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Ancient anchors brought to Dungeness from Dickens' Bleak House, Broadstairs -
Derek Jarman's cottage in Dungeness
Following the PLUTO trail and more smoking history
18th August 2026Dungeness, Kent
On each day of our holiday travelling around Kent and Sussex this week I have discovered a new aspect of history, an artefact or an episode that relates to our Company. Today, a trip to Hythe and Dungeness across Romney Marsh brought a particularly curious story to life.
This extraordinary landscape that today looks like a quiet stretch of railway, shacks and shingle, overlooked by the enormous bulk of Dungeness Power Station B, was once the setting for a remarkable piece of wartime engineering and - for the time - an extremely unusual outdoor smoking ban.
PLUTO – Pipe-Lines Under The Ocean – was one of the most ingenious and secret operations of the Second World War. Its purpose was to deliver fuel to the Allied armies after D-Day through pipelines laid beneath the English Channel. One of those pipelines ran from Dungeness to France, making this remote corner of Kent a vital link in the Allied supply chain.
The little Romney, Hythe & Dymchurch Railway was requisitioned by the War Department and used to support the military effort. The tiny railway became part of the huge logistical operation behind PLUTO, carrying materials and equipment for the construction of the pipeline which crossed Romney Marsh before continuing towards Dungeness, where fuel was pumped under the Channel.
This is what makes the Dungeness smoking ban so unusual. Smoking was an everyday part of life in the 1940s, yet here it was prohibited outdoors because this remote corner of England concealed a vital and highly secret fuel operation. In a place where safety, security and secrecy were paramount, the familiar lighting of a cigarette or a pipe was considered too great a risk of explosion.
For a Company whose heritage is so closely bound up with tobacco, it is a particularly intriguing piece of history in which, at the height of the war, one of the most ordinary and commonplace of habits was forbidden - just for a time.
Dungeness was not simply a windswept stretch of shingle. It was a crucial and highly secret aspect of the war effort – and, for a while, even a puff of tobacco smoke was a risk that Britain and its Allies could not afford.
PLUTO has long since disappeared, but its story can still be traced through the railway, the marsh and Dungeness itself. Smoking may have been banned inside the fantastic local pubs such as The Pilot and The Britannia since 2007, but these days their customers are free once again to light up outdoors.