Philip Morris (person)

Philip Morris was a London tobacconist in late 1850s for whom the Philip Morris tobacco company was named. He produced hand made Turkish cigarettes.

Background
Among those catering to the new fashion in smoking was a Bond Street tobacconist named Philip Morris, about whom little is known personally. He died at a relatively young age, in 1873, and the business carried on for a time by his widow, Margaret, and his brother Leopold. In his early days, Morris discreetly sold fine Havana "seegars" and Virginia pipe tobacco to the carriage trade, but when returning Crimean veterans began asking for cigarettes, he quickly accommodated. Stressing to his select clientele that he had the cleanest factory and used the best paper, the purest aromatic tobaccos, and the finest cork tipping to keep the cigarette from sticking to the lips, Philip Morris helped lend to the product a cachet it had not previously enjoyed. He called his brands Oxford and Cambridge Blues, later adding Oxford Ovals, and thus attracting as customers the young elite attending those preeminent universities, and holding on to them afterward when they went off to run the empire and wrote to Bond Street to have their favorite smoke forwarded to them. But even for a merchant as successful as Morris, cigarettes remained a cottage industry. The most skillful rollers could not turn out more than 1,500 or 2,000 units in a ten or twelve hour day.