James Leavey, writer, actor and cigar devotee who wrote smokers’ guides to tobacco-friendly places – obituary

James Leavey, who has died aged 75, fought a valiant but ultimately unsuccessful campaign against “born-again puritans trying to drive forward a nanny state” by editing quirkily humorous travel guides for smokers.

Leavey, a devotee of Havana cigars, became convinced of the need for such guides when an acquaintance told him that the idea for a puffer’s guide to London was “bloody disgusting” and asked him to extinguish his cigar. Smokers, he protested, had been added to “the blacklist of late-20th-century pariahs alongside paedophiles, rapists, drug pushers, tax collectors, traffic wardens, TV gameshow hosts and National Health Service managers”.

Published under the auspices of Forest (the Freedom Organisation for the Right to Enjoy Smoking Tobacco), his Guide to Smoking in London: Where to Light up, published in 1996 with a foreword by Auberon Waugh and a “Last Word” by Jeffrey Bernard, was full of photographs designed to prove that smoking is cool and people who smoke are more sexy, have more fun and are more well-adjusted, tolerant individuals than their pink-lunged counterparts.

The best places to be seen smoking, Leavey claimed, were Cuban bars such as Cuba Libre, Kensington, because as well as a smoke, you could also pretend to be Ernest Hemingway – along with “any of the newer cocktail bars… because smokers look so good”. Smoking was associated with creativity: “Lots of artists have said that they need to smoke to think. That’s why… great thinkers have smoked, like Karl Marx and Mozart.”

Leavey followed up with a Smoker’s Guide to Scotland (1999), for which 525 hotels, pubs and restaurants were canvassed on their attitudes to smoking on their premises and given scores for smoker-friendliness. Edinburgh came top for tolerance, followed by Glasgow. Bottom of the heap was the Highlands region – which was odd, Leavey observed, because it was “so remote, you’d think they’d be glad to see anyone up there. Is it a puritanical, religious thing?”

Leavey’s purpose in compiling the guides was, he said, an attempt to defuse tensions between smokers and non-smokers before things got out of hand. “Over the past year alone in America, a 60-year-old man was beaten unconscious in a restaurant after he lit a cigarette,” he claimed in a 1998 letter to the Herald, “and anti-smoking extremists have threatened to burn to the ground several smoker-friendly bars. If this extreme intolerance continues, it’s only a matter of time before someone is murdered for daring to enjoy tobacco in public.”

Hitler, he told The Sunday Times, was “fanatically anti-smoking, which I think tells us a lot about the mindset”.

In spite of his efforts, smoking bans were imposed in all enclosed workplaces including bars, clubs and restaurants, in Scotland in 2006 and in the rest of the UK in 2007.

James Leavey was born at Beckenham, Kent, on December 9 1947 to Werner Pfeifer, a German former PoW, and Esther Mary Leavy (James later changed the spelling of “Leavy”). According to his daughter, writing in The Guardian, he had written his first book by the age of eight. 

From St Anthony’s School, Penge, he got a job as an editorial assistant at a weekly magazine, then worked as a road manager of a band composed of his school friends before training as an actor at Mountview Theatre School, north London.

He went on to appear in various London shows and worked backstage for West End musicals. In the mid-1970s he trained as a teacher but never made it to the classroom. Instead, in 1980 he became deputy editor of Database, the magazine for Post Office computing staff, and in 1984 moved to British Telecom’s marketing department, where he worked on the introduction of 0800 telephone numbers and helped to develop early video games.

In 1990 he went freelance as a writer. As well as his smoker’s guides he interviewed famous nicotine addicts for Punch’s “Sharing an Ashtray” column, edited The Harrods Pocket Guide to Fine Cigars, wrote about cigars for publications including World Tobacco, Tobacco Reporter, Cigar Style and Cigar Journal, and edited a cigar newsletter called The Humidor.

In 2006 he was interviewed for the BBC Horizon documentary We Love Cigarettes in which the programme makers set out to “capture our love affair with nicotine across the world on one single day”. In 2015 he received the Snow Queen Cigar Writer of the Year award.

His first marriage, to Flora Camboni, was dissolved, and in 1994 he married Gwenda Silsby, who survives him with a daughter and son from his first marriage.

James Leavey, born December 9 1947, died June 24 2023