Why do British people love tea? (from Here For The History)

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1:58And each episode we find out about how stories from the past have shaped our lives in the present. Yes, we'll uncover the origin stories behind the traditions, stereotypes and beliefs that make up everyday life. Why we speak the way we do, why football is our national sport, who came up with a package holiday. And in this episode, we're telling the story of how the humble cup of tea became so ingrained in British culture. It's a riveting tale. And if you want to hear more unusual origin stories, listen and subscribe to Hear for the History on BBC Sounds. If you're outside the UK, you can listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

2:35You can also watch us on our YouTube channel.

2:43Hello, I'm Ben Henderson. And I'm Alice Luxton. So, Alice, obviously I spend most of my free time with my nose in your best-selling history books. Thank you. But I think the first time I came across you was when you posted a video online to your legions of followers about some black railings on the street in London, which looked slightly misshapen. Am I right? Oh, yes. People absolutely love that video. It really went viral. There are these wonderful railings and they were actually used originally as stretchers in the Blitz in the Second World War. And people just love seeing, you know, the history behind these ordinary objects.

3:19Yeah, it's fascinating. I love that. And I saw it was even written up in the papers, you know, national news. Thank you, Ben. Thanks for reading. You're a loyal supporter. You're right. Well, I've also seen your stuff. You've been making history programmes for the BBC for years now. And you have your own social videos about history too. I loved the video about the origins of the British stiff upper lip. I think that's the first one I saw of yours. And it was always something I just accepted, but never really questioned why. Ah, well, it's funny you should say that, Alice, because that's exactly what we're doing on our brand new podcast, isn't it?

3:52Here for the history. Exactly, Ben. I'm so excited. We'll be uncovering the historical backstories that have shaped our lives. Yes, so we'll be finding out things like how English turned into the language we speak today and how the suit became every man's uniform and even where the weekend came from. And I've been really surprised by some of the things we found already. Some of it's really weird, some of it's quite dark and some of it's just hilarious. so I can't wait to reveal it all.

4:25So to you listening, we're here for the history. Now let's crack on with the first episode. Alice, could you start by telling me your dream morning routine? Well, the first thing that I have every morning is a cup of tea, as I did this morning, and I'll get out of bed, try and wake up. And the first thing I do is put the kettle on. I'll have an English breakfast tea. I've got a special mug. It's from the Durham Cathedral gift shop, which I bought a few years ago. And I'll have, I'd say, a dash of milk, semi-skim milk. And it normally ends up being the colour of a digestive biscuit. So I'm very particular about that.

5:08But if I get it right, it does set me up for a perfect day. What about you? how much milk do you have? Well, I don't want to ruin my popularity this early in the show, but I'm actually more of a coffee man. I know I'll have tea in the evenings, but yeah, more of a coffee man. My mum is a tea addict. So I've seen the addiction in action. Yeah. A fellow tea obsessive. I love it. Your mother and I would get on no doubt. Yeah, exactly. But I am interested in how particular people are with their tea routines. I've always been a bit of a, you know, just shove some milk in it. But obviously, you know, I'm a Southerner living in the North in Manchester.

5:42And if I go to make a round of tea for my colleagues at work and I put, you know, just slightly too much milk in, they'll have a massive go at me. Like, oh, you're Southern softy, can't make a cup of tea. Look at me with contempt. I know, people have such strong feelings about it, myself included, and perhaps you deserve that contempt. But it is a big part of the British identity. And actually the anthropologist Kate Fox has written about this in her book, Watching the English. She said that whenever the English feel awkward or uncomfortable in a social situation, that is almost all the time, they make tea.

6:17So totally relatable. How much does it say that you've got a cup of tea right there? Right, yeah, I am feeling awkward and uncomfortable. But the question is, why is tea so important? Did you know, this is an amazing fact, next to water, it's the most consumed beverage in the world. Yeah, that's pretty remarkable. So there's a lot of tea drinkers, there's a lot of us out there. But what about in Britain? How did something not native to Britain become intrinsically linked to British identity? Well, Alice, the anticipation is brewing. Well done. Welcome everyone to our new show, Here for the History from BBC Sounds.

6:53In the show, we'll be taking the stereotypes and traditions that make up everyday life and find out their historical origin story. Today, Alice is going to take us through the history of tea and pin down, in her opinion, how we Brits got so obsessed with it. So Alice, the kettle's boiling and I'm here for the history. Chapter One, Royal Tea.

7:19Now legend has it, 5 ,000 years ago, revered Chinese emperor and herbalist Xiong was relaxing under a camellia sinensis tree as his servants prepared some boiling water to be drunk. As he did so, a leaf of the tree drifts off the branch and lands in the pot of boiling water. But instead of throwing it away, Shanong takes a sip. He tries this new concoction and there we have it. Tea is born. Oh, unbelievable scenes, Alice, and beautifully told. But this is, you know, an underrated moment in global history, surely. A huge moment. This has shaped the lives of millions of people. Now, there are a few origin stories of how tea was invented, but this is probably the most famous of all.

8:13But if we're going to be looking at the role that tea played in Britain's history, it actually starts much later in the 1600s. So a time of civil wars, Puritans, ruffs, people wearing those big wide-bringed hats, the plagues, the Great Fire of London, that sort of thing. And we're going to look at the year 1662. The Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza is sailing through storms and rolling seas. She's in an English fleet travelling from Portugal to England for a pretty big moment in her life. She's going to marry King Charles II of England, who, by the way, at this point, she's never actually met.

8:52So pretty full on for her. The thing about Catherine, though, she's only 23 years old. She grew up next to a nunnery. She's basically had this life of seclusion and strict religious studies. She's got this reputation for being pretty pious and quiet, kind of a mousy figure, you might say. So if she's quite a shy person, naturally, this must have been a pretty daunting moment, I can imagine. You know, you've got to go over there, marry the King of England. I'd feel you the butterflies, I imagine. Absolutely. And she's this diplomatic pawn in this great tangled web of European politics. The marriage is a great strategic alliance arranged by her father, King John IV of Portugal.

9:31And this is quite a common thing at the time for royal families to use marriage as a way to forge these partnerships. Nonetheless, she lands in Portsmouth on the 14th of May, 1662. It's been a terrible journey. She's been thrown around, tossed about in the sea by the storms. But finally, she steps off the boat, no doubt hugely relieved. And what is the first thing she asks for on dry land? Can you guess? A pint at the local weather springs. Not quite. Catherine of Braganza asks for a cup of tea. And unfortunately, much to her disappointment, they don't have one to give her. So though tea had actually already arrived in the UK by this point in the 1650s, and we know this because of the famous diarist Samuel Pepys, it wasn't actually popular yet.

10:21So the princess on arrival was offered, you're right, Ben, a small ale instead. Oh, well, my historical instincts have kicked in there. You laughed. There we go. She'd love an airport spoons, I'm sure. Now, a week later, Charles II comes down to Portsmouth, and on this day, he meets Catherine of Braganza for the first time, and they get married. Oh, really? So it's not the, you know, big fancy royal wedding we're used to. No offence to Portsmouth, but not the most glamorous location in the world. Well, it's quite low key, I suppose you might say, but they do go to London later on and they process into London.

10:56And, you know, that's a great celebration. Of course, Charles is quite an extravagant man. Yeah, well, just to paint a picture of Charles II then for listeners. So he's often portrayed in portraits with a big shaggy dark wig going down past his shoulders. And he's known as a bit of a lad, isn't he? He famously reopens the taverns after the Puritans had tried to clamp down fun after the Civil War. But for the purposes of this marriage, his temperament's not great, is it? Because him and Catherine don't raise any surviving children, do they? And he has quite a lot of illegitimate kids with various mistresses, doesn't he?

11:30So he's not the best behaved. He's got a lot of mistresses and he is known as the King of Partying. So they are quite a kind of strange couple in some ways, this mousey girl from Portugal. But nonetheless, the key thing is that Catherine of Braganza, she is the new wife of Charles II and she joined the English court. And in one sense, she's this great outsider because she's remained a Catholic while the English court's religion is Protestantism. And she dresses in the Portuguese style. She has some quite funny habits which do actually catch on. She brings the fork in, which is a useful implement.

12:03She introduced marmalade again. Very grateful for that. But most importantly, she popularises tea. Yeah, it's a pretty remarkable influence for one woman, isn't it? Yeah, thank you. She's like an early modern Alice Loxton. Great influencer. Yeah, we're very similar in many ways. Now, as part of her dowry, Portugal provided a chest of tea. And this was already a very popular drink in the Portuguese court. This is partly because Portugal had established trade routes with the Far East and importantly China, which is where the tea leaves come from. Now, she serves this tea to her ladies-in-waiting and the ladies at court.

12:37So this sets a trend in England for the elites drinking tea. And we know that she would go and visit aristocratic families and drink tea at their houses, places like Ham House, which is on the outskirts of London on the River Thames, which is a beautiful house. Oh, have you been there? I have been there. And I've actually been to the cafe and drunk tea in the cafe. So, you know, repeating Catherine of Bracanza's experiences. Oh, very good. First-hand research, Alice. I'm impressed. Of course, of course. I do my best. Okay. So this tea as well, this would be tea coming from China, presumably, because that's where it's produced.

13:10And so it would have been green tea rather than the kind of black tea with milk that we'd later adopt in Britain as the centuries go by. Fascinating. But I'm interested to know how tea then spread from, you know, this elite circle revolving around Catherine of Braganza to wider society. So let me know how that happened. Yes, well a big moment in the history of tea in Britain comes in 1706 because we get our first tea shop. An exciting moment and it opened on the Strand which is where many of the London elites were living after the Great Fire of London and it was opened by a man called Thomas Twining.

13:48Ah, of Twining's tea fame, I see. Actually the shop still exists today which is rather wonderful But the key thing about the 18th century is that tea at this point was insanely expensive. So this is because it had to be transported from China. That's the only place producing it at the time. And there were these massive taxes on importing it. OK, so how much are we paying for a cup of tea? OK, so by 1707, three and a half ounces of Twining's gunpowder tea. It was called gunpowder tea because they had these tightly rolled leaves that looked like grains of gunpowder. This was sold at a price which would work out today as£160.

14:30OK, that sounds enormously expensive, but I don't really know actually how much 3.5 ounces is. What is 3.5 ounces in tea? OK, so 3.5 ounces is the same as 100 grams. It's about the same weight as four AA batteries or two medium eggs, if that's helpful. OK, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100 paperclips. Can you envisage what that looks like? That's, no, not really. That's helpful. Or a tree frog. It's the same weight as a tree frog. Oh, well, now it's clear. Prior to tree frogs these days, it's a joke. I'm always using tree frogs to measure out the flour. But yeah, so it's 100 paperclips worth of tea. Three and a half ounces costs£160.

15:11So what does that tell you? It's just very, very expensive. Yeah, so ordinary people surely aren't able to access this kind of thing. No. And of course, because it's taxed so highly and because there's such a big demand for it, people go outside the system and it creates this market for something that I know you'll love, Ben, smugglers. Absolutely. Well, I found this particularly interesting. You're a pirate at heart, I know. It's often said. Yeah, in the tea story, this is fascinating, though, because it really demonstrates that demand for tea isn't just located among the aristocrats at the top with Catherine.

15:45It's dispersed through society. So pirates are bringing the tea over from Holland and Portugal because there was far lower taxes over there than there was over here. And there's a lot of violence involved in this smuggling. But I found it really funny. It's not always the people you'd expect, you know, the pirates, villains in society. There were teachers involved in the smuggling trade. There was members of the clergy. Yeah, there's all sorts. Clergy men, you can never trust them. I've always said it. So, no, you're right. Well, it draws to the point that because of these high taxes, there was huge amounts of smuggling.

16:16and to try and stamp down on that, the tax was slashed in 1784. Fascinating. OK, so we get the picture. Catherine has popularised tea at the elite level and it's slowly trickling down through the classes and growing in popularity. But I get the feeling, Alice, that things are about to take a much darker turn. They are indeed. Hi, Uncle Lazer here. America's built on fast cars, fast food and even faster women. Photo casinos built in America. You know what they're fast at? Fast cash, rise, redemption. You see, only Moto is U.S. owned and operated. Moto. It's American-made. That's who we are, and that's who we care about.

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18:23Chapter 2. The Tea Wars. Now I'm taking us forward into the 1800s when tea had become so popular that Britain was willing to go to war for it. At this point, China is still the only country that produces tea. And of course, the British Empire is at its height. So it's a time of expansionism, trade, globalism, all happening apace. And there's this company that's been set up. It's called the East India Company. And there are a few of these. But in this instance, we're talking about the British one. It started out as a merchant company. But over time, it basically became an extension of the British state.

19:03Yes, and the East India Company plays a huge role in this story, doesn't it? Absolutely, because in order to meet British demand for tea, the East India Company was determined to try and buy some more. But there was a problem because the Chinese would only accept silver in exchange for tea and the East India Company did not have enough silver. And the way that they dealt with this problem is rather looked down on today, shall we say, to put it politely. Because what they did was they took opium, which was being produced in parts of East India, an area of the world that they controlled at that time, and they amped up the production massively.

19:43So opium comes from poppies. It's massively addictive. Yeah, a very dangerous drug that can ruin lives and has done many people. So the East India Company then sold this opium illegally to Chinese merchants in exchange for silver, which then allowed them to buy more tea to bring back to Britain. And this did lead to a huge problem in China of opium addiction, which you can understand the emperor wasn't very happy about. Yeah. And this is what leads to what's known as the Opium Wars, isn't it? The Opium Wars, indeed. So the Emperor even writes to Queen Victoria in 1839. He pleads for this trade of opium to cease.

20:26He's met with silence. And next he takes action. He seizes 20 ,000 chests of opium and dumps it in the sea. And the East India Company retaliates with great force. And we obviously know it as a company, but they actually have the Royal Navy, don't they, to support them in going to war here? Absolutely. So the Royal Navy send in these warships, there's steamships towing gunboats that smash through China's river and coastal defences. So China is forced to capitulate. It's a great humiliation for them. They end up having to pay for the loss of the opium. They cede Hong Kong to Britain. They're forced to open up more ports to trade to Britain.

21:07And the eventual result of all of this is that tea starts to flow more easily and enable trade with Britain. Gosh, we're flooding their country with drugs, causing loads of addiction and going to war for tea. Now, following this, the Brits not only had they forced China to trade in this way, but they also wanted to take it a step further. Instead of having to rely on China to trade the tea, they wanted to shortcut this and grow the tea themselves. And so in India, they set up tea gardens and plantations. The great problem was that they were lacking in some pretty key parts of this. They lacked the knowledge, the know-how of how to grow the tea, but also the plants to do it.

21:52There have been all of these attempts which just totally failed. And this is where we introduce a new character to the story. Get comfortable because this is quite a story. So let me introduce you to Robert Fortune. He is a Scottish botanist, an explorer. And in 1848, he was instructed by the East India Company to, in an infamous episode of corporate espionage, travel to China in secret and do something pretty daring. Gather the tea seeds, the plants and the understanding which would enable the British to grow tea. Now, this is a pretty devious move, to put it kindly. Fortune disguises himself in traditional Chinese clothing and hairstyle.

22:41He sneaks into areas of China, which are completely forbidden to foreigners. And he goes to the factories and he sees how tea is made. I can't believe that a Scottish man can fit in in 19th century China. like that but yeah very impressive an impressive disguise so he brought back 20 000 live plants and convinced a small number of workers to travel to a northern province as he called it to grow the tea and this was in fact british controlled india in what we would now know as darjeeling and that is why we have darjeeling tea yes well done now it's really interesting to read about fortune's take on the whole affair.

23:24He wrote this book about it and he talks about it like this amazing adventure. He was the first to see these secrets. He wrote, I often look back upon those days with feelings of unalloyed pleasure. And of course, the interesting thing is he might have had a great time, but for China, they see this very, very differently. Yeah, absolutely. He's a bit of a national villain there, isn't he? Yeah, absolutely. And the point is, he's seriously unpopular in China today. They view him as this terrible figure. They see it as trickery. He single-handedly kneecapped the economy. And it's part of that great century of humiliation, which they still talk about today.

24:02And they call it the great tea heist. That's how it's remembered. So yeah, Robert Fortune and the opium trade echoes down the centuries. Absolutely. So it's quite a big change at this point. They've exploited opium and employed some pretty brutal military tactics. There's been a sprinkling of espionage and all of this broke China's monopoly on tea production and began to satisfy this raging demand for tea in Britain. Chapter three, look for the bare necessities. Okay, so as the Opium Wars and tea espionage are playing out in the Far East, what's happening back in Britain. Well, the Industrial Revolution is well underway.

24:47And this is playing quite a big part in the demand for tea. Can you tell me a bit about the Industrial Revolution, Ben? I know it's your great favourite topic. Oh, well, I'll try my best. So it's obviously a massive period of technological change. Britain turns from being a largely kind of agrarian country, where most people live in the countryside, to being a heavily urbanised country based on factory work. Okay, And so what is life like for those factory workers? Well, they work terrible hours. They have terrible diets. And the thing is, if only they had something warm and sustaining to keep them going through those long hours.