For four centuries, seamen and passengers used cigarettes, pipes and matches, which were a significant cause of maritime fires and disasters. The earliest dated clay pipe comes from a ship that sank off Alderney in the Channel Islands, probably in November 1592. A sea captain wrote in Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country in 1875, I think, a piece entitled “The Dangers of the Sea”. In it, he chastised the carelessness of merchant seamen. He said:

“It is to be regretted that in all classes of merchant ships smoking below is an acknowledged custom. Jack lies on his dirty bed of straw with pipe in mouth, reading some old scrap of a newspaper, or the pages of a novel, and not unfrequently falls asleep with the burning embers beside him”,

adding that the mystery is not why the ship in question was burned,

“but why such accidents are not constantly occurring from this and other causes.”

Indeed, we talked earlier in Committee about the dangers of house fires from people falling asleep while smoking in bed.

More than eight decades later, in a 1957 booklet, the Ministry of Transport still blamed smoking more than any other reason for fires on board ships. It said:

“Lighted cigarettes smoked surreptitiously are abandoned in combustible cargo and cause fires which smoulder unnoticed for days before bursting into flame. They are thrown away on deck where the wind catches them and blows them into an open port, hatch, or ventilator where they may land on inflammable material. They are left on the edges of ashtrays in the saloon or dropped from men’s hands as they fall asleep.”

With reports like that, it is no wonder that smoking was eventually banned in the maritime context.