A nice cup of tea

The English custom of afternoon tea, it is said, goes back to the late eighteenth century when Anne, wife of the 7th Duke of Bedford, decided that she suffered from a "sinking feeling" around 5 p.m. and needed tea and cakes to bring back her strength. Before long, complaints were heard that "the labourers lose time to come and go to the tea-table and farmers' servants even demand tea for their breakfast." Tea had arrived. Fashionable Tea Rooms were opened for high society, and soon tea became the national drink of all classes.

Today the British drink more tea than any other nation - average of 4 kilos a head per annum, or 1650 cups of tea a year. They drink it in bed in the morning, round the fire on winter afternoons and out in the garden on sunny summer days. In times of trouble the kettle is quickly put on, the tea is made and comforting cups of the warm brown liquid are passed round.

Tea has even played its part in wars. When George III of England tried to make the American colonists pay import duty on tea, a group of Americans disguised as Red Indians dumped 342 chests of tea into the sea in Boston Harbour - the Boston Tea Party which led to the War of Independence. In another war the Duke of Wellington sensibly had a cup of tea before starting the Battle of Waterloo, "to clear my head." In peace time official approval of the national drink came from the Victorian Prime Minister, Gladstone, who remarked: "If you are cold, tea will warm you, if you are heated it will cool you, if you are depressed it will cheer you, if you are excited it will calm you."

What exactly is tea? Basically it is a drink made from the dried leaves of a plant that only grows in hot countries. The British first heard of tea in 1598, and first tasted it in about 1650. For nearly two centuries all tea was imported from China, until, in 1823, a tea plant was found growing naturally in Assam in India. Sixteen years later the first eight chests of Indian tea were sold in London, and today, London's tea markets deal in tea from India, Sri Lanka (Ceylon), and Africa more than from China.

(From "Read and speak about Britain and the British" by V.F. Satinova)