1960s WORK
0122 Gallahers Cigarette Production
I should perhaps explain the production of cigarettes, since they were staple diet of Gallahers’ business.
Having been withdrawn from the high security bonded warehouse, where it was held before duty had been paid on it, the tobacco was first of all blended. Originally this had been done by hand -- workers with garden forks turning it over. It had eventually become much more mechanised, though, and the tobacco was then (in the 1960s) run backwards and forwards over silos so that a layer of one type of tobacco lay on top of another one. Then the end the silo was opened and a 'blended' cross-section of the tobacco fell onto a conveyor; so all the leaf was thoroughly mixed. Next the tobacco was pulled through cutters which cut it into rag -- the very fine tobacco that you find in your cigarettes. Then it was passed to Molins cigarette making machines. These wrapped the cigarette paper around the outside and inserted the filters into what was then called Rod and these were then cut out as cigarettes. The cigarettes were ultimately pushed into the cigarette packet. By that time it had become a flip-top box which were are all now used to, though not long before it had been what was called ‘hull and slide’; in which the whole inner was pushed out to get to the cigarettes.
All this happened, though, to millions and millions of cigarettes every day. Everything worked at the speed of light.
Cigars were something different. Some of them – cigarillos - were produced in the same way as cigarettes, but most were a combination of machine and hand preparation. Thus the filler, which was much more roughly chopped, and was special cigar tobacco, was formed by hand and then wrapped by hand, with machine help, into a binder (which was originally a lower quality whole leaf, but was at the time moving to paper made from cigar leaves). Last of all the wrapper, was put on very carefully by hand; traditionally rolled on the thigh of a dusky maiden, but in Gallahers with the help of a machine by middle-aged Ulster housewives! It was this wrapper that gave the cigar its quality. Since Cuba had been banned from exporting its products by the Americans, this wrapper was grown in Connecticut under muslin shades -- and hence was known as Connecticut Shade. Gallahers produced a range of small cigars -- which were the big sellers - as well as a few luxury cigars.
Finally we come to pipe tobacco and roll-your-own. Roll-your-own tobacco was turned into rag in very much the same way as had been that for cigarette making. It was, however, made of much stronger -- and hence cheaper -- tobacco. When I arrived roll your own tobacco was made in Clerkenwell at the Wix tobacco factory. Gallahers had bought this some years before, along with Kensitas, but it was Old Holborn they really wanted. They made a killing with it in fact, since the whole company only cost something like a quarter of a; which previously had not been very profitable. Gallahers changed the profitability, overnight, by one move. They put in electronic weighing, albeit that it was partially hand fed. Thus gangs of girls used to sit in front of weighing machines, putting the rag into the weighing scales as they came before them - they weighed in an ounce or whatever the size was required - and this was electronically measured. The girls were very accurate, since if it was not accurately weighed it was rejected. It had to be hand weighed since the girls had to separate the strands of tobacco to get exactly the right weight. Having, after a few seconds, got the weight right the cups then moved on to deposit it into the packing machine which packed it into a soft wrap pack. This, by itself, improved profitability by several hundred percent -- previously weighing hade been a very approximate.
In any case, on getting into Wix, Gallahers discovered that they had an large tobacco library, covering a number of back years, without any obvious use. Simply by putting this in for duty drawback, that is passing it back to customs and getting the duty back on it, they more than recovered the £250,000 that was the cost of the whole of the old company.
In my time there this factory was actually moved to Lisnafillan near Ballymena in Northern Ireland. This was a massive job since all the equipment had to be relocated. For weeks there were lorries trundling backwards and forwards carrying massive pieces of production equipment between the two locations. Paradoxically, though, what we had not thought about proved to be the biggest move. This was of the tobacco stocks held in warehouses. This could be in delivered by just one, very large, boat -- but in practice it had to the delivered on several dozen boats since the insurers would not accept the risk of having several billion pounds worth of tobacco on one bottom!
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