Tea caddies are connected with British history

Idon’t know if it was my love of tea that I inherited from my Southern grandmother Ruth Sophia, or her family’s love of tea. (Aunt Kathleen and the elder Aunt Sylvia drank tea all day long in old St. Louis).

But I have been fascinated by British tea and, in fact, achieved a love affair in England for three years, after which I actually married a Scot.

I still drink my tea with milk.

And I have a collection of British tea caddies and brass and bronze tea scoops.

Speculation exists amongst scholars that the history of Britain in the 18th and 19th centuries could not have been the same without the tea ( and the shadow side of the tea trade, the opiate) trade, and all the colonial interests and taxes involved.

I do know that the history of the shape of the tea caddie would have been quite different if not for the great expense of tea in the early 18th century. Tea caddies were usually handled, so the owner of the tea leaves could take them with her. They were also lockable and made of precious veneers and marquetry and sometimes edged in ivory and sterling.

Usually, they were divided into interior compartments, smaller than your fist. Tea was precious, until the mid-18th century, when the black market began to smuggle it over from China.

Tea was known to Holland and Portugal about 50 years before it was discovered by the court of King Charles II, whose wife was

Portuguese. She brought it to England in the late 17th century.

It was so valuable that a pause in the day was religiously followed to brew tea and to drink it with loads of sugar.

Men of the world drank tea in coffee shops, where it was hugely expensive, and ladies bought leaves in small apothecaries.

The tea trade was bound with the opium trade. The name “caddie” is in reference to the Malaysian word for 3/5 of a kilo: “kati.” Tea was exported in bottles of glass and jars of metal and shipped in straw in ballasts of vessels, until gentlemen cabinet makers in Britain began to create mahogany boxes with one, two or three compartments in which to house the glass or metal containers.

Soon the boxes were made with their own containers and compartments and began to be showy and expensive, and they were part of the tea ceremony.