A set that few people know about, though it must also be said that few people know that Arthur Conan Doyle was actually Scottish, being born in Edinburgh, where his parents had married four years prior. And another often misquoted fact is that his parents were Irish, when only his mother was, his father was English.
His full name was Arthur Ignatius Conan Doyle, and his first story was published, in a magazine, when he was twenty years old. Writing did not make him immediately famous and the following year he was on board a whaling ship, in the Arctic, just one of the adventures he had whilst training to be a surgeon. He must have coped, as he graduated the following year. His first practice was on the South Coast of England, at Southsea. However this work allowed him to return to writing, and to an idea he had been pondering over. This was printed in Beeton`s Christmas Annual 1887, and it was a story called "A Study in Scarlet". The main character was a man called Sherlock Holmes, and the public were enthralled by the way he took simple facts and combined them to come to a solution.
Our set says it was by Alexander Boguslavsky, but actually it is by Carreras, who had acquired the company in 1913. The original Alexander Bogslavsky Ltd were founded in 1896 and their address was 55 Piccadilly, London. They never issued cigarette cards, but they did issue postage stamps. If anyone out there would like to explain this to me, and to us all, please do. The cards only came along after they had been acquired by Carreras and moved to Hampstead Road, London, N.W.
This set can be found in various printings. Our World Tobacco Issues Index cites A as "back in black or grey black" and B as "back in green". However the 1950 London Cigarette Card Co catalogue has three variants, A as "black, white board", B as "grey, cream board" and C as "green" without mentioning any board at all. It might be argued that the A and B here were combined because it was felt that the grey was simply the back slowly running lighter as the printing machine ran out of ink or was affected by the weather temperature, but it does not explain the fact that two different boards are clearly mentioned.
Maybe we could all have a look at our cards and see if we can spot this difference?