There was no Tinder in 1918 but there was smoking a pipe...

Dateline: October 29, 1918...
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Ladies! Attention! Do you like the smell of tobacco? Do you swoon at the sweet aroma created by a well-stoked pipe? Well, that was the intimation given by an advert for Bondman tobacco in 1918. The advert ran on page five (the penultimate page) of the Yorkshire Evening Post on this day 100 years ago. It was a time when smoking was not frowned upon but which today makes for humorous reading.

Meanwhile, on the same page was a story about the difficulties farmers were facing in not only harvesting corn but having it threshed. This came from the meeting of the Leeds War Agricultural Committee, which was told there simply weren’t enough machines to go around and do the work required.

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However, the chairman of the meeting, R Garnett, pointed out that the real problem was lack of experienced labour. He said he knew of one machine standing idle in Horsforth, adding the son of the farmer who owned it (and who knew how to use the machine) had been compelled to go to work in a machine shop in Lincoln and that all efforts to get him back had failed.

Meanwhile, there was an “emphatic” protest at one miner’s ‘exemption’ from service in Mexborough, South Yorkshire. The man in question was Tom Williams, checkweighman at the Barnburgh Colliery, who was exempted on “domestic grounds”, a move backed by his union but which galvanised his co-workers at Manvers Main into calling a strike in order to force him into the Army, their argument being that other men with greater claim to remaining in civil life had already been drafted.