It’s No Smoking Day which used to be one of the busiest days, media wise, in the Forest calendar.
No more. The days when NSD had a budget of £600k and four full-time staff are long gone and the event is now barely mentioned if at all by the national press.
Here however is how Forest ‘celebrated’ NSD 22 years ago. To escape the frenzy of state sponsored nagging we sent a small team of crack undercover operatives to Paris, which was then the European capital of smoking, where they had lunch and plotted with our French counterparts in a restaurant formerly used by the Resistance. The photo above shows them keeping a low profile aboard Eurostar which still had a smoking coach.
Also on board was Forest’s chairman, the late Lord Harris of High Cross, and Bob Shields, the legendary reporter and columnist from the Daily Record who is pictured below at Waterloo Station prior to departure. If I remember, not everyone made it back on the scheduled return journey and there were some bleary eyes in the office the following day. The next year we stayed at home and invited some journalists and friends of Forest to join us for a Smoker-Friendly Fry-Up at Simpson’s-in-the-Strand in London.
Happy days.
PS. Sadly I didn’t go to Paris in 1999. Someone had to stay behind and do all the media interviews (apart from the few that were done on board the train as it trundled through the Kent countryside) and it was me!
Update: Writing on the Friends of Forest Facebook page Caroline Hallett, who worked for Forest in the late Eighties/early Nineties, recalls:
I remember NSD in 1990 - I started off with a breakfast interview at Sky News, then off in a plane to Manchester for a live 1 hr debate with ASH on Granada for one of their shows, then back to back radio interviews and home around midnight! It was an exciting day, loads of coverage - Chris [Tame, Forest director] was just as busy - ah happy days indeed.
Below: Bob Shields, Daily Record, at the old Eurostar terminal
