He Lives on Oatmeal, Sleeps in Garbage Bags : Smoking Foe Has Single-Purpose Life

Stuart Holmes, Britain’s best-known anti-smoking campaigner, sleeps in black plastic garbage bags under bushes and lives off raw oatmeal.

He owns one set of clothes, carries his few possessions in a scruffy black briefcase and makes unexpected and unorthodox television appearances as often as possible.

When not campaigning on the streets of London, Holmes, 41, pedals round Britain on a battered bicycle to lobby conventions.

Behind him, on a home-built trailer, flies a 25-foot long banner with the logo: “Smoking kills 2,000 people in Britain every week.” He has a huge file of newspaper clippings about his activities.

Holmes, a draftsman, started his campaign in a bar in the northern English city of Manchester on Christmas Eve, 1983, when irritated by cigarette smoke, he set up an anti-smoking petition.

All his savings vanished on anti-smoking publications and posters, and he gave up his job in early 1984 to campaign full-time. A few months later he was evicted from his apartment.

One of his successes was to to persuade seven big cities, including Glasgow, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, to ban cigarette advertisements from the sides of buses.

“I turned up, found out who was in charge and then collared him as he went into the building,” Holmes said. He persuaded the cities to replace the gaps on the buses with anti-smoking posters free of charge for three months.

London ignored him, but after the King’s Cross subway disaster last year, when 31 people died in a fire that might have been caused by a discarded cigarette, cigarette ads began to be phased out from the system’s billboards.

“Cigarette advertising must stop,” Holmes, who gave up smoking at 21, said. “The surgeon general in the (United) States has just classified cigarettes as a dangerous addictive drug. What is the (British) government going to do about it?”

His solution? First, ban all tobacco promotions. Second, sell cigarettes only in pharmacies. Thirdly, mount an effective anti-smoking campaign and finally put cigarettes on prescription.

The government is reluctant to act, he says, because it rakes in $11 billion a year from tobacco taxation.

“Outrageous,” says Holmes, who claims that tobacco advertisements encourage teen-agers to smoke.

During a recent live audience television talk show on smoking Holmes grabbed the host and pursued him across the studio to finish what he was saying.

Shortly after being returned firmly to his place, he vaulted three rows of seats to the front of the audience and started shouting anti-smoking slogans into the microphone of the junior health minister.

The church is “a dead loss” in his view for not preaching against smoking, while he also criticizes the British Broadcasting Corp.

Every year Holmes cycles to the central English town of Sheffield, from where the BBC broadcasts the world snooker championships. While the BBC is noncommercial, the event itself is sponsored by a cigarette manufacturer.

Cameramen know him well--he tends to pop up in the background when least expected, waving anti-smoking posters.

In November, in the Scottish city of Glasgow, where one in six men dies of lung cancer, Holmes welcomed businessmen visiting a convention by shouting: “Welcome to Glasgow, lung cancer capital of the world.” The disruption cost him two weeks in jail but charges of causing a public disturbance were later dropped.

For the last 18 months he has been campaigning in front of the headquarters of a newspaper group in London. He spends 12 hours a day standing outside the building in all weather, talking to passers-by.

“I wake up sometimes and wonder what the hell I’m doing,” says Holmes, who has never married. “The campaign hasn’t done my love life much good. Girls aren’t keen on spending the night in garbage bags.”

There are many more lonely nights ahead if his campaign is to be successful. Although cigarette sales in Britain are dropping, smoking among children and women is at an all-time high.