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Three On A Match

GNC

King-Sized Canary
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(This discussion originated as an extended tangent in the 'Invisible Smoker' IHTM thread. It's now been moved into its own dedicated thread within the Superstition section.)

I believe the old "three on a match" warning of WW1 was a marketing ploy invented by the matchmakers to get people to use more of their product. Doesn't mean the glow of a coffin nail didn't contribute to a rather more premature death, of course, but I doubt it happened often.
 
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Fair enough. The "three on a match" warning was that if you lit three cigarettes with one match, the third man would be shot dead as the enemy had enough time to ready, aim and fire with each glowing cigarette tip.
 
gncxx said:
Fair enough. The "three on a match" warning was that if you lit three cigarettes with one match, the third man would be shot dead as the enemy had enough time to ready, aim and fire with each glowing cigarette tip.
Ah, that makes sense. But to present it as a marketing ploy almost certainly goes too far. It may be popular in some circles to blame capitalism for all the world's ills, but in wartime people are going to do what is sensible to stay alive!

Is there any evidence for that 'marketing ploy', or is it just an urban legend?
 
rynner2 said:
...Is there any evidence for that 'marketing ploy', or is it just an urban legend?

Strikes me (see what I did there) that given the demand on timber supplies (and chemicals) the match makers probably had a job supplying demand as it stood, never mind trying to expand the market.

Having said that, I've always found it odd that three blokes in the middle of WW1 would light up in any exposed position anyway.
 
rynner2 said:
Ah, that makes sense. But to present it as a marketing ploy almost certainly goes too far. It may be popular in some circles to blame capitalism for all the world's ills, but in wartime people are going to do what is sensible to stay alive!

Is there any evidence for that 'marketing ploy', or is it just an urban legend?

I thought it was the "three on a match" bit which was the urban legend! I wonder if there's anything online about it?
 
gncxx said:
rynner2 said:
Ah, that makes sense. But to present it as a marketing ploy almost certainly goes too far. It may be popular in some circles to blame capitalism for all the world's ills, but in wartime people are going to do what is sensible to stay alive!

Is there any evidence for that 'marketing ploy', or is it just an urban legend?

I thought it was the "three on a match" bit which was the urban legend! I wonder if there's anything online about it?
Well, "three on a match" seems a sensible stratagem for avoiding unnecessary casualties. Maybe some officer or RSM actually noticed several examples of the 'third light' getting shot, and instigated the rule, or perhaps the lower ranks noticed it themselves and made it a rule of thumb not to light more than two ciggies from one match.

And then, with the grim humour that prevails in wartime, some squaddie joked, "That's just to get us to buy more matches!" :D

Or maybe it was some more intellectual squaddie having a pop at the communist ideas taking root in parts of Europe at the time (notably in Russia). 8)
 
I think you're overthinking it, after all if cigarette companies jumped on the suffragette bandwagon to increase their sales by opening up their market to women, it's not science fiction or Communist propaganda so suppose match manufacturers did similar with what would be called virals now.

Wiki backs me up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_on_a ... perstition)

There was in fact no such superstition during the First World War.[1] (The light would not be visible if the soldiers were in a trench or bunker, as they usually were when not attacking.) The superstition was alleged to have been invented about a decade later by the Swedish match tycoon Ivar Kreuger in an attempt to get people to use more matches but it appears he merely made very shrewd use of the already existing belief which may date to the Boer War.

Sort of! It's a bit vague but I can see where I had heard the urban myth thing.
 
There definitely existed such a superstition at the time of WWI.

Charlie Chaplin played on it in his film about the war - _Shoulder Arms_ (1918). It's even mentioned in the film's synopsis at the British Film Institute site:

http://chaplin.bfi.org.uk/resources/bfi ... ?fid=59457

The 'three on a match' bit was one of multiple gags Chaplin did with respect to luck and superstition among soldiers going 'over the top'.

Like many of his earliest films, this one was heavily (re-)edited in later years. The 'three on a match gag' was one of the bits removed when the film was shortened. References to the scene and its removal can be found on multiple Chaplin discussion forums.

For example - this thread at the Charlie Chaplin Club site:

http://www.charliechaplinclub.com/dated ... 51222.html

... discusses the match gag's removal as possibly being motivated by a desire to eliminate allusions that had become dated in the 20+ years since the film's original release.

Additional references to this gag's removal can be found in the archives of the alt>movies>Chaplin Usenet newsgroup at Lockergnome. One example is this thread:

http://help.lockergnome.com/movies/_Sho ... t8121.html

The point here is that such a superstition was known at the time of WWI. Whether or not it was widely known among the soldiers within WWI is a different issue.

Even the Wikipedia article (such as it is) refers to the superstition possibly dating back to the Boer War.
 
In this thread from the Straight Dope message boards:

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/sho ... p?t=448528

... One poster cites the 1931 book _Soldiers' Song and Slang_ (Brophy and Partridge) with specific regard to this superstition:

My 1931 copy of "Soldiers' Song and Slang," by Eric Partridge--an authority on historic slang--gives this note:

Quote:
"THIRD MAN.--The most popular superstition in France was the firm belief that the third man to light a cigarette from the same match would inevitably be killed soon after. It was so strongly held that anyone inadvertently attempting to go third man would have his hand or face pushed violently away--unless he was very unpopular. See C.E. Montague's story "The First Blood Sweep in Fiery Particles (Chatto and Windus, 1923).
 
EnolaGaia said:
There definitely existed such a superstition at the time of WWI.
I'm not denying that - as I said, it seems quite likely, and is more 'common sense' than 'superstition'.

The thing I query is that this was a commercial ploy to sell more matches!
 
rynner2 said:
The thing I query is that this was a commercial ploy to sell more matches!

I've never found any confirmation that 'The Match King' (Ivar Krueger) actually used the superstition in advertising, so as to boost match sales.

The Krueger connection is most widely cited in relation to the 1932(?) film _The Match King_, which was loosely based on Krueger's life but was never claimed to be 'biographically authentic'. The fictional pseudo-Krueger certainly played on the superstition in the film.

Whether or not the actual Krueger (a ruthless figure vilified as the 'first Madoff') originally did it is another issue. I've never located any 'solid' info on when this might have occurred, nor so much as any tangential evidence of any public advertising usage prior to the 1932 film version. Frank Partnoy's biography (_The Match King_) mentions Krueger was credited with 'spreading the story" about lighting more than 2 cigarettes from one match being bad luck (p. 84), but offers nothing more than this in the entire book.
 
When we were kids my friend would never let anyone be third man on a match. Thinking about it though why not just take your time and fire at any one of the three glowing fag ends?
 
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oldrover said:
When we were kids my friend would never let anyone be third man on a match. Thinking about it though why not just take your time and fire at any one of the three glowing fag ends?
A sniper would never see three glowing fag ends. The point is, soldiers were only vulnerable during lighting up - once the cigs were lit, they knew to shield the red glow.

As gncxx said earlier:
"The "three on a match" warning was that if you lit three cigarettes with one match, the third man would be shot dead as the enemy had enough time to ready, aim and fire with each glowing cigarette tip."

So the sniper, although alerted by the flare of the match, wouldn't be ready for the first smoker, but he could start to aim at the second, and then fire at the third.
 
Fair enough but this presupposes three unlikely scenarios, firstly that the sniper, who presumably was waiting to seize any chance to pick of the careless, wouldn't have his rifle at the ready. Secondly that anyone would sit up in an exposed position and light up at all. Thirdly that the sniper wouldn't be able to aim a shot at the original position with any less accuracy than a third light would give.

Anyway what about the third man, how did he manage for a fag. Was he the designated non-smoker for the evening, or did he he light his own fro a second match. If so it'd be a fairly safe bet for the sniper to keep his rifle trained on the position and wait, unless of course it was too unusual for three smokers to sit together exposed during trench warfare for him to think it was worth it, in which case how did the story start.
 
I think we might be getting bogged down in detail.

It's probably safe to say that doing anything that might give away your position was hazardous, and also that the longer that giveaway lasted the more hazardous the situation became.

Like many sayings, it possibly represents a general truth rather than a literal one, if you see what I mean.

My dad, (a veteran of WW2*), although only ever a very occasional smoker, recalls the three on a match thing also being common during this period. Interestingly he also seems to remember that the quality of the matches was so crap that you'd probably burn your fingers if you tried to light more than a couple of ciggies with one. (He also suggested that you were probably as likely to get shot by other members of your own unit for doing something as utterly stupid as lighting up in an exposed position as you would be by the enemy.)
 
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Why not save matches and light your next cigarette with the end of your last one? Go on like that and you could make a box of lucifers last a lifetime. A short lifetime.
 
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