Re: Snow Was: Smoking. Was: Clarke Award Finalists 2001

Bobbie Sellers wrote:

  On 6/26/25 12:32, William Hyde wrote:

Paul S Person wrote:

On Thu, 26 Jun 2025 09:16:17 +0100, Robert Carnegie
<rja.carnegie@gmail.com> wrote:
>

On 24/06/2025 07:16, Titus G wrote:

On 20/06/25 14:38, Titus G wrote:

On 20/06/25 09:27, William Hyde wrote:

Titus G wrote:

snip

Vengeance was the fifth of his Quirke series. Copyright 2012. As well as
constant cigarette references, specific English brand names were used.

>

Just in case I did not previously recommend Banville's "Snow", let me do
so now.  It is a mystery, but not involving Quirke.

>
In Chapter 1, Senior Service cigarettes are smoked and later on the
Priest smoked Churchmans cigarettes which will be English or Irish
brands. In Chapter 3, the body is sent to pathologist Quirke, an in joke
as there is no further reference.
I really enjoy his prose. Thank you for the recommendation.

>
By the way, Churchman was a real cigarette
brand which doesn't appear to have religious
meaning, Wikipedia says that William Churchman's
pipe tobacco shop was opened in 1790.

>
Are you sure his name did not come from an ancestor being ... a Church
man? Just like "Smith" or "Miller" (among others).

>
Usually the name came from people who worked for the church but were not ordained, sextons, vergers, and so on.  At the time the name arose clerics were Catholic, and thus did not acknowledge their children.

      But when the monasteries were dissolved there were a lot of former churchmen
running around without last names,

The name Priest predates Henry VIII by a couple of hundred years, but that doesn't entirely rule out your idea, as monasteries were dissolved long before he got to the throne, mostly monasteries of French religious orders.
But I thought that by 1450 people in England all had last names. Christians, anyway.
  places to live or even work because

prayer was
no longer a job. The literate could find work of course being able to read and write
when these were more rare skills.

Monks and nuns were given the option of joining a larger, surviving, monastery of the same order, or taking a one-time payment.
Most chose the former, particularly as having your monastery or convent being shut down did not release you from your vow of chastity. Religious orders were having trouble recruiting at this time, so the extra members were not a problem - or so I guess.
Later, when richer monasteries were closed, there were fewer places to put these people, and there was much more money available, so the one-time payment became a lifetime annuity.
It will surprise you not at all to find that Abbots and Priors received much larger payments - so much so that some of them were made bishops so the government could stop paying them.
It will surprise you even less that ex-nuns were paid substantially less than ex-monks.
  Lots of people became whoever "priest"

or even
"Priestly".
 

>

>

Also from Wikipedia, Senior Service was
an expensive filterless cigarette brand
launched in 1925.  "Senior Service" also
is a colloquial name of the British Navy.
I'm assuming that this name is older than
the cigarettes.

>
Very likely. Cigs for tars, how nice.

      Tars for tars.

>
The ads were more about officer-class types, officer class being in those early days always upper class as well.

      Well of course they were upper class in most nations as why would
entrust a peasant with an expensive ship and crew.

It was not so much upper class as having aristocratic connections. You could be wealthy and still have no chance without a recommendation from an aristocratic sponsor, or you could be middle class and get in with such a connection.
Middle class people with a slight whiff of a connection could become midshipmen (much as C. S. Forster's Hornblower) but promotion beyond Lieutenant required influence from above.  Aristocratic connections gave that influence, otherwise you had to rely on your superior officers, who would be deluged with claims from various of their relatives for promotion, which would often win out over promotion of a skilled Lieutenant or Commander.
Nelson was the son of a vicar, and not a rich one. But his mother was a relation of two aristocratic families and an uncle was already a Captain.  His uncle, the Captain, wasn't keen on the idea but in the end he sponsored him ("Let Horatio enter the navy and perhaps a cannonball will take off his head, thus providing for him.").
It is perhaps significant that among Nelson's closest friends were Collingwood and Louis, both of whom also barely met the social qualifications for officer.  Though Louis was said to be a great-grandson of Louis XIV, his father was a schoolmaster.
Newton, for example, despite being born rich, would not have been accepted  into the Navy as an officer unless a high ranking officer recommended him. His ancestors were sheep farmers, none of them even being on the tax rolls until about a century before his birth.
If you were very, very, lucky you could work your way into the officer class from the lower decks.  Generally you would have to do something spectacularly brave where an officer could see it, as well as be highly competent.  I seem to recall reading that two of Nelsons 30+ captains at Trafalgar had worked their way up, which was considered to be a high proportion at the time.
By 1925 this system was long gone, but the culture remained.
It wasn't only England, though.  Napoleon's family had to dig through ancient records in Italy to prove noble ancestry before he could be accepted for officer training in the French Army.

     Education was not evenly distributed then or now.

In those days aristocrats could get university degrees merely by showing up  No exams for them!  Why, they might finish worse than a commoner!
William Hyde