of laborers along the Regents canal to find new flats closer to the factory. Without casting aspersions on the nondescript, respectable but run-down Englishness of Camden neighborhood, they had hired the architect of the Firestone factory and the builder Sir Robert McAlpine and simply leveled the Victorian garden terrace.
The black cats in front of the Carreras Cigarette Factory at Mornington Crescent. One original and one replica cat guard the building’s entrance to this day.
Their builders were under instructions to give the Barons a building as au courant, daring, metropolitan, and giddily youthful as any in the metropolis, a landmark not only of iconic but also entertaining appeal.
Though the company letterhead always called the factory the Arcadia Works, and though its facade proclaimed CARRERAS as the walls rose, appreciative neighbors were already calling it the Black Cat factory.
Whenever I go to London, I visit the former cigarette factory, marveling at its facade as I ascend to the street from the Mornington Crescent underground.
A popular London landmark from its first days, the Black Cat factory seemed to revel in a brazen eclecticism that expressed at least one version—not everyone’s—of what modernity should be. The building capitalized on the Egypt craze that swept the world after the discovery of King Tut’s tomb by British archaeologists. The St. Pancras Chronicle, on hand for the opening ceremonies in 1928, praised the new “Temple of Tobacco” in an article several columns long, admiring the Tutankhamun-inspired facade especially: “Something fresh in London architecture—a Conventionalized Copy of the Temple of Bubastis, the cat headed goddess of ancient Egypt.” Local guidebook writers had to hurry out a new edition when in Mornington Crescent (the dingy backstairs entrance to Regents Park, the neighborhood tone set by Gilbey’s Gin Works and the Camden Goods Yard), of all places, arose a radiant, parti-colored monument. The writers could not marvel enough at the “magnificent premises of Carreras Ltd,” with its huge black cats guarding the entrance, its ground glass colored columns, its “solar disk emblem of Ra, the sun God, mellower of tobacco.”
Postcard to the author’s grandfather, Emil Levy, in 1928, shortly before the opening of the Arcadia Works, the “Black Cat Factory.”
But the architectural establishment was not so sure. London’s modernists had kept quiet as Victorian preservationists fought the commercial development of the Crescent, horrified at the Crescent gardens being replaced with a factory. That the gardens were run-down and the buildings around them broken up into poor bed-sit flats with cookstoves on the landings and privies in the yard did not matter to the newly organized defenders of London’s residential integrity.
The modernists, unperturbed as the walls went up, followed with pleasure the rise of the largest reinforced concrete structure in England, an edifice poured out of 80,000 tons of modernism’s wonder material. They admired the pale austerity of the factory’s interior spaces, with its sloping walls, the skylights angled to admit morning light and block afternoon heat, and the nine acres of floor space covered with palest maple. Yet all the enthusiasm inspired by the bold use of poured concrete trickled away as the facade was applied and this architectural travesty could be seen for what it was, a grossly commercial embrace of ornament, the beauty of its modernist bones traduced in art deco crowd pleasing and King Tut mania.
When finished, the building managed to violate nearly every canon of modernist doctrine: derivative where it was supposed to be the embodiment of its occasion; decorative where it was supposed to be strictly functional; eclectic where it ought to have been indigenous. Next to this “bogus” modern building, “abominable” as architectural purists agreed, the Mornington Crescent Terraces deserved credit as ambitious. Whether the commercial intent, leftist leanings, and mixed Jewish, Russian, and American “extraction” of the building’s baronial builder—unfailingly mentioned—were part of the problem the critics were too polite to say. But in the Architect’s Journal Maxwell Fry led the charge by calling the Carreras factory “Bauhaus with bells.” Better gaze at the back side of the building, better study its estimable loading dock and exhaust towers, than waste a minute on the frontage along Hampton Road: “a piece of ponderous scenery secured to a factory for the purpose of advertisement.”
As if advertising were not the point! Uncle Eddie, feet up in the Egyptian boardroom, must have been amazed. To the sober view that architectural detail should follow the bare contours of function, his building let out a thin stream of amused smoke: Restrained it was not. For blocks, the warm smell of Virginia and Carolina tobacco drifted round corners and over rooftops. The aroma gusted down the underground vents, filling the Mornington Crescent tube station with the sweet savor of tobacco (cured by the sun god, Ra!). Though Eddie’s campaign to rename the Mornington Crescent tube stop “Tooten Camden” (a pun on the factory’s Tutankhamun-inspired look and the fact that the two terminals of the Northern Line were Tooting and Camden) did not succeed, his spirits were undampened. He flood-lit and eventually affixed neon lights to the facade, and then a cigarette and neon plume of smoke, so that at dusk, as the guide-books breathed ecstatically, “the whole frontage was flooded with colored light.”
Lit up like a cabaret by night and smelling like one too, the Black Cat factory stretched itself with a great purr along the Hampton Road. Baron’s protégé, my uncle Eddie, having raised t
his pyramid in eighteen months and having transferred thousands of workers from the other factories in a weekend, did some purring too. After the ceremonies capping the two-day move to the Arcadia Works, he was reported to have made paper airplanes of hundred-pound notes and sent them over his blotter, calling “Catch!” to those in the vicinity. Yet his reasons to purr were not all plutocratic. In 1929, with Bernhard Baron still alive and his philanthropic reputation now legendary, Eddie stood to inherit a company that not only did very well but also did good. The building might look like a pyramid—archetypal image of civilization’s rise on the backs of slaves—but the papers all called it a temple, and its owners, the Baron family, were called not tycoons but great Solomonic benefactors. Anyone looking past the facade could see that this Egyptian pyramid was one of the world’s most ambitious experiments in social, or industrial, democracy.
Did Eddie have Bernhard Baron to thank for his father’s stop in London? Would Jacob have been interested in the great social progress the Black Cat factory was making, perhaps curious to see the works even if he were not anxious to see the man who was responsible for them? Certainly the works fulfilled all that he and Bernhard had dreamed of long ago when they’d hammered together in Baltimore, confident that labor-saving machines would improve civilization.
If Jacob had let Bernhard speak to him, his old friend would surely have pointed out that, in 1919, blessings on the progress of worker welfare in the British tobacco industry had been pronounced by the Fabian Socialist, Sidney Webb. Webb agreed that mechanization had gone a long way toward remedying conditions in an industry Lloyd George’s inspectors had found unspeakably filthy. But Carreras went well beyond a clean-up. The Arcadia Works was not only, as the old man modestly put it to reporters, “a clean and pleasant place to work,” but, among local working people, a place whose name alone conferred prestige and suggested privilege. Anyone who heard you worked at Carreras, reported employees, “thought you must be rich.”
