There is a short section in Edward Bramah's 1972 book,
Tea & Coffee that I think deserves to be quoted, as I have never seen this particular subjected talked about in any other book.
Edward Bramah wrote:The Indian Summer of China Tea
In 1950, to the surprise of all, the first shipments of China tea for eleven years reached the London market. There was not much of it, and what there was was not very good. These first post-war supplies were large-leafed teas of indifferent quality which disheartened the surviving China brokers who remembered the great days of China tea. . Even in China, some primitive forms of mechanization had been introduced and now the tea was unsuitable both for the demands of the traditional China tea-drinker and for the large-scale requirements of the proprietary blended packet trade.
The manner in which it was offered was unsatisfactory too. It bore a Chinese reference number which meant nothing in Mincing Lane, and no name either of the area or the factory by which to identify it.
In the old days the China Tea Importers' Association had been an important body. In the post-war period it barely managed to maintain its existence. Without being sure of the market, buyers bought some of these post-war teas for their China blends. Their hesitation was justified. The new China tea just did not sell rapidly enough in the shops, even in the brighter economic climate which followed the end of tea rationing in October 1952.
The new Conservative Government was keen to dismantle the wartime apparatus of rationing, but in an orderly manner. Their Labour predecessors had de-rationed sweets too soon, with the result that the sweet-shops, with insufficient supplies, were overwhelmed by the demand and rationing had to be reimposed. The Conservatives were anxious to avoid this kind of mistake.
This time large stocks of tea were built up for some time before rationing ended, but the expected rush to buy did not materialize. So slack was the market, against all forecasts, that many plantations, as I had known from my experience in Nyasaland, had cut back their production. Gradually the demand revived with the growing prosperity of the 1950's, and then in 1954 came the Great Tea Scramble.
The Indian and Ceylon governments placed an export duty on tea, an ironic contrast to the whole history of China tea, bedevilled for so many years by a tax on imports at the British end, and at the same time there were some exaggerated reports that the new season's teas would be in short supply. Rumour fed on rumour, prices rocketed, and on the back of this seller's market even teas from China began to find buyers, who chopped it up and included it, in modest proportions, in some of the proprietary blends. North Indian broken grades of average quality were fetching 6s. 10d. (34p) per pound at the auctions, the highest figure in living memory, and the buyers were so short of stocks that they were prepared to take anything that looked, smelt or tasted even remotely suitable.
During this period of panic buying Sir John Kotelawala, then Prime Minister of Ceylon, added to the excitement by publicly contending that the prices which the British housewife was then paying for tea were 'damned ridiculous'. When tea was de-rationed the controlled price was 3s. 8d. (18p) per pound. Two years later the average price was about double that amount, so there were plenty of people ready to lend an ear to any suggestion that the tea merchants were profiteering.
Sir John alleged that tea was being bought by dealers at 3s. to 4s. (15-20p) per pound in Ceylon and was being sold in Britain for 7s. (35p). When the tea trade challenged Sir John to produce these supplies at the price he had quoted he was unable to do so. Subsequently he retracted his allegations. It turned out that dealers were in fact paying 5s. (25p) per pound in Ceylon and that to this figure had to be added the Ceylon Government's export duty of 1s. 11 1/2d. (10p). The publicity given to Sir John's remarks, unjustified though they were, proved to be the turning point. Certain of the leading firms introduced new, cheaper blends. In various parts of the country a buyers' strike developed. Housewives cut down their purchases of tea, waiting for the price to fall.
Finally, on 16th February 1955, a day which had become known in the trade as 'Wild Wednesday', the bottom suddenly fell out of the market. Throughout the day there were sensational price movements, 'the like of which', wrote a trade writer at the time, 'have not been witnessed on this or any other market in the history of the commodity'. At the lowest point, teas were being sold at 2s. (10p) and even 3s. (15p) per pound less than they had been fetching only a day or two previously. Before the day was out, the suppliers began to withhold teas from the auctions. Bidding became more animated, and prices started to recover. But never since have they reached the levels prevailing just prior to 'Wild Wednesday'.
With the market stabilized, the temporary demand for China tea disappeared and for the twelve months before I joined my new employers in June 1956 the company, as agents for the Chinese, had made no sales. The Chinese Tea Corporation in Peking wanted to know why their teas were not selling and what should be done to make them sell. My job would be to advise them.
For my first venture into market research I set out to meet the old China brokers. I found three of them still making part of their living from occasional shipments of China tea which reached England from Formosa and Hong Kong. One of them had been born in China, and as a boy had survived the Boxer rebellion. His father had watched the tall ships set out on the great tea races. These old brokers were only too pleased to talk of the past, and from them I gained some first-hand impressions of the great days of China tea. I was glad I took the opportunity of doing so, for within the next few years all three had died. Their deaths meant that there was hardly anybody left with an expert knowledge of what the classic China teas had really tasted like in the days before 1914, when the China trade had still been large enough to command respect and the hundreds of individual teas selling under mark names had not been reduced to a few broad types.
But their reminiscences, fascinating as they were, seemed to be of little use for the job in hand, so I asked all the major firms of blenders and packers for their opinions of China tea. I found that the market for the traditional leaf grades of China tea, the Lapsang souchong, the Keemun and the exotic scented and flavoured teas, was so limited that the blenders and wholesalers could hardly take their prospects seriously. The only people who bought them, and who could afford to pay the prices asked, which were much higher than those of proprietary blends, were a diminishing number of old ladies in Cheltenham and Chelsea who remembered China tea from their youth.
Edward Bramah wrote:None of these teas appealed to me as tea I would want to drink at home, since I had been trained to appreciate the merits of orthodox modern teas from Darjeeling, Assam and Ceylon.
I became convinced that the only sound commercial future for China tea lay in their producing a machine-made blending-type tea, suitable for inclusion with others in the British proprietary blends, and this was essentially a manufacturing rather than a marketing problem. When I discussed this with my English buying acquaintances their reaction was not encouraging. From their pre-war days the senior blenders could remember the scented, weedy taste of China teas and they were quite firm that they wanted no such taste in their blends. All this had to be conveyed to Peking and explained to the Chinese representative in London, Liao Run-chu, of the Commercial Counsellor's office.
Liao had come to England with the Trade Mission as a sort of Mandarin without Portfolio and there he found himself assigned to promoting the tea trade. He was very much a product of modern China, a sound, orthodox Maoist supporter, probably under thirty and undoubtedly a former soldier in Mao's army. He was tough and he was intelligent. He knew no English at all. My negotiations with him had to be carried out against a background of furiously antagonistic politics and propaganda, although politics were never brought into our discussions, and the Chinese never showed any personal animosity whatever. There was, of course, a long and daunting history of bad relations between our countries.
Edward Bramah wrote:There was certainly no established tradition of international friendship to build on. I soon found that there was no common professional experience either. Liao knew nothing about tea!
All discussions took place through an interpreter at first, but there were inevitably difficulties about the terms used in tea-tasting. I also had to teach Liao to taste in the English fashion, with milk. At the same time, I had sent a lot of samples to China to inform the Tea Corporation of the standards expected on the London market. Strange as the post-war China teas were to the London brokers and buyers, the British blends must have been even stranger to the Chinese tea experts, who had been isolated from the rest of the world for years and had in any case never regarded other countries' tea with much interest.
Edward Bramah wrote:Any decision to modernize, even small selected areas, would be an important one. For the Chinese to evolve a strain of tea plant, possibly an Assam hybrid, and manufacture tea comparable to the tea which the British public was used to, was a horticultural and technical problem which could take years to solve. The Chinese had to be convinced that it was worth while to compete for a share, possibly only a small share, in the British market when they already had a home market of 700 million people who were satisfied with China tea as it was.
By 1958 the Chinese were producing a low-priced, low-grade, but not unacceptable tea which I was able to sell for them to one or two large blenders 'for shipment', which meant that if the buyer liked the sample he would place a contract for say, 2,000 chests to be shipped from Shanghai.
This was success of a kind, but these direct contracts were negotiated outside the main Mincing Lane market, and I was convinced that if China tea was ever to take its place beside Indian and Ceylon and African tea it would have to be offered for sale in the weekly auctions and make its way in straightforward competition.
By this time an English-speaking tea expert had been sent out from Peking, and although the whole capitalist system, epitomized by the City of London, was anathema to them, the Chinese agreed to produce a selection of new, manufactured tea for the auctions. As soon as the London tea trade heard about this, rumours started that the Chinese were about to flood the market with cheap tea. The Chinese reacted angrily to this and replied that they had no intention of exploiting their people or allowing them to be exploited to provide the British with cheap tea, and in any case they could not supply more than 10 million pounds of tea a year, compared with total imports into this country of 558 million pounds.
Edward Bramah wrote:Gradually I found China blending teas becoming accepted as one major blending company after another found that the new tea was suitable for them. In July 1960 the Tea and Rubber Mail printed an article of mine under the heading 'China teas find increasing acceptance for British proprietary blends', a great contrast with the unfavourable publicity of less than two years before.
Then I heard ominous news that some China teas, though not my contracts, had been forbidden to land because of excess lead content. New 'Lead in Food' regulations had been announced, and the Port of London Health Authority had started systematic tests. The excess found was usually minimal and only a small number of samples were affected, but advice was given to the blending companies not to include more than a given proportion of certain tea in their blends. Then the real blow fell. A consignment of tea from Formosa was condemned by the Health Authorities.
Almost overnight the demand for China tea vanished. No tea buyer would take a chance on 'buying forward' if the consignment might not be allowed into the country when it arrived and no tea company would risk being connected with a contaminated tea. My job for the Chinese Tea Corporation became impossible for the time being, although some importers who still dealt in tea in the old way managed to buy a little by private contracts in China, using their agents' information on which teas to avid because of likely trouble. For more than five years I had worked with Liao and his colleagues, Chang Chi-cheng and Wang Ping-yu, and I took my leave of them with sincere regret.
A few months after this China invaded Tibet and even threatened the tea estates in the extreme north of India. The political climate between Britain and China deteriorated rapidly and many of the Chinese diplomatic personnel were changed. China tea imports for 1962 only reached 30,000 chests and in no year since have they reached more than two-thirds of their peak of 116,000 chests in 1960, while tea from such a new producing country as Uganda has multiplied three times. It is obvious that official policy in Peking is no longer enthusiastically supporting this part of their export trade, and, instead, China tea is being sent to countries where political ties are strong and her traditional manufacturing methods still acceptable.
