Putting the kettle on is the beginning of a short ritual we all know so well. However, over 350 years ago, when tea first started percolating through the country, not everyone was so certain. “Miss Hutchinson’s great-grandmother was one of a party who sat down to the first pound of tea that ever came into Penrith,” wrote poet Robert Southey in his Common-Place Book (published posthumously in 1849–1851). “It was sent as a present and without directions how to use it. They boiled the whole at once in a kettle and sat down to eat the leaves with butter and salt; and they wondered how anyone could like such a dish.”
Perhaps the party’s ignorance can be forgiven; at that time, tea was a drink only the very rich knew about. It had arrived in Britain in the mid-1600s, imported from China via the notorious East India Company and popularised among the upper classes by Catherine of Braganza, the wife of Charles II.
Ironically, the first ever advert for tea appeared in the republican magazine Mercurius Politicus in 1658, placed by coffee-house owner Thomas Garway. He tried to tempt in customers by describing the beverage as “that Excellent, and by all Physitians approved, China Drink”.
But tea was extremely expensive due to tax. In 1660, the drink itself was taxed at 8d per gallon, rising to 2s per gallon in 1670. Tea would be brewed in the morning by coffee houses, and measured every day by an officer. Then, in 1689, a tax of 5s per pound of dry tea was introduced. This gradually increased over the century. As a result, people began to find ways of obtaining the leaves as contraband.
Smuggling thrived, and gangs, usually around Kent and Sussex, would sell on the quiet to customers throughout the country. However, violence inevitably went hand-in-hand with such a profitable, high-stakes criminal enterprise. In 1748, for example, shoemaker Daniel Chater and customs officer William Galley were tortured and killed by the Hawkhurst Gang. This was all to ensure that one of the members of the gang could not be found guilty of taking part in a raid to steal back an illegal shipment of tea that had been seized by officials.
Despite the violence, many respectable people continued to buy tea from smugglers. Writing in his Diary of a Country Parson in 1777, Rev James Woodforde records that “Andrews the Smuggler brought me this Night about 11 o’clock a Bagg of Hyson Tea 6 Pd Weight. He frightened us a little by whistling under the Parlour Window just as we were going to bed. I gave him some Geneva [gin] and paid him for the Tea at 10/6 per pd.” In 1707, 3.5 oz of Twinings gunpowder tea – so called because the tightly rolled leaves resembled grains of gunpowder – was sold at a price equivalent today to £160. By Woodforde’s time, taxes would have inflated that price tag even further. Paying 10s 6d – roughly £45 today – for a pound of tea, therefore, was clearly a bargain.
Yet tea was not always taken at home in the 18th century. While coffee houses had long been a purely male establishment, pleasure gardens, such as those in Vauxhall, South-East London, had now started to offer a place for both men and women to promenade, make merry and – of course – drink tea. Consequently, tea became a tool for flirting. In the White Conduit House gardens, for example, it was well known that if a gentleman wanted to make the acquaintance of a lady, he could pretend to accidentally tread on her skirt. He would then be able to invite her to take tea with him without causing a scandal – on the surface, tea was merely an apology for his blunder.
Not everyone thought the drink so innocent, however. While one doctor to George III thought that it drove men mad, others felt that tea – and the gardens associated with it – was morally corrupting. What’s more, it was known that some wealthy men had mistresses who were employed in their household under the guise of “resident tea-blender”. Even Lord Nelson’s mistress Lady Emma Hamilton was nicknamed “the fair tea-maker of Edgware Row” while she was the lover of Charles Greville. Nevertheless, on the whole, society could not get enough of the beverage. When, in 1784, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger acted on the advice of Richard Twining of Twinings Tea and slashed the tax on tea from 119 per cent to 12.5 per cent, it became available to the masses for the first time.
By the turn of the 19th century, therefore, the London Tea Auction – where tea had been traded internationally since 1679 – became hugely popular. Auctions had previously been held every quarter, and the commodity had been sold by the candle. This was a method that limited bidding and discouraged last-minute bids: a candle was lit when bidding began, and once an inch had burned away the gavel fell, ending the sale. As the popularity of tea grew, not only was selling by the candle replaced, but the number of auctions also increased from quarterly to monthly, and then from monthly to weekly. In 1826, a dealer described the scene: “To the uninitiated, a Tea sale appears to be a mere arena in which the comparative strength of the lungs of a portion of His Majesty’s subjects are to be tried.” The auction continued until 1998.
Perhaps, though, it was the invention of afternoon tea that made the drink indispensable. In 1840 Anna, 7th Duchess of Bedford, one of Queen Victoria’s ladies-in-waiting, complained of a “sinking feeling” in the late afternoon. With the evening meal not served until the fashionable time of 8pm, she requested that a tray of tea, bread and butter, and cake be brought to her room at around 4pm. She soon began inviting friends to join her and when she introduced the custom to Victoria, the trend exploded.
London’s upper classes had ‘low tea’ served in the late afternoon before a promenade around Hyde Park in the centre of the city. The middle and lower classes, however, had a more substantial ‘high tea’ at 5pm or 6pm – a selection of tea, bread, cheese and meat in place of an evening meal. The difference in name is said to have derived from the height of the table the food was served at; the upper classes would use small low tables in the drawing room, while the lower classes would eat at the higher dining table.
For women, afternoon tea was revolutionary. For the first time, it allowed them to entertain both male and female guests at home without their husbands, which a formal dinner party would require. In addition, women were able to wear lighter, less restrictive dresses because an afternoon tea party was a more intimate, relaxed affair that took place at home. However, that does not mean that they were always small and quiet events – tea parties could often become rowdy and riotous, with only standing-room left available for the many guests.
Unsurprisingly, therefore, it was a woman who opened the first tea room in Britain. An advocate of the Temperance Movement, Glaswegian Kate Cranston decided that a space was needed where people could enjoy themselves without the need for alcohol. In 1878 she opened the Crown Luncheon Room, offering light refreshment in a respectable setting to both men and women of all classes. She was the first to describe the space as a tea room, listing it so in the Glasgow Post Office Directory. Cranston always placed emphasis on the rooms being beautifully designed, and by 1903, when she opened her fourth tea room, had worked with architect and designer George Henry Walton as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and his wife Mary Macdonald. Everything, from the cutlery to the waitresses’ uniforms, was exquisite. The idea quickly took off, and was soon copied across Britain.
The new practice of taking afternoon tea in a tea room changed women’s lives greatly. Alan’s Tearoom, for example, was owned by Marguerite Alan Liddle, sister of prominent suffragette Helen Gordon Liddle. The venue was popular with both wings of the suffrage movement, and even offered the Pankhursts’ Women’s Social and Political Union the free use of a function room. The tea room provided women of all classes with the space to gather without causing suspicion. “The promise of a cup of tea was a great inducement to come to meetings and discuss problems which would otherwise not be dealt with,” The Dundee Courier revealed in an article about the suffrage movement from 1908.
Britain’s love for tea became even more passionate as the 20th century developed. It provided comfort to millions during the Second World War, and the introduction of modern tea bags in the 1950s made the drink much easier to prepare. It is a 1978 advertising slogan that, even now, sums up our relationship with the dark-leafed beverage perfectly: “Tea – best drink of the day”
