Smoking wasn't just a way of life for the majority of professional players in the 1940s and '50s, it helped some of the game's stars make a few extra quid on the side - even if they didn't smoke themselves.

 

Compiling a list of ten leading footballers who smoke regularly would be a great deal harder than it would have been either side of the Second World War. In those days, a more revealing list would have been of ten top players who didn’t.

In the 1940s and '50s the dangers of smoking were only just beginning to be understood and J.L. 'Jack' Jones, captain of the Spurs side who won the FA Cup in 1901, was well ahead of his time in warning against tobacco in his book Association Football. Jones was more tolerant of alcohol, writing that beer was ‘so much a recognised article of diet that it would be impossible or at least unwise to forbid it’.

At halftime in the 1950 Cup Final Denis Compton, the England cricketer and Arsenal footballer, even quaffed a fortifying brandy.

Jones was markedly less sparing on the matter of smoking. He said that he could not ‘find words strong enough to express my disapproval’ of a practice that ‘once started may lead to grave disasters’. But it was many years before anyone took much notice. Half a century later, in 1957, a ban was mooted – after 11am on match days.

In fact clubs regularly handed out cigarettes as a Christmas present to their players - and it wouldn't do if a player felt he wasn't getting his fair share.

Bill Leivers, who went on to become a star player for Manchester City (1953-64), remembers that it was being short-rationed in a Yuletide handout that contributed to his leaving his first club.

Each December a director at Chesterfield gave cigarettes to the players, 50 to each of the first team and 20 to each of the others. 

‘Well, I’d been in the first team until just before Christmas 1952 when I got injured,’ Leivers says, ‘and when the manager, Teddy Davison, came to hand out the cigarettes he gave me 20. I had never smoked a fag in my life and had no intention of doing so, but my dad did and in the past I’d given them to him.’

When Leivers failed in his protest that he deserved 50 because being injured was the only reason he was not in the first team he said something that he has regretted ever since.

‘Teddy Davison was a lovely little chap,’ he says, ‘but I told him, “You can stick those cigarettes right up your arse – and you can put me on the transfer list at the same time.”

‘And that’s how I came to leave Chesterfield – over a few cigarettes.’

For some of the top players advertising cigarettes was considered a perfectly acceptable way of earning a little extra.

Johnny Paton, who played for Chelsea in the late 1940s, recalls an incident involving Tommy Lawton. ‘Although Tommy was only on £10 a week,' Paton says, 'he came in one day and threw 400 Players cigarettes on the table: “There you are lads, help yourselves.”

‘Tommy was advertising them. He didn’t smoke at all – but there was a picture of him with a cigarette in his hand. Other big players were doing the same sort of thing to earn money on the side. I mean how did Stanley Matthews get his hotel at Blackpool? He didn’t get that out of his wages.’

Although Matthews was also a devoted non-smoker, he appeared in one ad alongside the words: 'It wasn't until I changed to Craven "A" that I learnt what smooth smoking meant.'

 

This is an edited extract from When Footballers Were Skint by Jon Henderson / @hendojon published by Biteback Publishing.