Vintage Raleigh Tobacco 🚬 Uncut Sheet 8 B&W Coupons NOS Brown & Williamson Premium Plan 1960s

Raleigh B&W Coupons, Uncut Sheet of Eight 🚬 Brown & Williamson Premium Plan

Size: 6 1/2" x 2 3/4"

Eight B&W coupons still joined together, two rows of four with the perforation between them, never torn apart and never mailed in. Each one has a big orange "1" behind the B&W, ONE COUPON in both corners, and the pitch: "Redeem B&W Coupons for valuable gifts through the Brown & Williamson Premium Plan. You get famous B&W coupons on every package of RALEIGH and BELAIR cigarettes." Then "Send for new free catalog," BROWN & WILLIAMSON TOBACCO CORP., BOX 903, LOUISVILLE, KENTUCKY 40201, and Series V.

Flip it over and my favorite part is the fine print. Each coupon is worth "3/4 of 1 cent" in cash, and "in the unlikely event Premium Plan is terminated, coupon will expire five years after such termination." Unlikely! They printed that with a straight face. 😄

🎁 Saving Up for a Percolator

Raleigh came out in 1928 as Brown & Williamson's first national brand, and by 1932 there was a coupon in every pack. It took off in the Depression, when a free toaster mattered. When the war came and premiums stopped, Raleigh sales fell 75 percent - and when the coupons came back in 1949, sales doubled in less than a year. By 1960 B&W was redeeming 35 million Raleigh coupons a month, and the number one thing people sent away for was an electric percolator. That same year B&W brought out a new, bigger catalog with nearly 300 gifts in it.

Buying by the carton got you extra coupons. Erie historian David Frew grew up around Raleigh smokers in the 1950s, and he wrote about his family keeping their coupons in rubber-banded stacks in a corner of the kitchen cupboard, with a running tally taped to the cupboard door. What they were all saving for was a folding wooden card table, and when they finally got it, it became his grandmother's Canasta table.

The catalog was the dream book, and it kept coming even after the Surgeon General's report tied cigarettes to lung cancer on January 11, 1964. The July 1968 edition was already the 48th, and a Structo grill with the rotisserie motor ran 1,775 coupons, Etonic golf shoes 2,050 and a shuffleboard set 1,275. At three-quarters of a cent apiece, that grill was about thirteen dollars' worth of smoking.

📅 How Old Is It?

These are new old stock, an uncut sheet that never went anywhere. Two clues on it: it names Belair, B&W's menthol brand that came out in 1960, and the Louisville address has a ZIP code, which didn't exist until July 1963. So this sheet is from 1963 or later.

🏭 Brown & Williamson

George Thomas Brown and his brother-in-law Robert Lynn Williamson started the company in Winston-Salem, North Carolina in 1894 - back then it was still the town of Winston. They had married sisters, Elsie and Minnie Thompson, and both came out of tobacco families: Brown's father and uncle had a small tobacco factory in Mocksville, and Williamson learned plug and smoking tobacco in his father's plant, T. F. Williamson and Company. The Panic of 1893 left Brown holding 100,000 pounds of tobacco he couldn't find a buyer for, so the two of them went into business to turn that leaf into something that would sell. They opened on February 1, 1894 with $10,000 and thirty employees, took over the T. F. Williamson brands - Red Juice and Red Crow twist chewing tobacco and Golden Grain smoking tobacco - and added their own Bloodhound, Bugler, Kite and Shot. They incorporated in 1906, and Brown was president until he died in 1913.

In 1925 the company bought the J. G. Flynt Tobacco Company and its Sir Walter Raleigh pipe tobacco, made since 1884 - that's where the Raleigh name came from. On March 23, 1927 the business was reorganized as Brown and Williamson Tobacco Corporation, which is the "TOBACCO CORP." printed on every one of these coupons. British American Tobacco bought B&W in 1927 and moved the headquarters to Louisville by 1929, which is where Box 903 was. Everything but the chewing tobacco and snuff made the move, and B&W ran things from Louisville, on the Ohio River, until July 30, 2004, when its U.S. business merged with R. J. Reynolds Tobacco Company to form Reynolds American Inc.

📻 The Stories

Raleigh was on the radio too: Red Skelton's NBC show was simply called "The Raleigh Cigarette Program" when it started on October 7, 1941. Ozzie and Harriet Nelson were on it with him, it's the show where Skelton first said "I dood it!", and it ran on Tuesday nights until he was drafted - the last one aired June 6, 1944. And yes, there's the grim old collector joke that if you saved enough coupons you could send away for an iron lung. It's a cousin of the old legend from the polio years that if you saved the red tear strips off your cigarette packs, you could trade them in later for time in an iron lung.

Raleigh's coupons came decades before Camel Cash, and tobacco premiums go back further still: the Florodora Tag Company's 1904 catalog offered 487 gifts for the tags out of plug tobacco, from a pipe for 25 tags to a piano for 90,000 tags. Fun framed in a den or a bar, or tucked into a tobacco advertising collection. You'll get a sheet just like the one shown.