Livierato's Egyptian Cigarettes

I came across this advertisement in Calcutta: The First Capital of British India, an illustrated guide to places of interest with map by Herbert Andrews Newell, published by the Caledonian Press in 1920. I have not been able to track Livierato with any degree of certainty, but there is a Livierato Bros. founded by Gregory B. Livierato at Port Said "with branches at Aden and Marseilles", who were dealers in coffee. His home town was in Cephalonia, Greece.

This is what Clive Street would have looked like around the time, although the postcard (from my personal collection) is from about 15 years before the book was published. Originally I had thought of posting only the advertisements out of a kind of antiquarian interest in the everyday, but then I ventured to look a few things up.

Kitchener Sirdar? Field Marshal Horatio Herbert Kitchener led several imperial campaigns 1898 onwards, and became a particularly popular face in Britain during the First World War. Of him, Margot Asquith remarked "He is not a great man, he is a great poster", for his was the original "I want you" face. The "Lord Kitchener Wants You" that called for war volunteers, was designed by Alfred Leete. Kitchener's face was used in cigarette and cigar ads and in 1915, one R.L. Orchelle criticised the poster and claimed in an essay titled "The Soul of England", "The idea is stolen from the advertisement of a 5c. American cigar." [source: Wikipedia] Interesting that arguably the poster's most iconic adaptation is the American recruitment poster by James Flagg (1917). A few of Kitchener's cigarette ads are also available online on Getty Images.

Kitchener was noted for his cigarette smoking, and the poster-boy made it quite fashionable too. In Smoking, Culture and Economy in the Middle East, Relli Shechter writes "Another British celebrity, Lord Kitchener, helped to poularise the Melachrino's cigarettes after he first smoked them in Cairo." (p. 57)

In Kitchener: The Road to Omdurman and Saviour of the Nation, John Pollock says

Each day Kitchener would arrive at the War Office precisely at 9 a.m. having been driven in the borrowed Rolls from Carlton Gardens…At lunchtime, when the generals and colonels walked or drove to their clubs, Kitchener would eat a cold collation sent across from Carlton Gardens in a napkin. He then smoked a cigar. Brade, the Permanent Under-Secretary, said that ‘while he is smoking this he is the most amenable to any request. He is very approachable and interviews a constant stream of all sorts.’ When the cigar made him too amenable he took to disappearing for fifteen minutes into George Arthur’s little room, not to be disturbed on any matter while he smoked a rather special Havana.

Egyptian cigarette export was big around the turn of the century and demand for Egyptian cigarettes lasted into the '20s, as is evident from the advertisement. One reason for this popularity, the Wiki page suggests, is that because of a state tobacco monopoly in the Ottoman Empire, tobacco merchants fled to Egypt which was outside the monopoly laws. These merchants were mostly ethnic Greeks. The British began to be stationed there in 1882 and soon after their taste for these cigarettes turned it into a UK and subsequently global fad.

The Wiki section on popular references lists Hergé's Cigars of the Pharaoh and a section in "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez" by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, where Professor Coram offers Holmes a cigarette. "I can recommend them, for I have them especially prepared by Ionides of Alexandria." The New Annotated Sherlock Holmes, however, refers to a cigarette manufacturer based off Regent Street, London, called Ionides & Co., but is unsure about the "Alexandria". It may well have been a joke--using a local but Greek name to make it sound all hard-to-get.

As for Samsoun, I can again only hazard a guess. "The tobacco growing region of Anatolia tributary to the Samsun market covers the districts of Samsun, Baffra, Alatcham and Tashova" says a Commerce Report from 1921. The district, Samsun, in Turkey is on the Black Sea. One of its few claims to fame is that Atatürk started the Turkish War of Independence here in 1919.

Any more annotations to this ad? Please help if you can.