Three Victorian Ladies drinking tea – public domain

Recently, I’ve been reading Sam Llewellyn’s Shadow in the Sands (ignore Amazon’s silly pricing – second hand copies are available for a few dollars).

The novel is positioned as a sequel to Erskine Childers’ Riddle of the Sands – one of my favourite books – and for that reason I would normally avoid Llewellyn’s book for fear of spoiling my affection for Childers’ book, but this would be a mistake.

The book’s well written, and while it cleverly links to Childers’ book with some characters in common it can be read as a stand alone novel if you are so inclined.

It’s also very good on its portrayal of the class divides of English society at the end of the long nineteenth century.

And this leads us to tea drinking.

There’s a scene in which Dacre – upper class officer type, and nasty with it – when served a mug of tea asks ‘Don’t you have any china?’ to which the reply comes ‘It is sir, didn’t I boil it enough?’

And this neatly encapsulates the class divide around tea in nineteenth century Britain.

I hadn’t really thought about this before, but the middle and upper classes preferred quality tea, Ceylon or Assam, which was drunk black or with lemon to let them concentrate on the flavour of the tea. (Strangely, when I was in Sri Lanka, ten or more years ago, I had a dickens of a job persuading waiters in cafes that I wanted a weaker black tea without milk, and even then it was still pretty strong.)

Tea was expensive, and so when working class people bought tea, to be drunk as an alternative to beer with a meal, they bought the cheapest black tea going and steeped it in hot water as long as possible to get a strong black brew to which they added milk and sugar – a bit like what we call ‘Builder’s Tea’ today.

And so, how you liked your tea said something about your social class.

Of course, it’s not a universal rule, my father, despite coming from a family of tenant farmers, but who had lived in India and Malaysia, preferred his tea black, or with a slice of lemon, while my mother preferred hers with milk and sugar.

(Personally, I prefer my tea weak and black – English Breakfast in the morning, Russian Caravan in the afternoon, while J will only drink lemon scented or Earl Grey, again weak and black. I’m not sure what that says about us…)