If there is a particular kind of man the Club has always collected, it is not the man in the cape. It is the man who takes something the world regards as a mere indulgence — a smoke, a street, a branch line, a pink pigeon — and treats it with total, unembarrassed seriousness, until everyone around him is obliged to take it seriously too.

Nic Wing was that man twice over, and it began at Knebworth.

Rawlinson End

Sir Henry at Rawlinson End was made in 1979 and released in 1980: Vivian Stanshall's creation, born on John Peel's radio show out of the wreckage of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band, with Trevor Howard as the alcoholic squire and Stanshall himself as the trouserless ghost of his brother Humbert. It was shot at Knebworth House, in monochrome that came out of the laboratory the wrong colour and became, by accident, sepia — which is why the whole thing looks like a memory of an England that never existed. Time Out called it a missing link between Monty Python and Withnail & I. Sir Henry keeps his own prisoner-of-war camp, walks a mechanical bulldog, and has optics installed in every room of the house.

It is, quite simply, one of the greatest films about English eccentricity ever made — and it was shot fifteen miles from Nic Wing's front door.

He was born Nicholas Michael Wing, in Harpenden, on 25 February 1958. Knebworth is a short run east across Hertfordshire. So he was not a stagestruck Londoner who had travelled to a location; he was a local lad of twenty-one, and the most gloriously deranged film in the English canon was being made down the road. He went, and he stood in the grounds, and he never got over it, and forty years later his wife was still calling him a passionate Viv man.

The Club does not, as a rule, admit members on the strength of their film credits alone. In this one case, we would have been justified.

The scene

He was also proprietor and editor of UK Cigar Scene, the online magazine he founded and ran, which was for a while the best record anywhere of what the British cigar world actually was. He was a fixture on YouTube and on social media, and an occasional contributor to Cigar Aficionado.

The context matters, and the Club should say so plainly. He was chronicling a pleasure in retreat: the smoking ban had come in in 2007, the display ban followed, plain packaging was on its way. Whatever one's view of all that — and the Club, wisely, does not have one — Nic spent his working life documenting a culture the century had decided to disapprove of, and he did it without apology, without defensiveness, and entirely without the sour, embattled tone that creeps into these things.

He simply loved it, said so, and filmed it. Readers on the other side of the Atlantic wrote afterwards that his magazine had been their only window into the British cigar world, and that they had found their way to him through the shop videos. That is not a small legacy for a man with a camera and a laptop.

The other half

He also owned Cities in Sound, a company producing audio walking tours of European cities.

Those two enterprises look unrelated until you notice they are the same instinct wearing different hats. Both are devices for slowing a person down.

A cigar makes an hour last an hour. An audio tour makes a street reveal itself to somebody who would otherwise hurry past.

In a decade industriously demolishing the human attention span, he built two small businesses dedicated to lengthening it.

Then he combined them, and made a Cuban cigar walk around Mayfair.

Of course he did. It is the only possible synthesis, and it is the most Eccentric thing here: a guided walk through the richest square mile in London, organised entirely around where a man might sensibly buy and smoke a cigar. Sir Henry would have understood the principle exactly, though he would have wanted a drink at every stop, and got one.

The interviewer

It is worth saying what he actually did with the camera, because "cigar YouTuber" undersells it to the point of libel. He was a journalist, and he went and talked to people. He talked to me in an awesome studio overlooking London - about fast-changing clubland and its members, manners, social habits, pursuits and yes, cigars.

Among the interviews he left behind is one with Ranald Macdonald, a fellow Eccentric Club member — elder son of the 24th Chief of Clanranald, and the man behind Boisdale. Macdonald opened the first Boisdale in Belgravia in 1989, at twenty-four, added Canary Wharf in 2011, and built the whole enterprise on Scottish food, a thousand whiskies, live jazz under Jools Holland's patronage, and Cuban cigars — surviving recessions, pandemics and the smoking ban, and hosting the annual Cigar Smoker of the Year Awards into the bargain. Tatler once called him the most politically incorrect restaurateur in Britain, which he has borne with visible equanimity. When the ban came in 2007, most London venues shut their cigar bars, emptied their humidors and quietly forgot several centuries of history. Macdonald did the opposite.

That is the interview Wing wanted, and it tells you exactly what he was doing. He was not filming smoke rings. He was sitting down with the people who had refused to close the humidor, and getting it on the record while it was still there to be got.

The Club will recognise the impulse. It is the same one that keeps a membership register.

What his friends did

He had been ill with cancer for some months before he died on 25 September 2016, aged just fifty-eight. Far too soon.

He had married Sally Audley on 20 September 1986. They were married, as she puts it, for thirty years and five days.

Sautter of Mount Street — the Mayfair house he had done so much to put on the world's map — put up a notice the next day calling him a damn right good bloke, and meant it more than any formal encomium could. They said he would be missed in Britain and in Cuba alike, and sent their thoughts to Sally and to what they called his cigar family. The children are known, in the family's own word, as the Winglets. His memorial has since raised more than sixteen thousand pounds for the Hospice of St Francis at Berkhamsted. And the trade he had chronicled so faithfully gave him, after his death, its Cigar Writer of the Year award — which Sally went up and collected on his behalf.

Then, on Saturday 8 April the following year, a group of his friends met at the Roosevelt and Churchill bench on the corner of Old and New Bond Street, between half past eleven and noon, and walked his Cuban cigar walk. All were welcome.

Nobody organised a memorial service. They organised a walk. They took the thing he had made, went out into Mayfair, and used it — and smoked as they went.

Stanshall could not have written a better last scene, and would not have tried.

The Club extends its condolences to Sally and to the Winglets, and its considerable respect to the friends who thought of the walk.

Members are advised that the route exists, that it begins at Bond Street, and that it is presumably still there to be walked.


Nicholas "Nic" Michael Wing (25 February 1958 – 25 September 2016), a former Eccentric Club member.