Tea (23 page)
Authors: Laura Martin
Of all the names associated with tea, Lipton is perhaps the best known. Sir Thomas Lipton was born in Glasgow in
1850
and worked in the family grocery store during his early years. When he was fifteen years old, he went to America and worked in the food section of a New York department store, where he fell in love with American advertising and merchandising. When he returned to Scotland, he opened his first small grocery store in Glasgow in
1871
. By
1880
, he owned and operated a chain of twenty general stores.
In
1890
Lipton went to Ceylon, where plant diseases had ruined the coffee plantations and land was selling cheaply. Lipton bought four plantations and brought in ideas and innovations that quickly made him a very, very wealthy man. Although his estates in Ceylon could only supply a fraction of the tea he sold in a year, his advertising was so spectacular (his slogan was “Direct from the tea garden to the tea pot”) that it seemed that everyone in the world soon knew ofâand wantedâCeylon tea.
By
1894
, Lipton had a staff of five hundred working in London, and his employees in the plantations, offices, processing plants, and warehouses abroad numbered about ten thousand. Lipton's name became inseparably associated with tea and was known throughout the world.
Tea and War
Throughout the nineteenth century, tea continued to play a powerful role as an important commodity. By the end of the century, tea was an essential part of the daily rations of many armies throughout the world, including both British and American. It was considered necessary, not only because of its soothing effects, but perhaps more importantly, because tea necessitated boiling water, thus helping to ward off many of the intestinal diseases that had plagued armies for centuries.
Much has been written about the role tea played during the two world wars, not only as necessary refreshment for the troops but also as an item of trade. During the first two years of World War I, from 1914 to 1916, tea was enjoyed by the British as it had been before the war began. When German submarines began sinking British ships, however, supplies became less available, and the price of tea rose dramatically.
In response to the scarcity of tea, the government classified it as a luxury and began rationing it to civilians. The public uproar that resulted soon made it clear that tea would have to be reclassified as a basic necessity, essential for keeping up national morale. The government then took over all tea imports, fixed prices, and controlled sales. By 1918, all the tea available in Britain was owned and meted out by the government at the rate of two ounces of tea per week per person. In 1919, after the war ended, normal auctions resumed and consumption rose to three ounces of tea a head weekly by 1931.
While both world wars did have an impact on the world's consumption of tea, some things never change, and the British continued to import tea at an astronomic rate. Primarily through the efforts of the British-owned plantations, 470 million pounds of Indian tea were plucked in 1945, in spite of the turmoil in India during World War II. This was the largest tea crop ever from India, and British profits in tea increased by 200 percent.
TEA IN THE UNITED STATES
Tea in Colonial America
As the Dutch spread tea around the world during the seventeenth century, Peter Stuyvesant, Dutch governor in the American colonies, brought the first tea to New Amsterdam in
1647
âinterestingly enough, ten years before it was introduced to London. Early settlers quickly learned to love their tea. After New Amsterdam was captured by the English in
1674
and renamed New York, the British institutions of the coffeehouse and pleasure garden were brought to the New World.
In
1678
, William Penn founded Philadelphia. His writings and diaries suggest that tea was his preferred drink. He wrote that cups filled with tea were “cups that cheer but not inebriate.” By the
1690
s, both “green and ordinary teas” were advertised in Boston newspapers. George Washington is known to have ordered six teapots and twelve pounds of tea, including the then popular hyson, in
1757
.
The popularity of tea took on monumental importance, of course, as a symbol of the American Revolution. The tax on tea that Parliament was imposing in its own country was also applied to Americans, with disastrous results for the British.
On December
16
,
1773
, a band of angry colonists gathered at Griffin's Wharf in Boston, disguised as native American Indians. They boarded three East Indian Company ships and threw their tea cargoes into Boston Harbor, as a protest against the unfair taxation.
These acts and others ultimately led to the Revolutionary War. For a while, drinking tea was seen as unpatriotic, and citizens showed support by switching from tea to coffee or other substitutes. Following the Boston Tea Party, young ladies of Boston signed the following pledge:
We the daughters of those patriots who have, and do now appear for the public interest, and in that principally regard their posterity, as such do with pleasure engage with them in denying ourselves the drinking of foreign tea, in hopes to frustrate a plan that tends to deprive a whole community of all that is valuable to life.
After the war, people resumed drinking tea, and eventually the United States sent ships to China and began importing tea directly. Tea never became the national obsession in America that it is in Englandâcoffee seems to fill that role in the U.S.âbut the United States has been very involved in the tea trade since the early nineteenth century.
The Merchant Princes of the New World
Three of America's first millionaires, T. H. Perkins of Boston, Stephen Girard of Philadelphia, and John Jacob Astor of New York, earned fortunes from the China tea trade in the early nineteenth century. These entrepreneurs bought tea directly from China and brought it to America, bypassing the powerful East India Company.
John Jacob Astor, in particular, earned a massive fortune through trade. He began in
1808
with the American Fur Company, then bought five clipper ships and held a monopoly on the fur trade to China. He carried beaver and otter pelts to China and returned with silk, tea, and tea ware. It is said that part of his success lay in the fact that he made up for the trade deficiency in gold, not opium, and that he used the fastest ships available at the time. When the fur trade began declining in
1810
and tea from India began to cut into his China profits, Astor turned his attention to real estate in New York, where he made even more money.
Tearooms
The turn of the last century in America saw a new rise in popularity of tea that resulted in new “tearooms,” or small cafes that served tea and small snacks in the middle of the afternoon. Many of these tearooms were found in department stores that first appeared during the
1890
s. Taking tea after shopping became quite fashionable. In March
1908
,
Harper's Bazaar
included a short piece about tearooms: “To-day, at the tea-hour smart carriages are drawn up in front of the tea-room; within, the merry tap of high heels on polished floors mingles with the fresh odor of violets and the rustle of many skirts. It is the fashion to drink tea in New York!”
It was the wealthy, of course, who could afford to go out in the middle of the day and visit tearooms. Tea, in a situation mirroring that in England, became an important element of the lives of the affluent. Soon teahouses, tearooms, and cafes sprang up around the countryside as well, particularly in areas frequented by tourists. This was a direct result of America's love affair with the automobile. Tea establishments proved to be wonderful destinations for the leisure class. Women, in particular, enjoyed the freedom of going out into the country, where small tearooms were very popular. These small cafes or restaurants served light meals and tea and provided refreshment for travelers. An article in
Good Housekeeping Magazine
in July
1917
said, “Until the automobile was graduated from the class of luxuries into that of necessities, tea-shops were successful only in the larger cities. Today they flourish in the smallest hamlets and flaunt their copper kettles and blue teapots on every broad highway.”
In the early twentieth century, the best tearooms were found infine hotels, which offered afternoon tea to guests
and patrons. One of most famous was the Palm Court at the Plaza Hotel in New York, which opened in
1907
. This beautiful room was modeled after the winter garden in London's Hotel Carlton. Hotel tearooms often held enormously popular tea dances with a full orchestra, in the preâWorld War I era.
Innovations
Americans were famous for their creative innovations at the turn of the century, and tea was not exempt from this fascination for making things new, easy, and somehow a little better. For example, the invention of the first tea bag is attributed to Thomas Sullivan of New York. Sullivan was a coffee and tea broker and, like others in the trade, he regularly sent samples of tea out to various merchants. In
1904
, as a way of cutting costs, he decided to place single servings of loose tea in hand-sewn silk bags, rather than in small tin canisters, as was the custom of the day. The response was immediate and enthusiastic. People loved the ease of these little bags of teaâcleanup was so easy! Thomas Sullivan realized he had hit on a gold mine of an idea and soon began manufacturing tea bags.