Churchill and His Cigar

Winston Churchill without a cigar — that image barely exists. The Havana was as much a part of his public appearance as the hat and the V-sign, and he cultivated this iconography quite deliberately: the cigar was simultaneously a prop, a source of comfort and a message of imperturbability.

His fondness for the Habano began early. In 1895 the twenty-year-old Churchill travelled to Cuba as a war correspondent — and returned with a passion that accompanied him for seven decades. He favoured large formats, among them from the brands Romeo y Julieta and La Aroma de Cuba; at his country seat Chartwell he kept three to four thousand at a time. The London trade kept records too: the venerable house James J. Fox logged over 1,300 cigars sold to him in a single half-year of 1964 — by which point Churchill was in his ninetieth year.

How many he smoked across his whole life, no one knows. Contemporaries speak of eight to ten per day, though Churchill often chewed many of them rather than smoking them, letting them go cold. The frequently cited quarter of a million over a lifetime is an extrapolation from such accounts — a plausible estimate, not bookkeeping.

The greatest honour came from Havana itself: the brand Romeo y Julieta named its large flagship after him — according to tradition, following his visit to Cuba after the Second World War. From that came a category: the Churchill format measures roughly 18 centimetres at a ring gauge of 47 and stands for the long, stately cigar par excellence. The name has endured — in the catalogues of almost every manufacturer, this format is today simply called Churchill.