Thank you for your interest in this story
To continue reading this article, subscribe to the Stray Ferret for as little as £1 a week
Already a subscriber? Log in here.
12
Oct
Coming to Harrogate doubled our trade, says fourth-generation tobacconist
When James Barber broke with tradition and moved his family tobacconist’s business to Harrogate, it was a huge gamble.
JN Barber Ltd had been a fixture in the centre of Otley for over 150 years, and there were well-founded doubts that the pros of Cold Bath Road could outweigh the cons of pitching up in a new town where recognition was near zero, at a time when ever fewer people were smoking.
But as it turns out, James needn’t have worried. He told the Stray Ferret:
I thought at the time that it was a bit risky, but we’re doing more than double the trade we did in Otley, and I wish now that we’d made the move years and years ago. Cold Bath Road is a special place.
The Barbers started out in the tobacco business in 1867, when the company’s founder, Joseph Barber, headed out to America as a carpetbagger, acquiring parcels of land in Virginia and Kentucky. He owned a plantation called Hickory Thicket and criss-crossed the Atlantic, building up his business growing, manufacturing and importing tobacco.
He was known as a major player – along with the likes of Tom Gallaher, the founder of Gallaher Group (which owned Benson & Hedges, Silk Cut and Hamlet brands), and in 1889, he brought in 80 tonnes of tobacco, a record at the time. Nine years later built a stemming factory in Providence, Kentucky.
The original shop on Kirkgate in Otley
The business passed to his son Fred and via his son Jack, to James, and the torch – or the cigar – looks set to be passed on to a fifth generation.
James said:
Coming to Harrogate was a new challenge, and it’s worked out. So much so that I’ve got the opportunity to bring Alicia into the business.
Alicia is his youngest daughter, a marketing graduate who first joined the business 11 years ago and looks set to take it over once James calls it a day.
James himself took the reins from his father in 1980, but it wasn’t a promising start:
When I took over the shop I can’t say I enjoyed the business at first. Cut-price cigarette shops were opening all over the place, and I tried to join in.
But after a while, I realised I’d lost my way, and it was time to get back to being a specialist – and that’s when I started enjoying it.
He revamped the shop, specialised in cigars and high-end pipes, and built a walk-in cigar room – only the second one outside London – and the business started attracting rave reviews.
In 1995, an early introduction to the internet resulted in him securing a highly sought-after domain name: www.smoke.co.uk. He said:
A US customer asked me what my web address was, and I didn’t even know what one was. So I got a customer to build me a site, and became the first tobacconist in the UK to go online.
We became internationally known and started exporting to every corner of the world.
James sells cigars, pipes and other related items
He became the youngest chairman of the Association of Independent Tobacco Specialists at the age of 36 and set about making changes.
He said:
We needed a stronger trade body. The government at the time was trying to ban tobacconists from having websites, so I rode around London on a motorbike lobbying MPs and meeting health ministers.
It evidently worked, but that wasn’t the end of the legislative challenges the business has had to contend with.
Surprisingly, the 2007 smoking ban didn’t affect the business too much, but now there is talk of a ban on smoking or selling tobacco near schools, and even a ban on outdoor smoking, and James Barber’s shop stands directly opposite Western Primary School.
He said:
It’s very worrying. We do try to protect children from it – everything's covered up, so you can’t see any tobacco products from outside.
Alicia added:
What’s worrying is that they group cigars and pipes in the same category as cigarettes and vapes. It’s a bit like lumping together a £100 bottle of whisky with a £5 bottle of Lambrini from the supermarket. They’re not the same.
You’re not going to buy a £30 cigar and smoke it behind the bike-sheds, are you?
They might have a point. After all, cigars start at the cheap end at under £10, but £30 is not unusual, and the average amount paid for a cigar at James Barber is, says Alicia, about £100.
The shop sells so-called ‘New World’ cigars from Nicaragua, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Mexico and the Philippines, but most of the stock comes, unsurprisingly, from the ‘Old World’, in cigar terms: Cuba.
James said:
Cuban cigars are so high-end now that people are investing in them. For limited edition Trinidad Cabildos you’ll pay £800 for five, and yet I can’t get enough to satisfy demand.
That may seem jaw-dropping, but as James and Alicia point out, cigars are premium products. It’s estimated that each one goes through about 300 pairs of hands before it reaches the smoker.
Alicia said:
When we visit Cuba, we see the whole process, from the tobacco seeds being planted to the curing barns where the leaves are stemmed and fermented. At the factories in Havana, they’ll age the cigars, and then package them, and then age them again before they come to the UK.
So most of our cigars have taken between three and five years to go from seed to the shop. It really makes you appreciate the value of them – you can really see where the money goes.
James and his wife Rosalie, who also works in the business, with tobacco grower Hector Luis in Cuba
As a result, cigar smoking is not a poor person’s pastime. In fact, some cigar aficionados are very wealthy indeed. A humidor containing 55 10-year-aged Trinidad Fundadores cigars sold in London this summer for €2.5 million.
James said:
A customer drove all the way up from London to buy one special box of cigars that he wasn’t able to get in London. When he came in the shop, he complained that it had been a terrible drive up from London, and asked if there was anywhere he could land his helicopter next time he came.
Another of my customers was a French film director who lived for a while in York. He was ordering £2,000 worth of cigars a week. Four boxes of Robusto: big, fat cigars. He did that for just over a year, so when he moved away, I lost £100,000 of turnover.
James and his wife Rosalie with Alicia at a three-day Habanos World Day event in London
The shop also sells pipes, for a presumably ever-dwindling band of smokers. The most expensive the shop currently stocks is a limited-edition Titanic pipe for £10,000. It was made in 2012 by Dunhill to commemorate the centenary of the sinking of the Titanic, and the pipe tamper incorporates a piece of deckchair from the ship.
There is, it seems, a lot of money to be spent on cigars and pipes – and therefore a comfortable amount of money to be made. Four generations of the Barber family have made a good living out of it, and now a fifth is poised to carry the business through the coming decades.
So is it time yet for the baton to be passed? Perhaps not yet, James said:
I do want to take a back seat, but I don’t think I’ll ever entirely come out of the trade. I’ll still be there in the background. I’m passionate about it – it's been my life. I guess one day I’ll be working for Alicia, but on a part-time basis.
My father always told me 'there's no sentiment in business’, so I’d be happy for Alicia to do whatever she wants to in the future.
But we're the UK’s oldest family-run tobacconist still run by its founding family, so it’s great to have a fifth generation enter the business and see the legacy continue.
0