The Smoking Room

Author: penny edmonds

The Smoking Room at Martindale Hall, sometimes called the ‘trophy room’ or ‘weapons room’, displays over 130 artefacts and is based on the collections of the Mortlock family and their travels. The Smoking Room symbolises imperial and pastoral power and wealth par excellence. It is one of a kind in South Australia.

The Smoking Room shows an appreciation of the cultures of the world, and we should enjoy the pleasure of looking at its wonderful array of artefacts. An eclectic mix of artefacts adorn the room and walls, including Egyptians textiles; over fifty Aboriginal artefacts, among them coolamons (wooden food or water carriers), spears and boomerangs; and some Papuan and Pacific objects. Animal hunting trophies, including a dugong skull, buffalo horns and a taxidermied crocodile, are mounted on the walls, along with an array of guns. There is, of course, a great deal of smoking paraphernalia including several opium pipes.

Objects from India and Southeast Asia include Japanese Samurai armour, smoking paraphernalia, a cabinet of ornaments including Japanese netsuke, or carved miniature figures, a Tibetan prayer wheel and dramatic colourful Sri Lankan masks. In the grand entry hall of the house sits a small alabaster model of the Taj Mahal, the famous marble mausoleum from Agra, Uttar Pradesh, in the form of a lamp.

The Smoking Room interior at Martindale Hall.
The Smoking Room interior at Martindale Hall.

The Smoking Room at Martindale Hall was made through imperial privilege and power. By the 1870s, smoking rooms, billiard rooms and gun rooms had become features of large country houses of the Victorian era and a central part of male aristocratic life. It is not clear how many of these objects were installed or owned by the original Bowman family, who sold the mansion to William Tennant Mortlock in 1891. By 1905, the Smoking Room held extensive weapons and ethnographic collections acquired by W. T. Mortlock during his travels.

The Smoking Room at Martindale Hall was made through imperial privilege and power.

a decorative display of weapons
A decorative display of Indigenous weapons in the Martindale Smoking Room. Future research hopes to reveal their provenance. Photo credit, Fiona Lawry.
colourful carved sri lankan mask on a wall
Maha Kolam mask with snakes and eighteen sanniyas, displayed on northern wall above the mantelpiece and bordered by Egyptian wall hangings. Object 465, Smoking Room, Martindale Hall, Mintaro.

We have been inspired by the wonderful quote by the writer Delia Falconer: ‘Using objects as focal point of research is like “walking through the back door of history, you don’t necessarily end up at the front of the same house”’.1 As we wonder at the Smoking Room—with its jumble of artefacts, curios and visual cacophony of material splendours—we have sought to investigate the ‘lives’ of these objects, where they came from, who made them and under what circumstances. We discovered that the dugong whose skull sits on the wall was shot with a harpoon gun; that the Sri Lankan masks were probably made by specialist mask makers from the town of Ambalangoda near Columbo; and that the Egyptian textiles are known as ‘Khayamiya’, crafted by the famous Tentmakers of Cairo who have historically sold their work in the Cairo tent markets.

As we wonder at the Smoking Room—with its jumble of artefacts, curios and visual cacophony of material splendours—we have sought to investigate the ‘lives’ of these objects, where they came from, who made them and under what circumstances.

Smoking, Empire and Masculinity

Traditionally the smoking room was the place where men withdrew after dinner to discuss matters of importance. It was where, ‘especially after dinner, the men retired, dressed in smoking jackets, to talk of “men’s’ things”,’ writes Mark Girouard.2 The smoking room thus reflected the separation of men and women in domestic life at this time. Women and children had their own spaces. After dinner, while men would go to the smoking room, women would retire to the drawing room. The nursery was reserved for young children and became a common feature of large houses.

In the Smoking Room at Martindale Hall a bust of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill is mounted high above Egyptian textiles, with a characteristic cigar in his mouth. Churchill’s cigar ‘served as a reminder of a flamboyant aristocratic masculinity which only Churchill could pull off without irony,’ writes Matthew Hiton.3

In 1886, Rudyard Kipling wrote, ‘A woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. Light me another Cuba.’ 4 This oft-quoted aphorism reveals the central role of smoking and tobacco in British and imperial nineteenth-century Victorian culture, and the highly gendered and masculinists ideas of the companionship and reliability of a ‘smoke’ compared with a woman.

Tobacco was introduced into Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries from ‘new world’ America, and the smoking and cultivation of this much-desired plant rapidly spread to other parts of the world. By the mid-nineteenth century, smoking had become an established ritual throughout the world. 5

a bust of Winston Churchill
Khayamiya appliqué textile with Pharaonic motifs and Winston Churchill’s bust placed above. Object 158, Smoking Room, Martindale Hall, Mintaro.

“A woman is only a woman, but a good Cigar is a Smoke. Light me another Cuba.”

As houses of the wealthy became larger, and with the increased specialisation of rooms in the eighteenth century, the smoking room made its way into bourgeois homes in Paris and London. 6The Smoking room became a feature of the stately homes of Victorian England and the American mansions of the so called ‘Gilded Age’, a time of rapid industrialisation and economic growth in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As Valentin Goux writes:

‘It was a time of eclecticism; smoking rooms were temples of exoticism, with décor inspired by Eastern lands and the imagined delights of those places, amidst colonial expansion. Napoléon III was a great tobacco lover, having been introduced to the vice in London clubs, and created smoking rooms at Compiègne and Fontainebleau. Not a single home of the haute bourgeoisie or aristocracy was without this fashionable space.’ 7

In the early twentieth century, the smoking-room trend would be revived in the attractive interiors of transatlantic passenger liners and once again in homes, with the advent of the Art Deco style.

The Smoking Room at Martindale Hall is a repository of things that can tell us about times and places. Through ‘object stories’ or ‘object biographies’, the things at Martindale Hall can become portals to the past that open up new histories and unexpected stories—of those who made and bought them, of the animals who were hunted or used for sport, of the lives of the people who worked and lived at the country estate, and of the many others who enabled the accumulation of such wealth. We hope you enjoy these object biographies of the Smoking Room and the many journeys on which they can take us.

Footnotes

  1. Delia Falconer, ‘The Books of Last Things’, in The Best Australian Essays, ed. Peter Craven (Bookman Press, 1999), 165–83.  ↩︎
  2. Mark Girouard, The Victorian Country House (Yale University Press, 1979), 35. ↩︎
  3. Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture: Perfect Pleasures, 1800–2000 (Manchester University Press, 2000), 1. ↩︎
  4. Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Betrothed’, Departmental Ditties and Other Verses (Civil and Military Press, 1886), republished by The Kipling Society, https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_betrothed.htm. ↩︎
  5. ] David T. Sweanor and Matthew J. Hilton, ‘A Social and Cultural History of Smoking’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, last updated 27 November 2024, https://www.britannica.com/topic/smoking-tobacco/A-social-and-cultural-history-of-smoking. ↩︎
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