The archival part of the Fraser collection contains of a wide range of material predominantly relating to tobacco, but also reflecting other interests of John Fraser (1836-1902) and, subsequently, his sons, John Fraser ([18--]-1943) and Donald Fraser ([18--?]-1963). The majority of items were collected by John Fraser (1836-1902) during his period of employment for Cope Brothers & Co., a tobacco manufacturing company in Liverpool.

Items within this collection include publications and advertising material produced for Cope's under Fraser's direction, original drawings and watercolours, manuscript copies of literary work submitted to Fraser, correspondence, and other materials produced to facilitate the publishing process of Cope publications (e.g. printing plates, galley proofs). Also included are non-Cope publications and ephemera on the topic of tobacco (including anti-tobacconist literature), and material relating to book collecting, the Church of Humanity, and positivism.

This collection includes racial prejudices in the form of offensive language and/or illustrative depictions of people. The University of Liverpool’s Special Collections and Archives are committed to addressing the legacies of slavery and colonialism as present within the collections, and supports their ongoing contextualisation as evidence of historic inequalities and racial prejudice. Please contact scastaff@liverpool.ac.uk for more information.

Upon John Fraser's death in 1902, his collection passed to his son - also called John Fraser - who himself died in 1943. In 1957, the collection - along with additions by his two sons, John Fraser ([18--]-1943) and Donald Fraser ([18--?]-1963) - was presented to the University of Liverpool by Donald Fraser. Additions to the original donation were made by the family in 1963 following Donald Fraser's death, with further accruals made subsequently to complement the original donations.

Alongside the archive materials, the University of Liverpool Special Collections and Archives also hold John Fraser (1836-1902)'s private library, containing over 2000 books reflecting his private-life interests in Scottish literature, positivist philosophy, phrenology, bee-keeping and, particularly, tobacco. Also includes later additions by his sons, John and Donald Fraser. For more details, see https://libguides.liverpool.ac.uk/library/sca/johnfraser.

John Fraser was born in Scotland, possibly in Wick.1 There is little available information about his life. In Richard Altick’s 1951 article on Cope’s Tobacco Plant, he writes: “That he was an unusually shrewd and enterprising journalist, as well as a man of catholic literary tastes, can be inferred from the contents of his periodical, and it is too bad that we know so little about him. All that I have been able to discover is that he was in earlier life the captain of an ocean-going Liverpool steamer who took over the printing business of his father when the latter was permanently incapacitated by illness.”2 Unfortunately, Altick provides no source for this claim. Fraser may have been in Bradford in 1864, when he appears to have been hired as a foreman by Cope Brother’s Tobacco.3

He first appears on a Liverpool census in 1871. He is 40-years-old (born c. 1831), and lives at 18 Albert Road with his family. His occupation is ‘printer lithographic’. Ten years later, he and his family are living at 1 Railway Cottages, but his age is recorded as 45, which would put his year of birth c. 1836. In 1891, the family remain at 1 Railway Cottages and his age is 55. The final census he appears in is 1901, one year before his death, where his occupation is recorded as ‘Manager Lithographic Works’. In this census his age is recorded as 60-years-old, which would put his year of birth as circa 1841. Thus, according to four censuses, he only aged 20 years over the course of 30 years.

The census also records details of Fraser’s family. His wife, Elizabeth, née Bullen, was born c. 1837 and was from Bickerstaffe, Lancashire. His children were Jane (born c. 1862), Annie (born c. 1869), Elizabeth Ann (born c. 1870), John (born c. 1866), Lucy (born c. 1875), Donald (born c. 1877), and Simon (born c. 1880). In the 1901 census it is revealed that John was a general superintendent of his father’s lithographic works, and that Donald also worked in printing. After their father’s death, John and Donald ran the Lyceum Press, which printed books until at least 1924. [...]


Cope’s
John Fraser was for a period the secretary of Cope’s Tobacco Company, and also secretary of its printing and publishing department. He was also chairman of its benevolent fund in the 1880s. Cope’s was founded in 1848 and imported some of its tobacco from South Carolina and Virginia, both slave states where the crop would have been cultivated by enslaved labour.

Cope’s Tobacco Company was one of the earliest involved in the promotion of tobacco smoking. In line with Thomas Cope’s own literary ambitions, the magazine Cope’s Tobacco Plant began publication in March 1870. It was edited and printed by John Fraser. Cope’s Tobacco Plant was both a literary journal and a trade press. The magazine sought to “instil a collective identity for smokers as a group apart from the rest of society with its own interests and agendas.” Cope’s, as a company, promoted smoking “not by extolling the virtues of its own brands, but by sharing and heightening a culture of smoking which already existed.”4

After the Tobacco Plant, from 1889 to 1893 Fraser also printed and published a series of 14 pamphlets called Cope’s Smoke Room Booklets, using a selection of the best extracts from the former.


Legacy and SCA collection
An obituary of Fraser described his personal interests as a socialist, a Fabian, a zealous member of the Church of Humanity, and a pro-Boer, “[b]ut these extreme opinions were always held with moderation and courtesy, and certainly he never thrust them upon unwilling listeners, and never gave offence in maintaining them.”5 Other than his chairmanship of the Cope’s benevolent fund, there is little contemporary evidence of his personal interests, although among the Fraser collection there are papers relating to some of his activities (FRA/4). After his death, a few of his socialist friends gave one guinea to the Food and Betterment Association in Liverpool, in deference to Fraser’s “well-known love and practical sympathy for the poor, particularly children,” rather than purchasing a wreath in his honour.6

When Fraser died, his book, manuscript, and archive collections passed to his sons Donald and John, who succeeded him in the printing trade and added to aspects of the  collection. In 1957 and 1963, Donald Fraser donated the collection to the University of Liverpool. S. F. E. Scott delineated the collection between papers, manuscripts, and ephemera, and described the latter part as “a unique collection of advertising ephemera [that] demonstrate[s] the methods that could be employed in promoting a product in a most imaginative way.”7 In 1995, it was also noted that the papers contain racial and social stereotypes that would be worthy of further investigation. A printed catalogue has not been prepared for the Fraser Collection, but information is easily accessible via the Library and SCA catalogues. The collection contains 2247 printed works.

The above research was kindly provided by Andrew Williams, Collections Research Assistant at the University of Liverpool's Victoria Gallery & Museum.

References:

1 ‘Smokescreen: the Victorian Vogue for Tobacco’, University of Liverpool Library <https://libguides.liverpool.ac.uk/library/sca/smokescreenexhib> [accessed 21 April 2022].

2 Richard D. Altick, ‘Cope’s Tobacco Plant: An Episode in Victorian Journalism’, The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 45.4 (1951), pp. 333–350 (p.334).

3 Bradford Observer, 19 May 1864, p. 1.

4 Matthew Hilton, Smoking in British Popular Culture 1800–2000 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), pp.45–47.

5 University of Liverpool, Special Collections and Archives, FRA/6/1.

6 ‘Gift to the Food and Betterment Association’, Liverpool Daily Post, 3 March 1902.

S. F. E. Scott, ‘A good joke and a good smoke: tobacco advertising ephemera in the Fraser papers’ (unpublished MA thesis, University of Liverpool, 1995), p. 18.