Card of the Day - 2022-03-15

Three sets were issued in total, each having 100 cards – the first series being in 1937, the second in 1938, and the third in 1939.

The London Cigarette Card Company handbook, and our current handbook (RB.135) says the first series was issued by International Tobacco Overseas (I635-740 : I/18-6 - also in 1937) and can be found with grey or black backs, (though the Murray Catalogue of Values lists them as black and brown).

However, our original and our current World Tobacco Issues Index both tell us these three sets were issued by A & M Wix and "chiefly in Malaya".

This is also strange because the four issues prior to this, 1935-1938, were dual language (English and Afrikaans), and issued "chiefly in South Africa" through a Johannesburg address, as was the set after ours, "Maxims of Max" (W70-11 : 1950-1951). So I was not really sure why they made the expedition into Malaya, until, of course, looking at the date, the Second World War stopped what was going to be a new territory, and it never restarted. 

The connection here was two fold, for the card shows W.C. Fields (and Constance Moore) in "You can't Cheat an Honest Man." W.C. Fields was a comic, but he was also known for having a red nose, which was blamed on his drinking. However there is reason to believe that whilst he did indeed like a tipple, the red nose could have been through medical disorders, either rhinophyma, or rosacea. Curiously in the medical profession they still use the expression “W.C. Fields` Nose”.

And in the mid 1970s his fame (and that of his nose) was still great enough that the American Noveltronics Corporation retailed a battery tester in his shape where his nose illuminated to show the strength of the remaining charge. 

W.C. Fields appears on quite a lot of cards. On Carreras “Famous Film Stars” 92/96 he appears with child actor Baby Le Roy, a frequent co-star of his, in a scene from “It’s a Gift”, the last of five films he made in 1934 alone. His next film features on Ogden's (and Hignett) “Actors Natural and Character Studies” 14/50, where he is Wilkins Micawber in David Copperfield – and the card tells us that “..the actor found himself so close in type to the part that he had hardly to make up at all”.