High Tea Essentials

Samuel Pepys drank his first cup of tea, a China drink, in London in 1660. Two years later Charles II married Catherine of Braganza, and she brought Portugal’s tea habit to court. Afternoon tea is credited to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, around 1840, a claim contested and never verified; by the 1880s Queen Victoria was holding tea receptions at her palaces, and her garden parties carried the tray outdoors. The Sovereign still hosts three each summer at Buckingham Palace, more than 30,000 guests a year.

Who named the breakfast blend is unsettled. The story goes it was a Scottish merchant, or Victoria at Balmoral in 1892, or a New York merchant in 1843. What is certain is who filled the pot. Assam’s first tea reached London in 1838; Maniram Dewan, the first Indian to grow it commercially, was hanged by the British at Jorhat in 1858. The gardens were worked by indentured labourers, and of 84,915 recruited in 1863 to 1866, 30,000 were dead by June 1866. In Ceylon, James Taylor planted tea at Loolecondera in 1867; the pluckers were Tamils from South India, and the Citizenship Act of 1948 left more than 700,000 of them stateless. About 300,000 still were in 2003, when Parliament finally opened citizenship to them.

Harrogate, the English Spa, kept its tea rooms after the springs faded; Bettys opened there in 1919.

English Breakfast, Organic is the everyday pot and Irish Breakfast, Organic the heavyweight, Ceylon and Assam, strong with milk all day. Yorkshire Harrogate is the dunking tea, Five O’ Clock the afternoon pause, and Buckingham Palace Garden Party our own daydream of the lawn, cornflowers and jasmine in the leaf.