Antique 1930s Lord Roberts Cigar Label 🚬 Embossed Heraldic Coat of Arms Crown Lion Shield Gold NOS Collectible

Who Was Lord Roberts? 🦁 Lord Roberts "Very Mild De Luxe" Embossed Cigar Label

Size: 10" x 7" ~ New Old Stock, never on a box.

Now that's a coat of arms! This is an antique Lord Roberts cigar box label, printed in deep navy blue and shining gold on cream and embossed so the crest stands right up off the paper. LORD ROBERTS arches across the top in big navy capitals, and under it a crowned shield is split into quarters, a gold castle tower in one, a gold lion rampant on navy in another, with a slanting band and stars, all framed by crossed halberds, hanging chains and tassels. A gold ribbon beneath reads VERY, DE LUXE, MILD, and a second LORD ROBERTS, VERY MILD line runs along the bottom edge. Turn it over and you can see the whole crest pressed right through the paper.

🏷️ What's Printed on It

• LORD ROBERTS
• VERY / DE LUXE / MILD (on the ribbon)
• VERY MILD, LORD ROBERTS, VERY MILD (along the bottom)

The gold embossing is the real treat on these. Labels like this were printed by lithography, which a Munich playwright named Alois Senefelder worked out on a slab of stone back in the 1790s. By the 1920s the label printers had traded those heavy limestones for metal plates on fast presses, but the sheets still went under metal dies to raise the design, and the gold catches the light the way flat printing never could.

🎖️ "Bobs," the Man Behind the Name

Around 1900 there was only one Lord Roberts anybody meant: Field Marshal Frederick Sleigh Roberts, "Bobs" to the soldiers who loved him. He was born at Cawnpore, India, on September 30, 1832, went into the East India Company's army as a second lieutenant in the Bengal Artillery in December 1851, and won the Victoria Cross on January 2, 1858 at Khudaganj during the Indian Mutiny, cutting down a standard-bearer and another sepoy in the fight. He fought in the Abyssinian campaign of 1867-68, and then came the march that made him famous. In 1880 he marched 10,000 men from Kabul to relieve Kandahar, over 300 miles of rough country in twenty-three days, setting out on August 8 and arriving on August 31, and the next day he beat Ayub Khan. It is one of the most famous marches in British military history, and in 1892 he was made Baron Roberts of Kandahar.

When the Boer War went badly, he was sent to take command in South Africa. He sailed from England on December 23, 1899 aboard the RMS Dunottar Castle, with Lord Kitchener along as his chief of staff, and reached Cape Town on January 10, 1900, just weeks after his own son Frederick was badly wounded at the Battle of Colenso on December 15, 1899, died two days later, and was awarded the Victoria Cross after his death. Roberts took Bloemfontein on March 13, 1900, Johannesburg on May 31 and Pretoria on June 5, and came home to the Order of the Garter and an earldom: Earl Roberts, of Kandahar, of Pretoria and of the City of Waterford. He served as the last Commander-in-Chief of the Forces, from 1901 until the post was abolished in 1904, and he died of pneumonia at St Omer, France, on November 14, 1914, while visiting the Indian troops in the first months of the Great War. The country gave him everything it had: he lay in state in Westminster Hall, one of only two people outside the royal family to do that in the whole 20th century (the other was Winston Churchill), and after a state funeral he was buried in St Paul's Cathedral. A name like that was a natural for a cigar box.

🗓️ How Old Is It?

These are 1930s labels. There is no date, printer or maker anywhere on them, so the design does the talking, and the people who deal in old cigar labels put this Lord Roberts crest at about 1930. That fits the brand, too. There were Lord Roberts Father's Day labels, and Father's Day only grew into a day for buying Dad a present in the 1920s, when the tobacco trade was already trying to set its date in 1925. So the brand was still turning out labels well over fifteen years after Roberts died in 1914. That is how big his name was: it kept selling cigars for a generation after him.

🏡 Display

They aren't making any more antique cigar labels. Every one that goes up on a collector's wall is one fewer left for sale, and once this supply is gone, they will be very difficult to acquire.

Antique and Vintage labels show you what antique advertising is all about with the wonderful graphics that lithography provided that modern printing just can't reproduce. It looks great framed in a study, a den or a smoking room, and it's a perfect gift for a cigar lover, a military history buff or anybody who loves heraldry.