Putting the Tea in Britain E-Book

Les Wilson

• Herausgeber: Birlinn
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 407

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

'Deserves to sell like hot cakes' - Allan Massie, The Scotsman Shortlisted for the Saltire Society History Book of the Year From the Indian Mutiny to the London Blitz, offering a 'nice cup of tea' has been a stock British response to a crisis.  But tea itself has a dramatic, and often violent, history. That history is inextricably interwoven with the story of Scotland. Scots were overwhelmingly responsible for the introduction and development of the UK's national drink, and were the foremost pioneers in the development of tea as an international commodity.  This book reveals how Darjeeling, Assam, Ceylon and Africa all owe their thriving tea industries to pioneering work by Scottish adventurers and entrepreneurs. It's a dramatic tale.  Many of these men jeopardised their lives to lay the foundation of the tea industry.  Many Scots made fortunes – but it is a story with a dark side in which racism, the exploitation of native peoples and environmental devastation was the price paid for 'a nice cup of tea'.  Les Wilson brings the story right up to date, with a look at the recent development of tea plantations in Scottish hills and glens.

Leseprobe

First published in 2021 by

Birlinn Limited

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

Copyright © Les Wilson 2021

The moral right of Les Wilson to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act, 1988.

ISBN 978 1 78885 28 7 6

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book can be obtained from the British Library.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any other form without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Typeset by Initial Typesetting Services, Edinburgh Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

In memory of

Carl Reavey (1956–2018)

and for

Ivy Jean Hunter (born 22 August 2019)

‘For me starting the day without a pot of tea would be a day forever out of kilter.’

Bill Drummond, $20,000

‘Tea is the best substance in the world. I love tea. It makes me feel jolly – tea is the substance.’

Billy Connolly

Contents

List of Illustrations

Introduction

1 To Drink a Dish of Tea, Sir?

2 Without Milk, Sugar – or Tax!

3 Take Things Coolly and Never Lose Your Temper

4 The Days for Gathering Rupees

5 The Place of Thunderbolts

6 The Master Who Is God

7 A Handful of Seeds

8 Home for Tea

A Note for the Botanically Curious

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

List of Illustrations

A bamboo mountain travelling chair used in China.

The tea-rolling process.

Robert Fortune.

The river at ‘Shanghae’ – the great gate to the Chinese empire.

Camellia sinensis in flower.

A Wardian case at the Chelsea Physic Garden.

A James Finlay estate manager and workers in the 1900s.

Chests of tea are loaded onto bullock carts.

The Scottish Cemetery, Calcutta.

A tea estate in the Western Ghats.

A ubiquitous Indian tea stall.

James Taylor’s original tea bushes, Loolecondera.

Field no. 7, Loolecondera.

A Walkers’ tea roller, Kandy.

Sri Lankan tea, ready for export.

Tamil tea pickers, Sri Lanka.

The ruins of the house James Taylor built for himself.

James Taylor’s grave in Kandy, Sri Lanka.

Examining the records of the Garrison Cemetery, Kandy.

James Taylor and Thomas Lipton, Ceylon tea planters. ‘Ma’ Brown.

Henry Brown’s grave in the rich, red soil of Malawi.

Monica Griesbaum of Windy Hollow Tea Estate, Auchterarder.

Author drinking tea with grower Susie Walker-Munro.

Susie Walker-Munro, Kinnettles Farm, Angus.

Introduction

Two centuries ago, all the tea drunk in Britain came from China. Tea bushes, and the techniques of preparing their leaves, were the Celestial Empire’s jealously guarded secret. Any Chinese who betrayed them to the Western barbarians faced severe punishment, even death. This book tells how Scots broke that monopoly, made tea Britain’s – and the world’s – favourite drink and transformed the histories of China, India, Sri Lanka and much of Africa.

In 1664 the East India Company imported a single chest of tea into Britain from China. But Britain quickly developed a thirst. By 1800, the Company was buying more than 25,000,000 pounds of China tea a year. The self-sufficient Chinese didn’t want industrial British manufactured goods in exchange – they just wanted silver, and the United Kingdom’s reserves were dwindling. In this ignominious age, Britain paid for the tea with Indian opium – smuggling opium into China, causing misery for millions, infuriating the Chinese government and igniting two opium wars. A more rational way for Britain to balance its tea-trade deficit was to find somewhere in its vast empire where it could grow its own tea and then acquire the plants and the know-how to make them flourish. Enter a remarkable group of Scotsmen. Essentially, they ‘stole’ China’s tea, successfully replanted it in India and then discovered an indigenous tea in Assam. These two different jats (types or ‘castes’) of tea were successfully raised in Darjeeling, Assam, South India, Ceylon and Africa – breaking China’s tea monopoly forever.

The seed from which this book grew was planted in Darjeeling, in the foothills of the Himalayas. I have had a long love affair with India, and on a visit to this beguiling region I discovered, to my astonishment, that the first person to grow tea in Darjeeling was a Scottish doctor, Archibald Campbell. Campbell was the son of a gentleman but, as the third son, and being neither the ‘heir’ nor the ‘spare’, had to make his own way in the world. He graduated in medicine at Edinburgh University and joined the East India Company, which eventually sent him to establish a sanatorium and hill station that would provide white sahibs with temporary relief from the sweltering heat of Calcutta. A keen amateur botanist, Campbell planted China tea bushes in the garden of his Darjeeling estate. Campbell’s tea thrived, and within a decade other Brits had followed his example and tea gardens sprouted up all over Darjeeling’s hillsides.

Archibald Campbell is a neglected figure. He came from Islay, the Inner Hebridean island that has been my home for many years – yet I had never heard of him. He founded Darjeeling – but it was only on my second visit to the town that I discovered who he was and what he had done. Intrigued, I began to read and enquire. Very quickly, I discovered that an extraordinary proportion of the men who caused tea to become the favourite drink of half the world were Scots.

Here is a very brief list:

• Islay’s Archibald Campbell.

• Robert Fortune, a Borders ‘lad o’ pairts’, who – disguised as a Chinese man – risked arrest, robbery, piracy and murder to bring tea plants to the British Empire.

• William Melrose, the son of an Edinburgh grocer and a pioneer trader in a tiny European enclave in hostile Canton.

• Edinburgh’s Bruce brothers – Robert and Charles – who discovered that wild tea grew in Assam, thereby becoming the fathers of another great tea region.

• Robert Kyd, the Angus-born soldier who founded Calcutta’s botanic garden, where tea was first nurtured in British India, and the subsequent dynasty of Scottish botanists who succeeded him as the garden’s superintendents.

• James Taylor of Kincardineshire, who first grew tea commercially in Ceylon and brought the economy of the island back from the brink of disaster.

• Thomas Lipton, who brought affordable tea to the masses and made it our national drink.

• Edinburgh gardener Jonathan Duncan, who planted two tea bushes from the city’s botanic gardens at the Church of Scotland mission at Blantyre, Malawi; and Henry Brown of Banff, who founded Africa’s vast tea industry with a handful of seeds scrounged from that mission garden.

These men’s stories read like something from Robert Louis Stevenson or Joseph Conrad, but there is a genteel lady to soften this macho crew. The entrepreneurial and artistic Catherine Cranston’s fashionable Glasgow tea rooms gave full scope to the imagination of Scotland’s most famous architect, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, and his artist wife, Margaret Macdonald, and provided gathering places for unaccompanied ladies at a time when women were clamouring for the right to vote.

And there are the assorted entrepreneurial Scottish mill-owners, grocers, adventurers, soldiers, scientists, planters and chancers who risked their capital, reputations, health and lives for tea What characters! What stories! Tea is interwoven with centuries of Scottish, British and world history. My serendipitous discovery of Archibald Campbell of Islay and Darjeeling sprouted wings.

With such a litany of Scottish names prominent among those who put the tea in Britain (and a good many other places), I quickly came to face the questions: Why Scotland? What was it about the Scots that made them such pioneers? It is clear that the tea men were part of what Professor Tom Devine has called ‘the relentless penetration of Empire by Scottish educators, doctors, plantation overseers, army officers, government officials, merchants and clerics’.1 Essentially, Scotland’s tea men were economic migrants, escaping poverty – or at least a lack of opportunity – at home.

With about 9 per cent of Britain’s population, Scots at one point held 25 per cent of the British jobs in India and were clearly the right people, in the right place, at the right time. Their relatively small country had recently united with a neighbour that was busy building a global empire. That empire badly needed likely lads – white English-speakers, if not necessarily Englishmen – to run it. Scots, hungry for betterment, were able to take advantage of that. Their education, an inheritance of the Reformation and the Scottish Enlightenment, had equipped a far greater proportion of Scots than of England’s people to fulfil a wide range of imperial roles.

While they brought much needed skills to England’s imperial enterprise, they often came with a very non-English attitude to it. The historian Michael Fry argues that ‘A small poor country could never think of domination, but at best persuade larger and richer ones to treat it on equal terms. So they sought to make themselves useful, to thrive through adventure and enterprise, and so to approach other societies not with a desire of conquering, ruling and changing, but of understanding them.’2 The role of two Scots, Allan Octavian Hume and George Yule, in the creation of the Indian National Congress – which eventually led India to independence – certainly supports Fry’s view. However, there is no shying away from the fact that the business of tea production was a ruthless and exploitative one, and that Scots too were capable of the cruelty and racism that besmirched the British Empire.

Scottish administrators, scholars, soldiers, merchants and engineers all played their roles in the growth of empire, but the profession with the biggest impact on the tea industry was medicine. Time after time while researching this book, I found that a medical degree from Edinburgh or Glasgow University, followed by a spell as assistant surgeon on an East India Company merchantman, was almost a prerequisite for anyone to make their mark on the development of tea. The list of Scots medics I encountered reads both like a professional directory and a gazetteer of Scotland – Campbell of Islay, Falconer of Forres, Roxburgh of Symington, Buchanan-Hamilton of Callander, Jameson of Leith, Govan of Cupar, Hooker of Glasgow and Helensburgh, and Wallich of Denmark (but with an Aberdeen University medical degree).

Scottish medicine had developed alongside a strong tradition of plantsmanship. From the seventeenth century, Scotland had been recognised for gardening – a skill necessary to overcome a harsh environment, or starve. But as Scotland became the world’s leading nation in medicine, physic gardens were cultivated to grow and study plants for their healing powers. In 1670 such a garden was established near Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh by Andrew Balfour and Robert Sibbald, and within a decade more than 2,000 plants flourished there. Not long after, Edinburgh alone would boast three physic gardens.

The gardens, which serviced the medical profession’s interest in plants and the environment, were integral to the development of Scots as leaders in the creation of botanical gardens at home and abroad. Scots were the key figures at the Kew Gardens and the Chelsea Physic Garden in London, and founded and maintained botanical gardens across the diverse lands of the British Empire.3

Of course, English doctors understood botany too, but Oxford and Cambridge didn’t train students in surgery. English sawbones learned their trade by becoming apprenticed to surgeons. Scottish universities allowed students to take classes in both medicine and surgery and granted degrees to these ‘hybrid healers’. In an age of relentless war, exploration and expansion, broadly trained Scottish medics, who could amputate a limb or extract a bullet, as well as treat tropical diseases, were invaluable to Britain’s army, navy and East India Company. The medical services of these engines of empire became ‘largely staffed’ by Scots, particularly Edinburgh graduates.4 A massive public relations victory for the East India Company was won in 1815 by Scots surgeon William Hamilton, when he cured the painfully swollen groin of Farrukhsiyar, the Mughal emperor, allowing his delayed royal marriage to go ahead. So relieved was the emperor that he rewarded the Company with land and privileges in Bengal that were the starting point for its eventual domination of India.

For many Scots, the passage to India was with the East India Company, and many Company men played important roles in the development of tea. Then came the independent traders – entrepreneurial Scots who went east to make money. A Calcutta Business Directory of the 1840s might be mistaken for a Scottish one: Jardine Matheson; Jardine, Skinner & Co.; Begg, Dunlop & Co.; Andrew Yule & Co.; MacNeill & Co.; and James Finlay – all Scottish companies with a tradition of recruiting fresh blood (often with blood ties) from the homeland. Meanwhile, back in Scotland, Gorbals boy Thomas Lipton founded a retailing empire with a keen pricing policy that made sure that even the poor could enjoy tea. Tea then entered Scottish politics as the Suffragette, Socialist and Temperance movements embraced it as ‘the cup that cheers but does not inebriate’. Tea rooms sprang up throughout the country and the Glasgow of the 1890s was described as ‘a veritable Tokyo of tea rooms’.

The tea that Scots travelled the world in pursuit of has now taken root in their native land. In the 1960s the tea expert Denys Forrest visited the Loolecondera estate, where a Scot, James Taylor, pioneered Ceylon’s tea industry. Looking across the broad glens blanketed with tea bushes and up at the craggy tops of the mountains, he commented: ‘It is, one feels, what tea growing in the Cairngorms would be if such a thing were possible.’ How prescient! Today there are a fair number of tea growers in Scotland, some of whom feature in this book. My journey into the wide world of tea, which began in Darjeeling, finally ended in Angus.

My first memory of tea is from about the age of four, when I noticed that my father took his tea with sugar – presumably revelling in post-war plenty – while my figure-conscious mother didn’t. I took her side and have been a confirmed ‘no sugar, just a wee splash of milk’ man ever since. I’ve drunk a lot of it. All the television documentaries I have made and books I’ve written have been fuelled by tea, and on my travels I have drunk it in many ways: delicate Darjeeling in that very town, mint tea in Turkey, aromatic spiced tea in Jordon, sweet and milky chai from Indian street stalls, with lemon and sugar in the Ukraine, British Army stewed ‘brew’ with lots of milk and sugar, Sri Lankan teas sipped on the estates where they were grown, the slightly astringent fresh green teas of Japan . . .

I first encountered the process of growing and producing tea in Japan. Introduced from China a millennium ago, tea is now at the heart of Japan’s custom and culture, and its people ascribe medical and even mystical powers to it. The Okamoto family, who live close to the city of Shizuoka, had been tea planters for seven generations when I visited them. In 1948 they had been photographed, along with eleven other farming families from around the world, for an American magazine. Half a century later, I worked on a BBC2 documentary that traced these same people to discover what had happened to them in the intervening years. It was an extraordinary privilege, and the Okamotos were a warm and hospitable family with whom we enjoyed much sake as well as tea.

Ichie, the patriarch, had grown old and tired of the chills and rheumatics brought about by living in a beautiful, traditional home with its paper walls. On a warm night the 300-year-old house looked like a paper lantern, but when it got cold the heavy wooden shutters had to be slid shut. Ichie’s choice was between being chilly in natural light, or warm in the dark. When we first contacted him with a request to film him and his family, he had just decided to replace the paper walls with double-glazing, sweeping away the tradition of generations. His wife, Etsuko, was sorrowful about this, but he felt his health depended on it. However, Ichie postponed the double-glazing so that we might film his home and family in the style they had lived for a century or more, and we spent several days with them in the final days of that fine and historic house.

Just outside were the manicured tea bushes, grown on the sixty acres of land that the family had been granted at the end of the Edo period, 120 years previously. Ichie and Etsuko had three daughters and they, their husbands and children helped with tending, weeding and plucking the bushes to make a high-quality tea, just as the family had always done. When the American photographer Horace Bristol had been there half a century before (when Ichie was a small boy) the farm was remote, looking down on distant Shizuoka from the hillside. Today, the suburbs of the city end where the Okamotos’ tea garden begins; the old house is overlooked by a three-storey block of flats. No doubt property developers look on the garden with envy. What price a cup of tea?

The beauty of the traditional house, the warmth of our hosts and the loveliness of their tea garden entranced me. However, I have a confession to make. I don’t much care for Japanese green tea, or green tea at all. In this, I happen to be in good company. The sage of Ecclefechan (and Chelsea), Thomas Carlyle, living in penury when he first went to London in 1831, would splash out on black tea at home if there was the slightest danger that anybody he was about to visit might serve him the green stuff.5 More recently, the satirical website the Daily Mash told of a box of green teabags that had been around an office for longer than any current member of staff. Like a yoga mat, it had been bought in the vain hope of making a ‘healthy change’.6 However, my visit to the Okamotos’ tea garden has stayed with me, was the first of many visits to plantations and sparked my interest in tea as more than just a thirst quencher.

The 1867 edition of the Edinburgh-published Chambers’s Encyclopedia warned:

It is impossible to protest too strongly against the habit occasionally adopted by students of keeping off their natural sleep by the frequent use of strong tea. The persistent adoption of such a habit is certain to lead to the utter destruction of both bodily and mental vigour.

This is advice that I have chosen to ignore. I have no doubt that tea improves my concentration, memory and stamina. For me, coffee is the quick-start fuel of the poor wage-drone who needs six-cylinder propulsion to get her or him through the hugger-mugger of corporate life. Tea, however, is a gentler stimulant – refreshing, relaxing and likely to induce contemplation rather than hyperactive and rash action. Students may ‘cram’ on wee-small-hours coffee, but it is tea – mugs of it, strong and dark with the tiniest splash of milk – that gets me through the working day. I’m an at least eight-mugs-a-day man – although on this book my consumption rose dramatically as I reflectively sampled single-estate teas, green and white teas, teas from China, Assam, Darjeeling, Sri Lanka, Malawi, Kenya and Scotland. Sipping tea while staring into space – and they call it work? But work it has been, fascinating, delightful and rewarding, just like tea itself. This introduction was completed while drinking a pot of the splendidly named Bannockburn estate tea from Darjeeling. All it took to make was a teaspoonful or two of desiccated leaves and a kettle on the boil – but, like all tea, it comes with a history as rich and dramatic as Scotland’s own.*

Les Wilson

Port Charlotte, Isle of Islay

30 January 2020

_______

* So that readers can plunge straight into Scotland’s adventures in tea, I have relegated the technical matters of what tea is and how it is made into an appendix, Notes for the Botanically Curious, which appears at the end of the book.

CHAPTER 1

To Drink a Dish of Tea, Sir?

It is said that when the bride-to-be of King Charles II stepped off the ship that brought her to Britain in 1662, she called for a reviving cup of tea. She was horrified to find that none was available, as the exotic Chinese infusion was little known in wine-drinking, ale-swilling England. The disappointed bride was Catherine of Braganza, a Portuguese princess whose matchmaking father longed for an alliance with England. At this time the Portuguese dominated trade with the East and were the first Europeans to seriously take to Camellia sinensis (the Chinese camellia).

Fortunately for Catherine, amidst her lavish dowry were two cases of tea for her own use. The Stuart court, never slow to flatter, was quick to follow the queen’s taste. Poet and politician Edmund Waller – a practiced sycophant who wrote verses in praise of both Oliver Cromwell and Charles II – penned a birthday poem for the queen in which Portugal and its empire in the East is thanked for furnishing Britain with both a queen and tea.

The best of Queens, the best of herbs we owe

To that bold nation which the way did show

To the fair region where the sun doth rise

Whose rich productions we so justly prize.

The Royal Stuart seal of approval encouraged the Scottish aristocracy to embrace tea and it was first served to them amid the grandeur of Edinburgh’s Holyrood Palace. In 1680 Charles II appointed his younger brother, James, Duke of York, as Lord High Commissioner of Scotland. James and his wife, Italian Princess Mary of Modena, were tea drinkers and, for the three years of their residence at Holyrood, their guests and courtiers followed the fashion they set. In her classic book The Scots Kitchen, F. Marian McNeill tells us that tea ‘was denounced by both medical men and clergy, and its acceptance was slow, but by 1750 its conquest of the womenfolk was complete, and wine was reserved for gentlemen’.

James, Duke of York, became king on the death of his older brother, but he was deposed in the Glorious Revolution and replaced by William of Orange. King James II of England and VII of Scotland had reigned for just three years, but the taste for tea he introduced the Scots to has never left us. King William’s Dutch background may even have reinforced the tea habit. The Dutch were confirmed tea drinkers long before the British, and Holland’s traders in China even named a tea in tribute to the House of Orange – orange pekoe – which, unlike Earl Grey, contains not a whiff of citrus.

Tea was, in the beginning, a luxury item. The first known seller of it in Scotland was George Smith, a goldsmith who, in 1705, sold green tea at sixteen shillings a pound and Bohea (black) tea at thirty shillings from his premises at the Edinburgh Luckenbooths.1

Apart from the ladies who attended the gracious Mary of Modena at Holyrood, and those fortunate enough to be able to pop into an Edinburgh goldsmith’s for an ounce of their favourite leaf, who were Scotland’s tea drinkers?

My old edition of Rough Guide to Scotland says: ‘Scotland’s staple drink, like England’s, is tea, drunk strong and with milk.’ How did the desiccated leaves of a jungle tree become Scotland’s favourite drink? Before exploring how Scots contributed to the acquisition and exploitation of tea, let’s look at Scotland’s history of drinking it.

The history of our nation is full of tantalising references to the newly fashionable drink. Tea was not always welcomed. William Mackintosh of Borlum was ‘old school’: not only did he so disapprove of the usurping House of Hanover that he commanded units of the Jacobite army in the 1715 Rebellion, but he also strongly disapproved that his morning dram had been replaced by tea. In 1729 he lamented:

When I come to a friend’s house of a morning, I used to be asked if I had had my morning draught yet. I am now asked if I have had my tea. And in lieu the big quaich with strong ale and toast, and after a dram of good wholesome Scots spirits, there is now the tea-kettle put to the fire, the tea-table and silver and china equipage brought in, and marmalade and cream.2

Such a table and equipage are seen overturned and flying in an amusing drawing from Penicuik House, now in the National Museum of Scotland. It depicts blows and harsh words being exchanged over the rights and wrongs of the Jacobite cause.

When the English traveller Edmund Burt roamed throughout the Highlands in the late 1720s, he ate in numerous hostels and private houses. His Letters from the North of Scotland infuriated Scots, with its constant references to the dirt, poverty and superstition that he found, but it also records him drinking ‘wine’, ‘very good wine’ and ‘good claret’ – although they never mention him being offered a cupa tì. Burt was in Scotland to oversee and collect the rents from unsold Jacobite estates that had been forfeited after the 1715 Rebellion, and he worked closely with General Wade, the Hanoverian Army’s commander-in-chief in Scotland and famous builder of roads. Although Burt never seems to have heard the hospitable Gaelic invitation, Bheil dìth teatha ort? (‘Are you in need of tea?’), we know that it was being enjoyed by some Highlanders, because Burt writes of ‘wines, brandy, tea, silks etc.’ that were being smuggled into ports on the Moray Firth. Perhaps Highland tea-drinking was restricted to the Jacobite aristocracy who looked to Europe for the restoration of the House of Stuart, as well as luxuries untaxed by King George II’s government in London. These families would have been unlikely to offer such hospitality to a friend of the Redcoats like Edmund Burt. As readers will discover in the following chapter, there was a direct connection between Jacobitism and tea smuggling.

Because Scots doctors had a firm grounding in the medicinal powers of plants, the effect of tea on the human constitution was of great interest to them. Thomas Short, from Moffat in the Scottish Borders, moved south to set up his practice in Sheffield, where he conducted exhaustive scientific experiments on tea. A Dissertation upon Tea, Explaining its Nature and Properties by Many New experiments . . . to Which is Added the Natural History of Tea and a Detection of the Several Frauds Used in Preparing it was published in 1730. Discovering that tea ‘promoted the circulation of the blood’, Short concluded that ‘the person who frequently drinks it is not terrified by frightful dreams’ and that ‘Green tea is an antidote against chronic fear or grief ’. Thomas Short clearly believed that a nice cup of tea was both relaxing and fortifying – a view still widely held nearly three centuries later – and that it relieved ‘Disorders of the Head’, like migraine, by ‘increasing the blood flow to the brain’.*

Short’s experiments also indicated that tea affected the sexes differently:

Tea, if moderately drunk, and of a due strength, is generally more serviceable to the fair sex than to men. Because Nature, having framed them with a more lax and delicate Fiber, they are more liable to a Plethora, or Fullness of Juices; and also because they are more exempted from exercise and hard labour.

While the jury may still be out on whether tea affects men differently from women, Short’s observation makes it clear that the women who were drinking tea around 1730 were indeed from the class ‘exempted from exercise and hard labour’ – unlike the common mass of women labouring long and hard in agriculture, industry, in service and in the home. However, Short did believe that tea was beneficial to society as a whole, even those who could not afford to drink it, noting, ‘what a great revenue the duty upon the little crumbled leaf returns to the Crown of England whereby the general taxes are so much lessened to the Poor’.

Tea, in this era, was certainly still a luxury item, even a decadent one. In 1744 the clan chiefs of Skye – Sir Alexander MacDonald of MacDonald, John Mackinnon of Mackinnon, Norman MacLeod of MacLeod and Malcolm MacLeod of Raasay – gathered in Portree and agreed to ‘discontinue and discountenance’ the luxuries of brandy, tobacco and tea.3 It was not, however, a decadence that tempted the common folk of the Hebrides. Lodged in my memory (but sadly not recorded in any notebook) is a story I heard about a Gaelic seaman returning home from a long voyage to the East with a ‘poke’ of tea as a gift for his mother. The cailleach had never encountered this sophisticated product before, so her son carefully instructed her to pour boiling water over it and then left the house to visit friends. When he returned, his mother served him the boiled leaves on a plate, having poured the liquid away. I have no idea where I heard this story, but folklorist Margaret Bennett has heard the tale told in Nova Scotia about a seaman returning home there. While it may well be apocryphal, the story neatly illustrates how completely alien this fashionable drink of the upper classes was to the common folk. However, if these accounts are true, these confused Scottish and Nova Scotian mothers weren’t entirely off the mark. In 1823 the Scottish explorer Robert Bruce found the Singpho hill tribes of the upper Assam region boiling and eating tea leaves as a vegetable. These Indian tribesmen were ahead of the game. Until the late nineteenth century the vast majority of Indians didn’t drink tea; it is largely due to Scotland’s pioneering tea men that India is now one of the heaviest tea-drinking countries in the world.

Teatime certainly came late in the Hebrides. One traveller noted in 1875 that a field at Dalbeg, on the north-west coast of Lewis, was known as ‘the tea field’. This was because when chests of tea were washed ashore from a shipwreck the local people hadn’t known what the contents were and used the leaves to manure a field. He added that ‘tea has not been at all used in the west more than twenty years’ and even then was only drunk occasionally when the family was well-off.4 Hebrideans have certainly made up for it since; in all my stravaigs among the islands I’ve almost never visited a home where a strùpag wasn’t pressed on me.

There were those who believed that tea was an indulgence too far for the common folk. Duncan Forbes of Culloden, Scotland’s top legal officer and a man who did much to suppress the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, fulminated against the ‘excessive use of tea’ in the belief that such a luxurious import threatened the economy of the country. Nobody who earned less than £50 a year, he argued, should be allowed to buy tea.5 Forbes had accompanied General Wade’s forces sent to Glasgow to suppress the Shawfield Riot against the imposition, in 1725, of the Malt Tax. The tax, a clear breach of the Treaty of Union, increased the price of beer – and it can only have stimulated the demand for tea. Forbes, however, generously and personally supported the Exchequer in the drive to collect liquor tax. On the day of his mother’s funeral, he plied his fellow mourners with so much drink that when they got to the churchyard they found they had forgotten her coffin.6

Whole communities of common folk resolved not to succumb to the ‘tea menace’ that was corrupting their ‘betters’. The sturdy tenants of William Fullerton, of Fullerton in Ayrshire, pledged:

We being all farmers by profession, think it needless to restrain ourselves formally from indulging in that foreign and consumptive luxury called tea; for when we consider the slender constitutions of many of higher rank, among whom it is used, we conclude that it would be but improper diet to qualify us for the more robust and manly parts of our business: therefore we shall only give our testimony against it and leave the enjoyment of it altogether to those who can afford to be weak, indolent and useless.7

The Reverend Thomas Somerville, the minister of Jedburgh (whom Robert Burns described as ‘a gentleman, but sadly addicted to punning’), recalled how, during his childhood in the 1750s and 1760s, the middle classes were beginning to ape the custom of their tea-drinking superiors. ‘Most families, both in the higher and in the middle ranks, used tea at breakfast; but among the latter it was only recently introduced, or beginning to be introduced in the afternoon, and then exclusively on the occasion of receiving company.’8

We know that James Boswell was well acquainted with tea before he went to London in 1762, because in his London Journal he compared a grim London social event to ‘one of the worst Edinburgh tea-drinking afternoons’. His journal is infused with references to drinking tea and he kept a supply of it under lock and key in his rooms. ‘I am so fond of tea that I could write a whole dissertation on its virtues,’ he wrote. Sadly, no such dissertation exists, but his writings do show that invitations to drink tea (or not) offered the priapic Boswell the opportunity of sexual conquest, as the following exchange between him and actress Mrs Lewis (referred to in his journal as ‘Louisa’), reveals.

Boswell: ‘When may I wait upon you?’

Louisa: ‘What? To drink a dish of tea, Sir?’

Boswell: ‘No, no, not to drink a dish of tea. What time may I wait upon you?’

Louisa: ‘Whenever you please, Sir.’

Boswell kissed Louisa and took his leave, ‘highly pleased with the thoughts of the affair being settled’. Unfortunately, Boswell contracted gonorrhoea from Louisa and the drinking of tea, as part of a very simple diet, was prescribed for his cure. Boswell’s friend, the Scottish judge and philosopher Lord Kames, would doubtless have approved of this tea cure, having been told by physicians that sugar and tea were ‘no inconsiderable antiseptics’.9 Boswell’s guru, Dr Samuel Johnson, admitted to being a ‘hardened and shameless tea drinker’; he must have been relieved that during his jaunt round the Hebrides with Boswell in 1773 tea was firmly established at the breakfast tables of their well-to-do hosts. Tea, along with butter, honey, conserves and marmalade, had Johnson declaim that wherever an epicure wished he could sup ‘he would breakfast in Scotland’.10You needed to be a generous host to invite Dr Johnson for breakfast. While staying at Dunvegan Castle on the Isle of Skye, Johnson’s consumption of at least sixteen cups of tea at one sitting prompted Lady MacLeod to ask him if drinking from a small basin would cause him less trouble. ‘I wonder Madam,’ he replied, ‘why all the ladies ask me such impertinent questions. It is to save yourselves trouble, Madam, and not me.’ Lady MacLeod was stunned into silence. Johnson’s rudeness to his hostess went unreported by the sycophantic Boswell in his Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.

An even more ill-tempered tea party was held in the same year as Johnson’s visit to Dunvegan – the Boston Tea Party in Massachusetts. In a little-known aftershock of that powerful protest, Scottish merchant Anthony Stewart lost his ship, 2,000 pounds of tea and almost his life when he paid the hated British tea tax after his vessel the Peggy Stewart docked with its cargo of the leaf at Annapolis, in Maryland. An angry mob gathered outside Stewart’s house and erected a scaffold. The terrified merchant was given an ultimatum – swing from the gibbet, or board his ship and set it and her cargo on fire. The Peggy Stewart burned and her owner fled rebellious America to eventually found a settlement in Nova Scotia called New Edinburgh. America was soon lost to the British Empire – and to widespread tea drinking. ‘A great republic was born that was soon to become the wealthiest consumer-nation in the world, but with a prenatal disinclination for tea,’ commented William Ukers.

Tea was slower to reach the lower orders in Scotland than it was in London. Lamenting that the encouragement of ‘idleness and beggary’ disinclined the poor to find work, Lord Kames reported in 1778 that paupers in London who lived by parish-charity were in the habit ‘of drinking tea twice a day’. But of the Scottish labouring classes, he says, ‘Water is their only drink; and yet they live comfortably, without ever thinking of pitying themselves.’

It was at a respectable tea party in Edinburgh in December 1787 that Robert Burns, then the darling of the capital’s smart set, met Agnes Maclehose, ‘Nancy’ to her friends, a lively and pretty Glasgow lady who was estranged from her obnoxious husband. Burns was smitten. They exchanged passionate letters and, while it is possible that their relationship was more textual than sexual, Burns was moved to write ‘Ae Fond Kiss’, his greatest song of love and loss, after Nancy announced her wish for reconciliation with her husband.

I’ll ne’er blame my partial fancy;

Naething could resist my Nancy;

For to see her was to love her,

Love but her, and love for ever.

The author John Griffiths argues that taking afternoon tea was encouraged from 1794 onwards by the adoption of gas lighting, invented by the Scots engineer William Murdoch, who worked for the company that James Watt founded near Birmingham. Murdoch’s gaslit cities extended the working day, increasing the gap between dinner at midday and supper in the evening. It was a gap too far for many middle-class women, who filled it with tea, bread and butter, and cake.11

Writing of her life in 1808, the diarist Elizabeth Grant of Rothiemurchus recalls being treated to ‘a tea breakfast’ after sea-bathing – implying that even for an upper-class family tea wasn’t an everyday drink. It was, however, a valuable substitute for stronger stuff. When invasion by Napoleon was thought to be imminent, Elizabeth’s father became lieutenant-colonel of the Rothiemurchus Volunteers. His officers, all Strathspey gentlemen, clearly took the threat seriously. Elizabeth recalled, ‘It was in this year, 1809, my mother remarked that she saw some of them for the first time in the drawing-room to tea and sober.’

Slowly, tea began to percolate down to Scottish commoners, although, for them, it remained a luxury. Buchan loon James Milne recalled that in 1836 the rent on his father’s farm was so high that his parents limited themselves to one cup of tea a day, taken in the morning and sweetened with treacle because it was cheaper than sugar. In 1843 the Royal Commission on the Scottish Poor Law visited Elizabeth McGregor at Newtyle in Angus and found her to be a capable and respectable woman in her eighties, living on six shillings a month from the Kirk Session. ‘She never drinks tea except upon Sabbath,’ the Commission recorded. It also found that in fewer than a fifth of parishes the labouring classes ate meat and still fewer ever drank tea, although in the south-east tea or coffee with breakfast was a common luxury for the hind (farm labourer) and his family. In the 1880s a New Pitsligo resident recalled that only a few families had tea with their breakfast brose or porridge, but that in most homes it was a Sunday morning luxury, ‘the day o’ the lang lie an’ the tay breakfast’.12

Between 1730 and 1805, tea consumption throughout the UK rose more than five-fold to one pound eleven ounces per head. Historian Tom Devine has argued that it wasn’t just increasing wages that fuelled this thirst, but the rise of the factory and urbanisation.13 Country folk migrated to the towns where the new jobs and opportunities were. By 1840 six out of ten inhabitants of Glasgow’s Tron district were incomers: the teeming slums had multiplied like the bacteria in the fetid drinking water. In the cholera outbreak of 1832, 3,000 people died in Glasgow alone.14 Tea would have been more readily available than the fresh milk that country people were used to, and boiling water for tea sterilised it and made it safe for drinking. The phenolics in tea, which give it its ‘tannic’ taste, also may have some effect against bacteria, so for people living in insanitary industrial towns, tea was the healthy option.

Sir Gilbert Blane, the Ayrshire doctor responsible for preventing scurvy by persuading the Admiralty to introduce lemons and limes into the diet of sailors, was quick to recognise that tea was beneficial: ‘Tea is an article universally grateful to the British population and has to a certain degree supplanted intoxicating liquors in all ranks, to the great advantage of society . . . the modern use of tea has probably contributed to the longevity of the inhabitants of this country.’

Thomas Trotter, a son of Melrose who also made his reputation as a progressive Royal Navy doctor, noted in 1807 that ‘The consumption of the Chinese plant is enormous throughout the united kingdoms: it is a beverage well suited to the taste of an indolent and voluptuous age. To the glutton it gives a grateful diluant after a voracious dinner; and from being drunk warm it gives a soothing stimulus to the stomach of the drunkard.’ Trotter recognised that tea was being widely used as a stimulant. ‘To sip frequently of green tea, produced wakefulness and gaiety of spirits; hence some literary men who protract their studies to a late hour, use strong tea, like the late Dr Johnson, to keep them awake.’ Doctor Trotter was fond of tea himself, although he sometimes refused it, as he believed it aggravated his short-sightedness. He thought it harmless to the strong and athletic, but believed it particularly harmful to women, people with dyspepsia and gout, and ‘those who are weak natured’. Like the continual ping-pong in today’s newspapers about the benefits – or otherwise – of red wine, Thomas Trotter decided that tea was both good and bad for you.

Fine tea, where the narcotic quality seems to be concentrated, when taken in an infusion by persons not accustomed to it, excites nausea and vomiting, tremors, cold sweats, vertigo, dimness of sight and confusion of thought. In its more diluted state, sweetened with sugar, and softened by the judicious mixture of bland cream, it is grateful to the stomach, gives a soothing sensation as if it lulled pain, exhilarates the spirits, produces wakefulness, relieves fatigue; and from being taken down warm, promotes perspiration, and acts powerfully by the kidneys.15

In country areas, tea was sold at cottage and farm doors by packmen, including my own ancestors David, John and Charles Jardine, who in the mid-nineteenth-century censuses are listed as ‘tea dealers’ or ‘tea agents’ based at Powfoot in Dumfriesshire.

Between 1857 and 1903 the price of tea fell by 64 per cent. Working people drank it when they could. Red Clydesider David Kirkwood recalls that in the mid-1880s, after a day’s work as an apprentice in a Glasgow ironworks, he came home to supper of porridge and buttermilk ‘and sometimes bread and butter and a cup of tea’.16

Tea was coming to be a top-selling commodity for Scottish shopkeepers. In 1864 Greenock-born grocer Matthew Algie, who had first sold his customers tea that had been delivered to the Clyde by Clyde-built tea clippers, established a tea-blending and wholesaling business that served businesses around Glasgow. The company rapidly expanded after the Second World War, becoming a leading UK tea and coffee concern but remaining in Scottish hands until taken over by a German company in 2016, although the Matthew Algie brand has been retained. Scottish grocers blending tea to suit their local water, and the tastes and pockets of their customers, had a profound effect on Scotland’s other great national drink. The skills required to blend tea led Kilmarnock grocer Johnnie Walker to start blending whiskies to create a smoother, more palatable dram, and Chivas and Ballantine whiskies have their roots in tea-blending grocer shops in Aberdeen and Edinburgh.

In 1888 tea refreshed the crowds who flocked to the International Exhibition of Science, Art and Industry at Kelvingrove Park in Glasgow. At the Bishop’s Palace Temperance Café – where waitresses were dressed as Mary, Queen of Scots17 – Joseph Lyons gained the experience that allowed him to found the Lyons’ Corner House chain.18 Tea was all the rage in Glasgow. Thirteen years earlier, the enterprising Glasgow tea merchant Stuart Cranston had set up tables and chairs in his new shop, at the corner of Argyll and Queen Streets, where customers could sample his teas for tuppence a cup. Others were quick to follow, not least his sister Catherine (Kate) Cranston, who three years later opened the Crown Luncheon Rooms in Argyle Street. Unlike her brother, Kate served proper lunches and afternoon teas at a time when the city suburbs had sprawled out too far for men to nip home for lunch. Women, too, were welcome in Miss Cranston’s comfortable premises and could meet there unaccompanied by men. At this time many Glaswegians rejected Clydeside’s hard-drinking culture and their city had become a stronghold of the temperance movement. The new tea rooms became respectable, alcohol-free gathering places for all classes of men, women and children. Stuart Cranston now followed his sister’s lead and turned his ‘sample room’ into a fully fledged tea room. Soon the Cranston siblings embarked on an escalating rivalry, each opening new premises and styling them, confusingly, ‘Cranston’s’ and ‘Miss Cranston’s’. Miss Cranston – as she was known, even after her successful marriage – came to own four grand tea rooms, and from 1888 she had them designed in the emerging Arts and Crafts style that had captivated the imagination of many of Glasgow’s creatives.

While Kate Cranston was determined that her tea rooms would be tasteful and artistic, she had the courage to give her architects and designers the freedom to follow their own visions. Such enlightened patronage launched the career of George Walton, who went on to become a leading Scottish designer and architect. Walton had been working as a bank clerk until Miss Cranston hired him to redecorate her Argyle Street Tea Room and on the strength of that commission was able to set up his own design company. Kate’s tea rooms were Walton’s galleries, where prospective clients could view his work for the price of a cup of tea.

Miss Cranston’s passion for the bold, new style led to her commissioning Charles Rennie Mackintosh to transform a narrow four-storey tenement building in Sauchiehall Street – then the city’s most fashionable street – into her finest outlet, the Willow Tea Rooms. ‘Sauchiehall’ comes from the Scots words ‘saugh’ (willow) and ‘haugh’ (meadow), and Mackintosh ran with the folklore-rich willow theme. He collaborated with his wife, Margaret Macdonald, who contributed one of her finest works to the project, a gesso panel inspired by the line, ‘O ye, all ye that walk in Willow-wood’ from the poem by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The extraordinary and beautiful rooms opened in 1903; one critic said that a diner in the Willow Tea Rooms could ‘dream that he is in fairy land’. Para Handy author Neil Munro, writing in his Evening News column of the adventures of his ‘punter’ hero Erchie, noted Mackintosh’s signature high-backed chairs: ‘The chairs is no’ like ony other chairs I ever clapped eyes on.’* Mackintosh also designed Kate Cranston’s temporary White Cockade Tea Room for the 1911 Glasgow International Exhibition. The menu, designed by his wife Margaret, shows that Kate wasn’t offering her brother’s tea but that of Andrew Melrose, the enterprising tea company of George Street, Edinburgh.

The eccentrically dressed, single-minded and artistically inclined Kate Cranston became a Glasgow treasure. Who’s Who in Glasgow in 1909 listed her as one of the city’s leading 461 public figures, of whom only seven were women and of these only one a businesswoman. Kate Cranston’s recent biographer summed up her achievement: ‘Miss Cranston, her own creation, personified the panache of Glasgow in its heyday: hence the affection in which she was held by the inhabitants of that great city.’19 Two world wars, an intervening depression and changing social habits ended the great era of tea rooms, but today the Willow Tea Rooms have been fully restored by the Willow Tea Rooms Trust and are once again open for business, run as a social enterprise that provides training and opportunities for young people.