Here we have clue number two, and this is a rather obscure one. The answer was nothing to do with the picture on the front, (but I am very fond of pirates!), nor the subject, nor the author either. It was the rather hidden fact that this set was issued by Cope Bros with "Golden Cloud". And also with "Cope`s Mixture".
"Golden Cloud" was a tobacco, not cigarettes. It was further described as being made of "Finest Bright Honey Dew" and an "Aromatic Plug" - "manufactured from the finest selected Virginian leaf".
Now there is a curious fact which I welcome your input over - and that is that in 1948, almost half a century after this card was pulled from a packet, Cope and Lloyd registered the Golden Cloud trademark in Australia. So did they issue cards there with this name? Or did they intend to?
Over to you....
This card is a hundred and twenty three years old, which I find just wonderful. A small piece of pasteboard, with colours on top, and yet here it still is, as visible as it was way back then. The character, Nanty Ewart, the captain of the Jumping Jenny, turns up in Redgauntlet, which is part of Sir Walter Scott`s Waverley Novels, and was published in 1824, though it is set in the 1760s, and deals with a further, fictional, attempt at a Jacobite Rebellion. Sadly he was not a tattooed Pirate, but he was a smuggler.
Now there are a few things to mention about this card. The first is that it is technically backlisted, as it says in our World Tobacco Issues Indexes, but it is also numbered as part of that backlist, whereas most backlisted cards just have the titles and not the numbers. I cannot think of any other cards that are backlisted and numbered, but maybe you can?
The second is that in the 1950 London Cigarette Card Catalogue, and in some dealers lists and websites to this day, the set is quoted as having two formats. These are often quoted as (A) wide card and (B) narrow card. In that 1950 catalogue the wide cards are listed at between 5/- and 15/- each and £35 a set, whereas the narrow ones are only 2/- to 6/- a card. But the narrow card is not the result of some unscrupulous merchant trimming the edges of a defective card, it was officially trimmed by Cope. But I cannot find out why. So if you know, and have a narrow version of this card, please tell us.