Our Churchill ghost story yesterday included a cigar and whiskey. The cigar and whiskey were considered attached to Churchill. I thought there must be good Churchill cigar jokes. i get these notions wrong as often as I get them right. So mostly I was wrong - there are lots of quotes but not much fun. Here's the one that did make me think of a young Churchill:
A salesman walked up to the door of a house and knocked. A young boy opened the door, smoking a cigar and holding a glass of scotch in his hand. The salesman asked, “Excuse me son... Are either of your parents home?” The little boy said, “What the heck do YOU think?”
So how many cigars would he have smoked to always be smoking a cigar? “The number of cigars he smoked is truly extraordinary,” says Fox, whose company sold its first cigars in 1787. Churchill was a client of the store (then called Robert Lewis) at London’s 19 St. James Street. Fox has handwritten ledgers, telegrams and other records that document that the soldier/statesman bought hundreds of thousands of cigars there. During one six-month stretch in 1964—the year before he died—Churchill bought 825 cigars: 250 in April, 275 cigars in June and 100 per month in July, August and September. “It was a pretty consistent pattern of what he was buying,” says Fox. And that wasn’t the only shop supplying him with cigars. “He was doing business with a lot of cigar stores,” says Fox, “but we were one of his largest suppliers.”
“There was never a big, huge auction of cigars at the end of Churchill’s life. It wasn’t as if he was buying to collect,” says Fox. “He was buying to consume.” A box of cigars once owned by Sir Winston—along with the Romeo y Julietas it contained—is on display at Fox’s shop in London, under glass, along with a cigar case once carried by the Prime Minister.
This picture is one of my interpretations of Beamsville's August Restaurant's sign.
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