Noted for its strong unfiltered cigarettes, the brand was cheap and popular in the early 20th century with the working-class, as well as with army men during the First and Second World War.

[5][6] In the Great War, the British Army chaplain Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy MC was affectionately nicknamed "Woodbine Willie" by troops on the Western Front to whom he handed out cigarettes along with Bibles and spiritual comfort.

In common parlance, the unfiltered high-tar Woodbine was one of the brands collectively known as "gaspers" until about 1950, because new smokers found their harsh smoke difficult to inhale.

[8] In the 1960s, a few television ads were made in which Gordon Rollings played a man who engaged in numerous activities (including waiting for the bus or setting up a beach chair) and would always end in misery.

[14] Some late 19th- to early 20th-century steamships sported as many as five long and thin smokestacks (sometimes including a dummy one), notably the Russian cruiser Askold, earning them the nickname "packet of woodbines" among sailors.