Antique 1900s-1930s Lord Roberts Cigar Label 🚬 Embossed Heraldic Coat of Arms Crown Lion Shield Gold Foil 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, the stone printing a Munich playwright named Alois Senefelder invented back in the 1790s, and then stamped with 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 over 300 miles of rough country in twenty-three days, setting out on August 8 and reaching Kandahar on August 31, from Kabul to relieve Kandahar and beat Ayub Khan, 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 killed at the Battle of Colenso on December 17, 1899 and awarded the Victoria Cross after his death. Roberts took Bloemfontein on March 13, 1900 and Pretoria on May 31, 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.

🏡 Display

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.