Card of the Day - 2022-02-06

This showed Drummond Castle in Crieff, Perthshire, and this is here because it was the castle owner, John Drummond, who made the first legal Scotch Whisky in 1818; some forty years after an illegal still had first operated on the site.  

Our original Gallaher reference booklet (RB.4) tells us that these cards are real photographs, and that the fronts are toned black and white and then glazed. They followed on from Gallaher`s “Irish Views”, or sometimes “Irish View Scenery”, issued from 1908 to 1910 and are very similar in appearance to those, as well as suffering from the same problem of differing tones, which was caused by the production methods of the cards. In fact if you look closely at the cards you will be able to see that during the run of the “Irish Views” series several variations of glazing were experimented with, but none entirely solved the problem. 

In the British Cigarette Card Issues catalogue of 1950, issued by the London Cigarette Card Company, “English and Scotch Views” is listed for sale as odd cards only, they cost from 5/- to 15/- a card.

The “Irish View Scenery” was listed there as odds only for the most part, but you could have bought a set of the 1-600 “glossy” cards for £85 or a set of the 1-400 “glossy” black photo cards for £60 a set. These two were also the cheapest versions for odds, therefore they must have been the most readily available. The most expensive version was set 201-400 B, unnumbered cards with plain backs, for these were listed at between 7/6d and 20/- each, for just the odds.