A Superb, WW1, British Officer's Field Service, Harrods 'Kit' Named 'A Welcome Present for Friends At the Front,'. Trench Warfare Pharmaceuticals Case for Morphine, Heroin & 7% Solution Cocaine From Harrods Department Store {Now Empty!}

Even high street stores, in the Victorian, Edwardian and George Vth era, were once involved in selling questionable products {by today's enlightened standards of course}. In London during 1916, Harrods sold a ‘kit’ named ‘A Welcome Present for Friends at the Front,’ which contained cocaine, morphine, syringes, and needles. These kits were marketed to officers for use in the trenches of WW1. This case is also personally monogrammed for the officer

We acquired this from the elderly grandson of a WW1 officer in the Guards Division, and it once contained his complete kit of drug paraphernalia, the syringe, heroin vials, cocaine etc. for his trench warfare 'downtime' during his service at the front.

A very stout hard leather case, Harrods marked, containing its original metal box that once contained his 'kit', aka ‘A Welcome Present for Friends at the Front,’ In superb condition for age especially considering when and where it was used, and for over three years in the awful conditions of the trenches in Flanders and France. It was also very functional as a 'back-up' sandwich tin, which would likely be a more sensible use for it. Swayne and Adeney {another contemporary store but in Piccadilly} made a version for 'sandwiches' but larger, with a double hinged tin {so one could remove the sandwhich} and often a small glass flask, likely for a tot of single malt whisky. Apparently the vendors grandfather told him several of his brother officers used to ask for home to send them a F/S sandwich tin, but only in order to fit their drug kit within it!

“Which is it today,“ I asked “morphine or cocaine ?“. So says Doctor Watson to Sherlock Holmes in The Sign of The Four. “It is cocaine,“ he said “a seven-per-cent solution. Would you care to try it ?“

Doctor Watson wisely declines the offer. Instead he tries to alert Holmes to the potential dangers involved in his drug taking. “Why should you, for a mere passing pleasure, risk the loss of those great powers with which you have been endowed ?“ But Sherlock Holmes finds cocaine, “…so transcendentally stimulating and clarifying to the mind that it’s secondary action is a matter of small moment.“

The attitude to drugs in the Victorian era was very different to our own. Morphine and cocaine were both available from various sources without a doctor’s prescription. Morphine was even given to children - albeit in a diluted form such as a linctus. The great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud also wrote in praise of cocaine.

This all seems very strange to us. But before modern analgesics were developed people had to rely on drugs such as morphine and other opiates for pain relief and other medical uses.

Recreational drug taking was also not unknown. Sherlock Holmes’ drug use would certainly fall into this category. However, as he tells Doctor Watson; “Give me problems, give me work, give me the most abstruse cryptogram, or the most intricate analysis, and I am in my own proper atmosphere. I can dispense then with artificial stimulants.“

Code: 25156