Green’s Dictionary of Slang

1. tobacco that is made of broken up cigar stumps or cigarette ends.

1838		Tit-Bits 24 Mar. 373: Smoking hard-up is picking up the stumps of cigars thrown away in the streets, cutting them up, and smoking them in the pipe [F&H].
1866		J. Greenwood Night in a Workhouse 20: And he stood a quarten, and a half a ounce of hard-up (tobacco).
1869		N.Y. Times 17 Jan. 3/6: Pipes filled with ‘hard up,’ the technical name for smoking tobacco made of cigar stumps.
1931		E. Blair ‘Hop-Picking Diary’ 19 Sept.–8 Oct. in Complete Works X (1998) 231: Hard-up . . . tobacco made from fag ends.
1936		W.A. Gape Half a Million Tramps 93: A heavy fog was coming on [...] I soon found out that it was only the result of men smoking ‘Hard-up’ and ‘Twist’ [Ibid.] 99: These two men were known as the ‘Hard-up Kings.’ They earned the name because they collected cigarette ends in the streets.

2. a collector of cigar or cigarette ends which are dried and sold as tobacco to the very poor.

1859		Hotten Dict. of Modern Sl. etc. 49: Hard ups cigar-end finders, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutter, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor.
1861		(con. 1840s–50s) H. Mayhew London Labour and London Poor I 3/2: The cigar-end finders, or ‘hard-ups,’ as they are called, who collect the refuse pieces of smoked cigars from the gutters, and having dried them, sell them as tobacco to the very poor.
1864, 1867, 1870		Hotten Sl. Dict.
1933		M. Marshall Tramp-Royal on the Toby 154: These are the shagsters, or hard-up men. Their blend [...] is called hard-up, kerbstone twist, B.V.D. (Bend Down Virginia), and other names.

3. a cigarette or cigar end.

1937

J. Curtis There Ain’t No Justice 122: He never smoked hard-ups like most bums.