Catching up #2...Deptford X 2013

Continuing my blue and white theme, but changing the focus to the local campaigns I've been involved in, my Deptford X project this year was about my town's maritime heritage.

I joined forces with two other artists, David Aylward and Laura X Carlé to produce an "Anchor Fest" under the umbrella title "Deptford Is Forever". (www.deptfordisforever.net).

Our aim was to draw attention to the Deptford Anchor which used to sit at the top of Deptford High Street. It was removed earlier this year by the Council as part of regeneration works being done to the high street. Originally the anchor had been installed in 1990 as part of previous regeneration works, but was mounted on a low plinth that over the years had became a sit-down gathering point for the local street drinkers – in full view of the A2 traffic into and out of central London. Undoubtedly, the anchor's removal was intended to displace the street drinkers. A not very well publicised consultation took place in 2012 asking people if the anchor should stay in Deptford or go back to Chatham Historic Dockyard where it originally came from. Overwhelmingly, the response was to keep it in Deptford, since people had become very fond of it and it was the only visible manifestation of Deptford's rich seafaring and shipbuilding history.

When asked when the anchor would return to the high street, Lewisham Council let on that it might end up as part of the new riverside redevelopment at Convoys Wharf at the north of the high street. Lewisham Planning are currently considering an application for the redevelopment of this huge riverside site, but should the site ever receive the permission its owners want, it would be another five years before even the first phase of building is complete.

So we called on citizens to join us in our demand to Lewisham Council to "Give Us Back Our Anchor" and return it to the high street. I designed two single colour tattoos – one as a logo for the project (above), and the other a design to go on white paper counter bags, of which 5000 were printed to be given free to shop keepers and market traders to hand out to customers with their purchases.

This design also demanded that the Royal Dockyard was "saved". This year is the quincentenary of Deptford Dockyard – originally founded by Henry VIII in 1513 – which is now under threat from Convoys Wharf s.a.r.l., a company set up by Chinese conglomerate Hutchison Whampoa, owned by the 8th richest billionaire in the world, Li Ka Shing. They want to build 3,500 luxury flats, with three towers of 48, 38 and 38 storeys and most buildings between 12-18 storeys. All would be built over the historical remains of the dockyard – the slipways, the great basin, the mastponds, Sayes Court Garden (founded by John Evelyn), and other buried structures. Only two structures are to be saved – the double dry dock next to the privately owned (and listed) Master Shipwright's House, and the listed Olympia Shed which covers two other slipways.

A white "ghost anchor" was commissioned from the local florist/grocer High Street Flowers to hang in their window. This wreath was incorporated later into a procession (see below).

A day of "free" tattoos was organised with local tattoo parlour Kids Love Ink in which people could get a little anchor tattoo in return for a donation of up to £15 to a local charity Deptford Reach (who look after people like the street drinkers) and local project Build The Lenox (who want to build a replica 17th ship on the site of the double dry dock).

The Waiting Room coffee shop next door to the tattoo parlour joined in by using our specially stamped takeaway coffee cup cuffs.

And the grand finale was a procession through the high street on market day (Saturday 5th October) with David leading a giant cardboard anchor made by Laura, followed by a band of "rough music" players (brass and drums), and local assorted followers. The procession began at the Dog & Bell pub next to the Convoys Wharf site, and progressed up the high street to the site where the anchor once stood, and stopped along the way at other potential sites – Deptford station and Giffin Square. Eventually the cardboard replica was processed to Lewisham Arthouse, and to Laura's studio where she had originally built it.

We produced T-shirts and cotton shoppers to fund the project. More pix are on the website I designed to document the project.

Emma Biggs Mosaic

Back in November 2012, I was preparing my application for Goldsmiths MFA. It was a mammoth task to explain why on earth I wanted to do the course, and to describe my work in terms of critical discourse. I couldn't simply say "I want to be taken seriously, and I want to make full use of the workshop facilities and technicians because I can't afford to do half the things I want to do otherwise."

I got an email last week to say I'd been unsuccessful.

As part of my preparations I looked through my favourite art books. One of those books was Matthew Colling's Art Crazy Nation. It seemed rather dated (it was published in 2001) and I wondered what he had been writing about recently. Google led me to Biggs & Collings where I found the above piece by Emma Biggs.

Not being part of the art world's social network, I had no idea they operated as a couple making paintings together, or that his wife works with mosaics – particularly with found fragments.

At Emma's own website (emmabiggsmosaic.net) I came across her project Made in England. "The Made in England mosaic is a celebration of the Stoke-On-Trent ceramics industry and its history. The mosaic incorporates a range of fragments displaying back-stamps and potters marks, representing a wealth of stories and workmanship."

There is a website for Made In England which describes the project and is now an online resource about backstamps (or 'makers' marks'). Here are some extracts from the About section:

'Made in England’ is a project supported by the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council. It was conceived by the artist and mosaicist Emma Biggs, but involves the skills, knowledge and generous participation of numerous individuals. It is both a historical record and a demonstration of how signs and symbols influence our understanding of familiar objects and inform how we think today. (...)

(...) Ceramic tableware, the cups, plates and saucers we use every day, is unusual in one respect – each piece bears an identifying mark which tells a story. Although people may have noticed the marks on plates, they are not generally given a second thought, unless it relates to the rarity of the piece and its financial value. Marks are designed to be overlooked, they are on the bottom of plates because the important aspect is on the top – the decoration – but there is a fascinating story to be told from looking at the overlooked, the things we simply take for granted. This project aims to do both aspects of what art should do – namely make us re-examine a familiar aspect of our lives and see it in a new way. It should also be visually compelling.

Made in England begins where industrially produced ceramic began: in the pottery towns of Stoke-on-Trent. An art work in mosaic is to be installed in the entrance to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Hanley, which houses a collection of ceramic of international importance, and receives visitors from all over the world.

The marks on the backs of plates – known in the trade as ‘backstamps’ – inadvertently convey a social history of England, and ways in which the English have seen themselves, encompassing technology, classicism, empire, nationhood and the pastoral. The name of the project is taken from these stamps. Ceramic was not marked with the country of manufacture until the nineteenth century. (...)

(...) The plates we will use will not be ones of enormous financial value – it is the fact that the art work draws our attention to a story told by everyday things, accessible and familiar to us all, that gives it its aspect of surprise.

Ultimately the aim of the project is to look at the everyday in a local, a national and an international context. The products of the ceramic industry have a particular meaning to the community of Stoke-on-Trent, thousands of whom have spent their entire working lives in the industry, and many of whom have recently been made redundant as the industry contracts under pressure from the more competitively priced products of the Far East – particularly China.

But curiously the highly skilled workforce is not alone in being displaced by the retooled Chinese industrial giants – the traditional Chinese ceramic towns are also withering, and there are fruitful and supportive links between the two communities. The history of ceramic, more familiarly known as ‘china’, is one which cannot be seen simply in a national context: the word tells you about a trading history.

The first part of this project will be in Stoke, the second will be in the London Underground, and the third will take the project to China.

Emma also writes about the project on her blog. She describes how she came to use ready-made pottery as a mosaic material but found the decorative elements too distracting, so decided to use the maker's marks instead. "The backstamps did what contemporary art seeks to do – they woke me up to new meanings residing in something intensely familiar. These plates – objects we all live with every day – were loaded with all sorts of contradictory and fascinating cultural assumptions (...) Contemporary art is about meaning. It attempts to expose our place in relation to pervasive ideologies of which most of us are only dimly aware...the quest to reveal something new, true and overlooked is what distinguishes it from decoration."

© Emma Biggs – Six roundels from Made in England, the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery, Stoke-on-Trent

"Empire, victories at war, aristocracy (...) once I started to look, I saw it wasn't a story of power alone, but also gave a narrative of the relatively powerless, the people who worked in the potteries – or 'potbanks' as they are known in Stoke. There were batch numbers, and thumbprints, and tests of the brush, made by the 'paintresses' (...) There was a story of technological change (hand painted and underglazed versus 'dishwasher and microwave friendly)."

Emma did what I have failed to do: go to Stoke and meet the people.

In this post, she talks about how Stoke is now among the poorest cities in the UK as the industries based there have been decimated. In the following post, she describes how she got the community involved.

"As the project depended on public involvement, it was essential that as many people as possible knew about it. I contacted local TV, radio and the press. I appealed for pottery fragments and invited anyone interested to get involved. I went to public events — fairs and meetings, and circulated information. I visited clubs (I even went to a Rotary Club lunch). I alerted NORSACA — the North Staffordshire African Caribbean Association, and the local Racial Equality Council. The project was made part of the coursework for second year students from the University of North Staffordshire.  I spoke and held classes at primary and secondary schools. UNITY — the Trade Union — bulletined their members alerting them to the appeal."

She publicised the project with a series of postcards designed by George Walker and Catherine Nippe, which used words and phrases particular to the ceramics industry and well known in Stoke. On the back was an invitation to contribute along with contact details.

© Emma Biggs – postcards from Made in England

My favourite detail from the main Made In England piece is this one with the paintresses' marks:

© Emma Biggs – detail from Made in England

Silhouettes and Kara Walker

The Willow Pattern, viewed by candle-light (the usual night-time illumination at the end of the 18th century), appears like a silhouette. A vogue for making silhouettes and the art of shadow portraiture swept across western Europe in the last decades of the 18th century. This may have been influenced by Chinese fretwork, and the lattice work of furniture maker Thomas Chippendale. Silhouette art became a popular pastime, requiring only scissors, a candle and black paper; the art was taught in fashionable schools, and a major treatise was written in 1792 by a Dutch artist August Edouart (who had previously been a painter on Delft pottery).

The art of the silhouette was already popular in the East. The Chinese enjoyed shadow plays, and at the end of the 17th century were making iron 'pictures', designed to be mounted in windows or in lanterns, or hung on walls. A noted iron artist in the early 18th century was T'ang P'eng, who often featured the willow tree. Similar depictions found their way into the English drawing room in friezes.

Kara Walker is a major American artist whose signature works are silhouettes – paper-cut installations, using black paper and scissors. I first saw her work at Tate Modern in 2007. Kara uses the 'genteel' art of 'the oppressor' to create stories that would never have been told at the time.

The historical setting for much of Kara Walker’s work is the American pre—Civil War antebellum South. While this is the backdrop for many of her scenes, Walker does not represent a necessarily truthful depiction of history. Fact, fiction, and fantasy are intertwined; exaggerated truths and fictionalized events parade as history lessons that viewers must unpack, sort out, and ultimately decide which elements are true. Through this scrambling of “truth,” The artist is also commenting on the way that official history, particularly that of African Americans, is just as constructed as her stories.

Kara Walker describes her work as both visual and literary. Literature such as southern romance novels, historical fiction, slave narratives, and contemporary novels influence the artist's practice of storytelling, while some texts are directly referenced in her pieces. Like a novelist, Walker employs characters, setting and action to convey a story. These narratives are not always linear, however, and don’t necessarily include a clear plot line. In the artist’s words, “There is always a beginning and there’s never a conclusion.” Walker is interested in the stories we tell about ourselves, and specifically, a desire for a narrative about “African America” that engages the past, present, and future.

Text and image © of Walker Art Center (all artworks and quotations by Kara Walker © the artist, courtesy Sikkema Jenkins & Co, New York).

© Installation view of My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love at Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Photo: Sheldan C. Collins.

whitney.org/Exhibitions/KaraWalker

The History Bit: Origins of Blue and White

Copyright Trustees of the British Museum

Extracts from the transcript from the BBC Radio 4 series The History of the World in 100 Objects

Episode 64 - The David Vases

The David Vases (made in 1351). Porcelain; from China
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea."

The thrilling opening lines of Coleridge's opium-fuelled fantasy still send a tingle down the spine. As a teenager I was mesmerised by this vision of exotic and mysterious pleasures, but I'd no idea that Coleridge was in fact writing about a historical figure. Because Qubilai Khan is a thirteenth-century Chinese emperor and Xanadu merely the English form of Shangdu, his Imperial summer capital. Qubilai Khan was the grandson of Genghis Khan, ruler of the Mongols from 1206 and terror of the world. Wreaking havoc everywhere, Genghis Khan established the Mongol Empire - a superpower that ran from the Black Sea to the Sea of Japan and from Cambodia to the Arctic. Qubilai Khan, his grandson, extended the Empire and became Emperor of China, which leads us to the objects for this programme.

Under the Mongol emperors, China developed one of the most enduring and successful luxury products in the history of the world, a product fit for stately pleasure-domes, but which spread in a matter of centuries from grand palaces to simple parlours all over the world... it's Chinese blue-and-white porcelain. We now think of blue-and-white as quintessentially Chinese, but as we shall discover, this is not how it began. This archetypal Chinese aesthetic comes in fact from Iran.

The importance of Chinese porcelain is hard to over-estimate. Admired and imitated for over a thousand years, it's influenced virtually every ceramic tradition in the world, and it's played a star role in cross-cultural exchanges. In Europe, blue-and-white porcelain is practically synonymous with China. And we've always associated it with the Ming Dynasty. But it was the David Vases, now in the British Museum, that made us re-think this history, for they predate the Ming and were in fact made under Qubilai Khan's Mongol Dynasty, known as the Yuan, who controlled all of China until the middle of the fourteenth century.

Seven hundred years ago most of Asia and a large part of Europe were reeling from the invasions of the Mongols. We all know Genghis Khan as the ultimate destroyer and the sack of Baghdad by his son still lives in Iraqi folk memory. Genghis's grandson Qubilai was also a great warrior, but under him Mongol rule became more settled and more ordered. As Emperor of China, he supported scholarship and the arts, and he encouraged the manufacture of luxury goods. Once the Empire was established, a 'Pax Mongolica' ensued, a Mongolian peace which, like the Pax Romana, ensured a long period of stability and prosperity. The Mongol Empire spread along the ancient Silk Road and made it safe. It was thanks to this Pax Mongolica that Marco Polo was able to travel from Italy to China, and then return to tell Europe what he'd seen. And one of the startling things he'd seen was porcelain.

The David Vases are so-called because they were bought by Sir Percival David, whose collection of over one and a half thousand Chinese ceramics is now in a special gallery at the British Museum. ... These two vases are obviously luxury porcelain production, made by artist-craftsmen delighting in their material.

Porcelain is a special ceramic fired at very high temperature: 1200-1400 degrees centigrade. The heat vitrifies the clay, so that like glass it can hold liquid, in contrast to porous earthenware. And the heat also makes it very tough. White, hard and translucent, porcelain was admired and desired everywhere, well before the creation of blue-and-white.

The very word 'porcelain' comes to us from Marco Polo's description of his travels in Qubilai Khan's China. The Italian 'porcellana', 'little piglet', is a slang word for cowrie shells. They do indeed look a little like curled-up piglets. And the only thing that Marco Polo could think of, to give his readers an idea of the shell-like sheen of the hard, fine ceramics that he saw in China, was a cowrie shell, a 'porcellana'. And so 'little piglets', porcelain, we've called it ever since - that's if we're not just calling it china. I don't think there's another country in the world whose name has simply become interchangeable with its defining export.

The savagery of the Mongol invasion destabilised and destroyed local pottery industries across the Middle East, especially in Iran. So when peace returned, these became major markets for Chinese exports. And in these new markets blue-and-white ware had long been popular. So the porcelain the Chinese made for them mirrored the local style, and Chinese potters used the Iranian blue pigment, cobalt, to meet local taste. The cobalt from Iran was known in China as 'huihui qing' - 'Muslim blue' - clear evidence that the blue-and-white tradition is Middle Eastern and not Chinese. Here's Craig Clunas, an expert on Chinese cultural history:

"Iran, and what's now Iraq, are the kind of areas where this sort of colouring comes in. This is a technique that comes from elsewhere, and therefore it tells us something about this period, when China is unprecedentedly open to the rest of Asia as part of this huge empire of the Mongols, which stretches all the way from the Pacific almost to the Mediterranean. Certainly the openness to the rest of Asia is what brings about things like blue-and-white, and it probably had an impact on forms of literature. So from the point of view of cultural forms coming into being, the Yuan period is extraordinarily important."

We're told that the vases were purpose-made to be offered as donations at a temple, and that the name of their donor is Zhang Wenjin, who describes himself with great solemnity as a disciple of the holy gods. It gives his home town, Shuncheng in what is now Jiangxi province, a few hundred miles south-west of Shanghai. He was offering these two grand vases along with an incense-burner - the three would have formed a typical set for an altar. The incense-burner has been lost, or at least has not yet been found. ...

Foreign rulers, the Mongols; foreign materials, Muslim blue; and foreign markets, Iran and Iraq; all played an essential part in the creation of what to many outside China is still the most Chinese of objects, blue-and-white porcelain. Soon these ceramics were being exported from China in very large quantities, to Japan and south-east Asia, across the Indian Ocean to Africa and the Middle East. And far beyond that. Here's author Jenny Uglow:

"Then it comes to Europe, and the Dutch adapt it to their life, and so it comes to Britain, and we adapt it to the forms of jugs we like, the plates we love, and so on. It becomes translated, it's like a wonderful language which is perpetually translated to the culture where it's arriving and is loved. People say it's a very, sort of, elemental thing: it's blue and white, it's the blue sky and the white clouds, or the blue sea and the white sand. And behavioral psychologists who've looked at the way people react to colour say that blue and white is seen as immensely serene and relaxing. But I think also it has to do with the great long history - you know, a thousand years of history - and the way that the blue-and-white designs themselves seem to be mysterious and 'other' and have their own stories as well. It's a combination of colour appeal and historical appeal."

So, eventually, centuries after its creation in Muslim Iran, and its transformation in Mongol China, blue-and-white arrived in Europe and triumphed. Willow-pattern, the style that many people think of when blue-and-white is mentioned, was invented in England in the 1790s by Thomas Minton, and it was as much a fantasy view of China as Coleridge's poem. It was an instant success, and Coleridge may indeed even have been drinking his tea out of a willow-pattern cup as he emerged from his opium dream.

Blue-and-white porcelain was the first truly global luxury product, and one that could be infinitely adapted to suit all local tastes. The David Vases, the earliest dateable blue-and-white, were made as offerings to the gods; in the next programme we're with another high-status object, also used as a means of connecting with the supernatural... it's a ritual throne from the Caribbean.

The History of Art in Three Colours

Decided on Saturday to apply gold leaf to back of a small number of 'flowers', which will be sparsely scattered in the installation (hidden, in fact). Was therefore delighted then to see the trailer for an upcoming art documentary The History of Art in Three Colours. The first episode – about Gold – is Wednesday 25th July, the day before Deptford X opens.

"Dr James Fox explores how, in the hands of artists, the colours gold, blue and white have stirred our emotions, changed the way we behave and even altered the course of history. Together these three colours tell an entirely original and surprising story of ourselves and the world we live in."

Dr Fox "brings us the golden splendour of the Pharaohs, the transcendent blues of the Renaissance and the gleaming white marbles of the Enlightenment, as well as forgotten and curious works of genius. As he journeys across the millennia Fox introduces us to the eccentrics, the dreamers and the visionary artists whose works in gold, blue and white will change the way we see the kaleidoscopic world around us."
www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2012/30/history-of-art-in-three-colours.html

I wonder if the short series will mention the use of blue (and white) in the long history of ceramics – the blue came from cobalt rather than Lapis Lazuli...

Local musician David Aylward, who is helping me with the installation, drew my attention to The Wilton Diptych, housed in the National Gallery, painted as a portable altarpiece for the private devotion of King Richard II.
www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/english-or-french-the-wilton-diptych

John Rocque maps of Deptford

Online purchase of maps for Crackle Glaze project from City of London website:

Crackle glaze teapot

Stuck John Rocque's map of Bow on a teapot – in Photoshop. Needs a bit more work. Deptford teapot to come.

Made In Britain and China's PM visit

Great programme with the lovely Evan Davis, looking at the British economy, and in particular what is going on in China. Of the mighty sale price of the iPhone, most goes to the retailer and pays for the components, then $85 goes to Apple, and $5 to the Chinese company who assembled it.
Pointless making a link to i-Player, but anyway...Made In Britain.

Meanwhile, the Chinese are in town for trades deals, shaking hands with Cameron and getting the old horse guards parade treatment.

PM signs China deals but urges respect for human rights (link here to BBC report)

"After meeting Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao for talks, Mr Cameron hailed what he said was a 'deeper dialogue'. But he said political and economic progress must go hand in hand as respect for human rights was 'the best guarantor' of prosperity and stability.

"Mr Wen urged co-operation and dialogue over the issue, not 'finger-pointing'.

"During talks in Downing Street, the two leaders signed bilateral trade agreements worth £1.4bn and restated their desire to double the value of two-way trade between the countries by 2015...."

BBC News reported this without irony and seemed at a loss as to what Mr Wen might be inferring, what with their piling up of political prisoners such as Ai Wei Wei.

Could it be, ahem, the British treatment of the Chinese some 200 years ago or is more likely, ahem, our treatment of terror suspects? Or could it be, ahem, our government's enormous disregard for trades unions, and the voice of protest (the same voices so right about Iraq)? Pointing the finger indeed, Mr Cameron, as you close down education, libraries, the health service and the arts, and cut local authority grants to ribbons, for the sake of your banker mates.

In his speech about how different our countries and cultures were, Cameron failed to refer even briefly to our shared history – why, for fear of shaming the Chinese? Or because, when the Chinese have been bank rolling the Western world for ten years now and is about to become the No.1 economic power in the world, it is hugely embarrassing to speak of an once vain glorious, now inglorious past.

It's not in the school curriculum, that's for sure.

Lawes Chemical Co. at Harold Wharf

Christopher Mazeika from the Shipwright's Palace contacted me on Facebook to tell me to bid for this ashtray on eBay. For around £7 inc p&p I resurrected my PayPal account to snap up this small representation of my family name in Deptford. I have lived here 30 years and had no idea.

It was admittedly very exciting to find that my namesake (as yet connection unproved) John B Lawes had a chemical works on the very site where I have just exhibited. It is in fact, TOO WEIRD.

John Bennet Lawes founded the chemical fertiliser industry in 1842, with the development of wet process phosphoric acid technology. He was a self taught agricultural chemist and early Victorian entrepreneur who patented a process whereby ground coprolite was mixed with sulphuric acid resulting in a more soluble form of calcium phosphate or "superphosphate".

Coprolite is fossilised animal dung and composed chiefly of calcium phosphate along with minor quantities of organic matter (it is possible to infer the diet of the animal which produced the coprolite on examination). Superphosphate production factories were rapidly built around the country, where coprolite could be extracted. It had been discovered in 1840 that crops grew more strongly where the coprolite existed, but the mineral was not insoluble in water so couldn't be used until Lawes found a way to make it work. Bone ash was also used and many industries around the creek were based on using the discarded body parts of cattle.

Lawes was the founder of fertiliser (although wikipedia has some bloke called the Rev John Stevens Henslow as the one to patent the extraction process, so some more research is required!).

Lawes' first chemical works straddled the south of the present Faircharm site and the north of APT's site. This predates the present APT building.

I saw a map today at a consultation exhibition by Thames Tunnel (Thames Water) at Creekside Centre which showed the chemical works, but I've yet to track this map down. Rather ironic that Lawes made a fortune out of fossilised shit, and now I'm living in Shit Central, this area being one of the largest concentrations of sewage confluence...resulting in one of the few areas on the Thames discharging effluent into the Thames during heavy rain. The overflow is next door to the Ahoy Centre, where I have mudlarked on many an occasion and where some of my pottery fragments have been found.

At the Thames Tunnel consultation today I learned that the tunnel will merely be an overflow pipe, and not as I thought, a giant tunnel of shit channeling all out to sea. On the contrary.

After Creekery I thought my name would be associated with mud (my name is mud), but now it appears it is historically associated with shit. On my doorstep.

A History of the World in 100 Objects

This BBC Radio 4 series is finally coming to an end. And NUMBER 92 on the list (today) is a TEA SET!
I've been waiting for tea and teapots to come up for the last (and sometimes rather dreary) 91 episodes...and I'm really chuffed that my own research is validated by the British Museum's choice...although there would've been even more to say if they'd used the Willow Pattern, but perhaps they thought it a bit tacky...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/i/v71qr/

This week's theme is Mass Production, Mass Persuasion (1780–1914)

Here's the transcript from the History of the World BBC website...

What could be more domestic, more unremarkable, more 'British', than a nice cup of tea? But you could ask that question the other way round and ask what could be 'less' British than a cup of tea, given that tea is made from plants grown in India, China or Africa, and is usually sweetened by sugar from the Caribbean. It's one of the extraordinary ironies of British national identity –- or perhaps it says everything about our national identity – that the drink that has become the worldwide caricature of Britishness has nothing indigenous about it, but is the result of centuries of global trade and a complex imperial history. Behind the modern British cup of tea lie the high politics of Victorian Britain. The story of nineteenth-century empire, of mass production and mass consumption, the taming of a turbulent and drunken industrial working class, the re-shaping of agriculture across continents, the movement of millions of people . . . and a world-wide shipping industry. It's a lot to think about as you tuck into the cucumber sandwiches at the vicarage.

"It takes one into the heart of the Victorian parlour. You have this superficial gloss of politeness and sobriety, but underneath you have this absolutely cut-throat imperial economic agenda." (Celina Fox)

This week we're looking at the global economy in the nineteenth century, at mass production and mass consumption, when all over the industrialised world luxuries became commonplace – clothes and clocks, pepper and porcelain – and some luxuries came to be seen as not only desirable but essential. In Britain, the most ubiquitous of all these former luxuries was tea.

Today's object is the tea set that I've got in front of me now – three pieces of brownish-red pottery. A smallish teapot with a short straight spout, a milk jug and a sugar bowl – the trinity of afternoon tea. They were made – as we can read on their bases – at Wedgwood's Etruria factory in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in the heart of the Potteries. In the eighteenth century Wedgwood had made some of the most expensive ceramics in Britain, but this earthenware tea set shows that by the 1840s, when Wedgwood produced it, the company was aiming at a much wider market. This is quite clearly a mid-range tea set, of a sort that many quite modest British households were now able to afford. But this had not been the case for long.

Among the upper classes, tea had been popular since before 1700. It received celebrity endorsement first from Charles II's queen, Catherine of Braganza, and then again from Queen Anne. It came from China, it was expensive and it was refreshingly bitter, drunk in tiny cups without milk or sugar. People kept their tea in locked tea caddies as if it were a drug, and for those who could afford it, it often was. In the 1750s Samuel Johnson confessed himself a happy addict:

". . . a hardened and shameless tea-drinker, who has for 20 years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnights, and with Tea welcomes the morning." ('The Literary Magazine')

Desire for the drink increased steadily in the eighteenth century. At some point early in the century people had started adding milk and sugar, transforming bitter refinement into sustaining sweetness. Consumption rocketed - tea supplies surged to meet the nation's growing appetite, and prices fell. Unlike coffee, which was seen as a masculine drink, with heavy overtones of all lads together, tea was specifically marketed as a respectable drink suitable for both sexes – and women were particularly targeted. Tea houses and tea gardens flourished in London, china tea sets became an essential part of a fashionable household, and less costly versions in pottery spread throughout society.

There's one more point that needs to be made about our tea set. Although it's made of simple earthenware, it's been given something extra, because all three pieces have been decorated with lacy open-work silver, cut out by hand. This is not for a modest middle-class household – this is a tea set with serious aspirations. It's not just going to keep up with the Jones's, it's going to leave them far behind.

As the eighteenth century went on, and tea got cheaper, the taste for it spread rapidly to the working classes. In 1809 a startled Swedish visitor to Britain noted:

"Next to water, tea is the Englishman's proper element. All classes consume it. In the morning one may see in many places small tables set up under the open sky, around which coal-carters and workmen empty their cups of delicious beverage."

By 1900 every person in Britain was, on average, getting through a staggering three kilos of tea a year. The ruling classes had an interest in promoting tea-drinking among the industrial urban population, who were poor, vulnerable to disease, and thought to be given to disorderly drunkenness. Beer, port and gin had all become a significant part of the diet of men, women and even children, largely because alcohol as a mild antiseptic was much safer to drink than the unpurified city water. Religious leaders and temperance movements joined together to proclaim the merits of tea. A cup of sweet, milky tea made with boiled water was healthy, cheap, energy-giving - and it didn't make you drunk. So in that way it was also a powerful instrument of social control. Here's historian Celina Fox:

"Temperance was huge. Drink and the Victorians was a very big issue. The desire to have a working population that was sober and industrious was very, very strong, and there was a great deal of propaganda to that effect. It was tied in with dissent, Methodism and so on . . . sobriety . . . and tea really was the drink of choice. And on top of that you have got the ritual of afternoon tea, because by this time dinner had become so late - 7.30, 8 o'clock – it was quite a bit of a gap for the British tummy between lunchtime and evening. So again, there is a revival of tea drinking as a sort of meal – for sandwiches and so forth – round about 4 o'clock. So really tea drinking takes off in a massive way in the nineteenth century."

In a remarkable re-branding of the British character, boisterous, rowdy beer was ousted as the defining national drink, and replaced by polite, respectable tea. Songs and poems celebrated tea's triumph over the demon drink:

"With you I see, in ages yet unborn, 
Thy votaries the British Isles adorn,
 Till rosy Bacchus shall his wreaths resign, 
And love and tea triumph o'er the vine."

But our loving, tranquil cup of tea has a violent hinterland. To buy tea from the Chinese, British traders brought huge quantities of opium into the country, a practice that led to the two Opium Wars between Britain and China. We refer to these as the Opium Wars, but in fact they were just as much about tea. And the first Opium War broke out more-or-less at the same time as our teapot was leaving the Wedgwood factory.

Traders began looking for other sources, and in the 1830s the British set up tea plantations around Calcutta. In order to encourage demand, tea from British India was exempted from import duty, and strong, dark Assam tea became the patriotic national "cuppa". As the century went on, further tea plantations were established in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and large numbers of Tamils moved from South India to Ceylon to work on them. The physical geography and the populations of both India and Sri Lanka were re-shaped by the insatiable British thirst for tea. Here's Monique Simmonds from Kew Gardens:

"You would have had hundreds of acres being turned over to tea, especially in India. They also had success when they took it to places like Ceylon. It would have had an impact on local populations, but it also did bring jobs to the area – although low-paid jobs – and started off with males being employed. But then it was mostly females who would be clipping the tea. Local communities in parts of India and China were benefiting from growing the material, and also being able to sell it. But the added value from the trade would have really occurred within the Empire, and especially within Britain."

If there was big money in growing tea, fortunes were also made in shipping it. The tea trade required huge numbers of large fast clippers, and when they docked in British harbours they met cargo vessels coming from the other side of the world, bringing sugar from the Caribbean.

Getting sugar on to the British tea table had, until recently, also had a darker side. The first African slaves in the Americas worked on sugar plantations, the start of the long and terrible triangular trade that carried European goods to Africa, African slaves to the Americas, and slave-produced sugar to Europe. After a long campaign, which involved many of the same people who supported temperance movements, slavery in the British West Indies had been abolished in 1830. But there was still a great deal of slave sugar around – Cuba was a massive producer - and it was of course cheaper than the sugar produced on free plantations. In the 1840s, the ethics of sugar were hot politics.

The most peaceful part of our tea set is of course the milk jug. But it too is part of a huge social and economic transformation. Until the 1830s, for urban-dwellers to have milk, cows had to live in the city – it's an aspect of nineteenth-century life we're barely aware of now. But suburban railways changed all that. Thanks to them, the cows could leave town.

"A new trade has been opened in Surrey since the completion of the South-Western Railway. Several dairies of 20 to 30 cows are kept, and the milk is sent to the various stations of the South-Western Railway, and conveyed to the Waterloo terminus for the supply of the London Market."

Our tea set is in fact a three-piece social history of nineteenth-century Britain. And it's a lens through which we can look at a large part of the history of the world. Here's historian Linda Colley:

"I think the other striking thing for me is, of course, it does underline how much empire – consciously or not – impacts on everybody eventually in this country. If, in the nineteenth century, you are sitting at a mahogany table, drinking tea with sugar, you are linked to virtually every continent on the globe. You are linked with the Royal Navy, which is guarding the sea routes between these continents. You are linked with this great tentacular capital machinery, through which the British control so many parts of the world and ransack them for commodities."

In the next programme we will be in another tea-drinking island nation, but one that – quite unlike Britain – had done all it could to keep itself separate from the rest of the world. Yet the image that I shall be looking at is now known all over the world . . . we'll be in Japan, with a print of Hokusai's 'Great Wave'.

Further notes from the website:

This tea set was made by the famous Staffordshire pottery firm founded by Josiah Wedgwood. It is made of red stoneware, which came to Europe from China via Holland in the 1600s, and can withstand hot water. Tea was initially a luxury product but by 1830 it was increasingly drunk by everyone in Britain using mass-produced pottery and porcelain. Historically this set has been associated with Queen Adelaide (1792 - 1849), wife of William IV. Although simple and originally moderately-priced, the pieces have been ornamented with silver to make them more prestigious and desirable.

How did drinking tea become a patriotic duty in Britain?

Vast geopolitical forces lie behind the creation of this simple tea set. In Britain between 1840 and 1900 the consumption of tea and sugar quadrupled. Mass consumption required mass production on an industrial scale and huge tea plantations were developed by the British in India and Sri Lanka. New sources of sugar were also developed, reducing the role of the former slave plantations in the Caribbean. Tea drinking was regarded as patriotic as it supported British trade and empire, unlike wine and coffee, beverages of imperial rivals.

Looking behind domestic tranquillity

This elegant tea set was probably made for an aristocratic or even royal household. But this object and its manufacturer, Wedgwood, were emblematic of Britain’s own transformation from the ‘polite and commercial society’ of the eighteenth century to the mass consumer society of the nineteenth. The tea set became a desired item for middle and working class households as the custom of sociable family tea parties spread across society and Wedgwood’s tasteful designs, but mass production techniques, flourished along with it.



Yet the wider history of tea consumption belies this picture of domesticity. In the mid-eighteenth century, tea began to edge out coffee as the sociable drink. It was thought to be lighter and more health-giving. Yet China’s black and green teas, produced in its central provinces and transported down to Canton (Guangzhou), the Qing Empire’s only ‘open’ port, were the main source for European and American consumers. The tea of Assam and Ceylon only came on-stream in the 1840s and after.

It was the English East India Company which monopolised the trade, bringing tea westward in exchange for silver and later, Indian raw cotton. Cotton was one of the few commodities the Chinese Empire needed, as its population outgrew local sources of supply.

Then war and politics brutally intervened. The company’s American market was suddenly destroyed after American patriots revolted against the tea taxes imposed by Britain and stormed its ships in the famous ‘Boston tea party’ of 1773, hastening the American War of Independence. 

When the United States became independent in 1783, the East India Company lost its foothold in America, just at the time when its military costs were rising as it invaded larger and larger areas in India itself. Bankruptcy loomed, but this national champion was ‘too big to fail.’

William Pitt’s government intervened and reduced the duties on tea to a fraction of what they had been. 

This was what caused the surge in tea drinking in Britain and ultimately made Wedgwood and other pottery-makers a fortune. But what was there to sell to the Chinese to supply the rising demand? Silver supplies had dwindled and the demand for raw cotton was erratic. 

Opium, however, was another matter. It made its own market. It was grown in western India, which the British now controlled, and sold in China through Canton. The opium habit spread from the court to the aristocracy and to ordinary people, like a sinister version of tea in Britain. A huge illicit trade developed and the Chinese authorities became worried as labourers and the army were infected.

The situation reached breaking point when the Company lost its monopoly in 1834 and private merchants, British and Indian, piled into the trade, flooding the China coast with opium. In 1839 Commissioner Lin Zexu marched to Canton and destroyed the British opium ships. So began the First Opium War of 1839-42 and the beginning of China’s long humiliation.

Two hundred or more years later the Boston Tea Party and the Opium War still haunt world politics. Behind the domestic tranquillity of this pretty tea set lies a history of warfare and exploitation.
Professor Christopher Bayly, Director of the Centre of South Asian Studies, University of Cambridge

Three objects that changed the world

Tea had been drunk in England since the seventeenth century but only really by the classes that could afford it because duties were so high that it became a sort of socially high caste activity, especially for ladies. It was about polite sociability and entertaining your friends around the tea table, but they carefully locked up their tea in tea caddies. 

But by the late eighteenth century, Pitt the Younger realized he could get quite as much duty if he lowered the duty on tea and then more people would drink it, and so gradually from the 1770s through to the 1830s the duties on tea were coming down, and you could say by the time this teapot was manufactured, it was in reach as a drink for the working people.



Tea drinking takes off in a massive way in the nineteenth century. 

It’s pretty widespread, because of course by that time you’ve got distribution. You’ve got tea merchants all around the country, you’ve got the railways distributing it, and it’s generally available. You’ve got packaging, you’ve got individual companies: Brookebond is starting around this time; Lipmans, all of these people are really joining the older tea merchants like Twinings and Fortnum & Mason who started in the eighteenth century. So the whole market is growing, growing, growing. 

Temperance was huge; drink and the Victorians was a very big issue. The desire to have a working population that was sober and industrious was very strong, and there was a great deal of propaganda to that effect. It was tied in with dissent, Methodism and so on – sobriety, and tea really was the drink of choice. 



The middle classes have been exploding away in Britain since the eighteenth century, and the population of Britain is growing massively, and it’s becoming increasingly urbanised, but I think you can just say it’s a huge population growth in Britain at this time. 

London is the largest city in the world, and you’ve got a massive increase in birth rate and the death rate means that the population is growing enormously. The British navy was everywhere, and what the British Navy wanted the British Navy usually got, and the result is that it was able to control these massive movements of goods into not only the London docks but also the other docks, the Liverpool and Bristol and all round the country, Glasgow. 

Yes, you could say they did change the face of the world, for this tiny country off Western Europe.
Dr Celina Fox, art and cultural historian

Creekery - the canvas

The view from Ha'Penny Hatch footbridge looking south at lowtide (August 2010). The bridge seen here is the viaduct carrying the Docklands Light Railway from Greenwich to Deptford Bridge and on to Lewisham. The line was part of the second stage extensions to the DLR and was opened in 1999. 

The official opening of the new Ha'penny Hatch footbridge in 2002 (picture courtesy National Maritime Museum, London).
The footbridge crosses Deptford Creek alongside the railway bridge. The modern lift bridge replaced the old wooden Ha'penny Hatch toll bridge, which closed in the 1920s. It cost a ha'penny – half an old penny – to cross.

Some more history...

Deptford Creek is the last tidal stretch of the River Ravensbourne (Randisbourne) before it flows into a part of the River Thames known as Greenwich Reach. The Creek lies partly in the Borough of Lewisham and partly in the Borough of Greenwich.

The most famous industrial plant in Deptford Creek was the Power Station. It stood at the mouth of the Creek and supplied electricity to Central London. The river provided an unlimited supply of water for cooling and allowed coal from the North East to be shipped in easily.

The bridge over Deptford Creek was the site of the Battle of Deptford Bridge, 17 June 1497, the last battle of the Cornish Rebellion of 1497.

From the 16th century onwards until its closure in the 19th century, the proximity of Royal Dockyard created by Henry VIII at Deptford gave employment to many small shipbuilders on the creek. Queen Elizabeth I knighted Francis Drake on board the Golden Hind in Deptford Creek on Drake's return from his circumnavigation of the globe in 1580. The Golden Hind remained moored in the creek until it broke up.

The tidal Creek has been the site for three corn mills. The power of the tide would drive the machinery to mill the corn, which would be brought into the Creek by barge. The Domesday Book recorded eleven corn mills on the Ravensbourne in the 11th century. The 17th century London diarist John Evelyn bought one of these mills – Brookmills – in 1668 for "grinding colour".

From the early 19th century the Creek also hosted chemical works, engineering works, gasworks, soap and candle factories, sawmills, coal and timber wharves, paint works, breweries, food stores and verdigris works for the manufacture of copper sulphate.

Text gathered from wikipedia and portcities.org.uk

The Blueing of America

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Larry David is at Elaine's house, trying to persuade her to take part in a new Seinfield show. Elaine has a huge collection of blue and white ceramic. The pattern on the plate on the dresser behind Larry is called 'Trophy'.

Thomas Minton's Trophy, c.1800. Listed in 1810 as both a table and a teaware pattern. The design is a direct copy of an original found painted on Chinese porcelain. The same basic pattern was used by numerous factories. Plate diameter 241 mm.

In this project I have largely ignored the American's love of blue and white. I have concentrated on the Eastern hemisphere because this where it originates and where the British Empire grew, based on the tea trade. I particularly liked using the Eastern hemisphere, since it is not the usual representation used in the West when thinking of the world.

In Willow! David Richard Quinter talks about the 'Blueing of America'...

"Animated by the outreach of British imperialism, the Willow Pattern plate was a child of Empire; soon it would travel across Europe and around the globe, to the rhythm of an army's trudge and the slap and thunder of an oak-timbered hull. (The 1935 movies, Mutiny on the Bounty, probably got it just about right in showing Captain William Bligh (Charles Laughton) using in 1789 a Willow Pattern type bowl at shipboard mealtimes).

Wherever the British settled they took Willow Pattern-ware with them, or ordered it delivered to their new lands. Throughout the 19th century the Willow Pattern found as prominent a place in the Canadian or American home, on a New Zealand or Australian sheep station, or in the southern African mansion, as it did – and still does – in a Scottish manse or in an English council flat.

Sometimes it found a resting place where the British were not particularly in evidece – in Mexico, for instance. In the first quarter of the 19th century, shortly after Spain's domination ended, large quantities of British crockery were ordered and shipped to Mexico to grace the tables of a new class, a home-grown elite.

The sundering of political ties between Britain and its former American colonies in the 1770s did not sever the longstanding emotional or familial bonds, and the Willow Patter plate had a busy role in the new American kitchen and dining room as it did across the Atlantic Ocean. Indeed, even that cultivated trend-setter, George Washington, the United States' first president, used, evidently enjoyed and eight times ordered more of the Chinese porcelains, largely blue-and-white Canton- and Naking-style ware – the hand-painted Chinese inspired and derived versions of the Willow Pattern – for his home and official functions at Mount Vernon. "

The Americans began their own trade with China in 1783; 16 months later in May 1785, the Empress of China returned to New York to unload a cargo of fine teas, silks, cotton fabric, cinnamon and 60 tons of porcelain. They had traded furs, pig lead, woolen cloth, coinage, and 30 tons of ginseng (grown in the Appalachian Mountains). The ship's owners made a 25% return on their investment – later to be much more...

to be continued

Discover Greenwich

Last Sunday I visited the spanking new Discover Greenwich, a permanent exhibition housed in the Royal Naval College, which tells the continuing story of the Old Royal Naval College and Maritime Greenwich. I came across an exhibit of pottery fragments:

1. Ceramic chamber pot, late 17th century
Miniature, or child-sized chamber pot in tin-glazed ware with Chinese-style decoration showing figures in a landscape, probably made in Southwark.
2. Ceramic chamber pot, mid 18th century
Large chamber pot in London-area post-medieval redware with internal lead glaze. Probably made at Woolwich or Deptford.
3. Ceramic chamber pot, mid 18th century
Chamber pot in Westerwald stoneware, imported from the Rhineland, Germany. It is decorated with an ornate floral rosette opposite the handle and large lions and medallions.
4. Ceramic dish, late 17th or 18th century
London-area post-medieval redware probably made at Woolwich or Deptford
5. Ceramic plate, early to mid-18th century
Tin-glazed with decoration in darker blue on a pale blue background, showing a peacock standing in a landscape with a border of flowers, a butterfly and a dragonfly.
6. Ceramic dish, 17th century
Tin-glazed with polychrome decoration, showing part of the leaves, stem and petals of a flower. Probably made in Southwark 1630-80.

On the way back I found the tide was out, so I did a spot of beachcombing and found a hoard of blue and white...

Mark Dion - Tate Thames Dig

In the summer last year I went to see 'Classified: Contemporary Art at Tate Britain', which was a display of recent major acquisitions which included stuff by Hirst and the Chapman brothers. I came across Mark Dion for the first time, whose Tate Thames Dig 1999 groups together objects found on the banks of the Thames in a large mahogany cabinet. One of the drawers contained nothing but blue & white ceramic fragments. The piece was the result of Dion's organised dig and beachcomb of the foreshore at Millbank and Bankside and was first displayed when Tate Modern opened. I missed it then, and quite possibly might not have noticed it then either.

"Like a good detective, Dion revels in seeing beyond individual fragments to recognise larger patterns; making connections between often seemingly unrelated objects and events. Through the careful juxtaposition of the finds from the Tate Thames Dig, Dion creates new layers of meaning, linking our thoughts to the constructions of the past and choices for the future."

Taken from Art Now: Mark Dion: Tate Thames Dig 26 October 1999 – 26 February 2000. Text by Clarrie Wallis
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/exhibitions/artnow/markdion/default.shtm

Global trade

Here are a few selective, slightly abridged or paraphrased excerpts from Tom Standage's book A History of the World in Six Glasses (mentioned in previous post), that I found illuminating (my school history education was very poor) and which sent me down the Tea and Burberry route:

"The (East India) Company's first tea imports from the East Indies arrived in 1669...It was initially a minor commodity as the company concentrated first on importing pepper, and then cheap textiles, from Asia. But opposition from Britain's domestic textile producers encouraged the company to place more emphasis on tea; there was no problem with offending domestic producers, since there were none."

A new approach to manufacturing, pioneered by Richard Arkwright in the 1770s "turned Britain into the world’s first industrialised nation". Skilled labourers and craftsmen were replaced by machines situated together in one place around a source of power such as a waterwheel or steam engine. Employees were housed nearby and use of shifts ensured maximum utilisation of expensive machinery. "Each labourer in Arkwright’s mill could do the work of fifty hand spinners, and as other aspects of textile production were automated...production soared. So cheap and abundant were British-made textiles by the end of the C18th that Britain began exporting textiles to India, devastating that country's traditional weaving trade in the process."

The workers were given tea breaks. "Tea kept workers alert on long and tedious shifts and improved their concentration when operating fast moving machines...Factory workers had to function like parts in a well-oiled machine and tea was the lubricant that kept the factories running smoothly". Tea’s healthy properties also meant the workforce could "be more densely packed in their living quarters around the factories in the industrial cities of the British Midlands without risk of disease".

"The popularity of tea also stimulated commerce by boosting the demand for crockery and bringing into being a flourishing new industry. Ownership of a fine tea service was of great importance for rich and poor alike...The most famous of the Staffordshire potters was Josiah Wedgwood, whose company produced tea services so efficiently that it could compete with Chinese porcelain, imports of which declined and eventually stopped in 1791."

"Wedgwood was a pioneer of mass production...No longer did individual craftsmen in his factories make each item from beginning to end; instead, they specialised in one aspect of production and became particularly skilled at it. Items moved in a continuous flow from one worker to the next. This division of labour enabled Wedgewood to use the most talented designers...without requiring them to be potters too." ***

"The political power of the British East India Company...was vast...The company had many friends in high places, and many of its officials simply bought their way into Parliament. Supporters of the EIC also cooperated on occasion with politicians with interests in the West Indies; the demand for West Indian sugar was driven by the consumption of tea. All this ensured that in many cases company policy became government policy."

"The EIC's fortunes revived in 1784" (after Britain's loss of the American colonies) "when the duty on tea imports to Britain was slashed, which lowered the price of legal tea, doubling the company's sales and wiping out smuggling. But the company's power was gradually curtailed amid growing concern over its enormous influence and the corrupt and self-enriching behaviour of its officials...the company's monopoly on Asian trade was removed, except for China. The company concentrated less on trade and more on the administration of its vast territories in India; after 1800 the bulk of its revenue came from the collection of Indian land taxes. In 1834 the company's monopoly on trade with China was removed too."

"The cultivation and preparation of opium in India was, conveniently, a monopoly controlled by the company, which had been quietly allowing small quantities of opium to be sold to smugglers or corrupt Chinese merchants since the 1770s...the company set about increasing the production of opium in order to use it in place of silver to buy tea. It would then, in effect, be able to grow as much currency as it needed."

"Of course, it would never do to be seen to be directly trading an illegal drug in return for tea, so the company devised an elaborate scheme to keep the opium trade at arm's length...(this was) state-sanctioned drug running on a massive scale, which created millions of addicts and blighted countless lives merely to maintain Britain's supply of tea."

An attempt by the Chinese to clamp down on the trade, resulting in the British being expelled from Canton, "caused outrage in London, where representatives of the company and other British merchants had been putting pressure on the British government to force China to open itself up to wider trade...On the pretext of defending the right to free trade, war was declared."

"...as further wars were waged...in each case Chinese defeat entailed additional concessions to the commercial aims of foreign powers. The trade in opium...was legalised, Britain took control of the Chinese customs service; imported textiles and other industrial goods undermined Chinese craftsmen. China became an arena in which Britain, France, Germany, Russia, the United States, and Japan played out their imperialist rivalries, carving up the country and competing for political dominance."

The beginnings of the cultivation of tea in India began around the time the EIC lost its monopoly on trade with China in 1834. "Proponents of the idea argued that...British consumers would be assured of a more reliable supply...and it would provide plenty of jobs for Indian workers, a great many of whom had lost their livelihoods when the company's imports of cheap cloth from British factories wiped out India's traditional weaving industry. Furthermore...the people of India might be encouraged to consume it, which would create an enormous new market."

"...The traditional Chinese manner of producing tea was anything but industrial and had remained unchanged for hundreds of years." There were also many middle men involved in bringing the raw material from the country to the foreign traders "that brought the price paid for each pound of tea to nearly twice the original producer's selling price. An enterprise that produced its own tea in India, however, could pocket the difference...Furthermore, applying new industrial methods...(would) boost productivity, and hence profits, still further. With the cultivation of tea in India, imperialism and industrialism were to go hand in hand."

By 1851, after difficult beginnings, "a tea boom ensued as dozens of new tea companies were set up in India, though many of them failed as clueless speculators bankrolled new ventures without discrimination...production really took off when industrial methods and machinery were applied. The tea plants were arranged in regimented lines; the workers were housed in rows of huts and required to live, work, eat and sleep according to a rigid timetable. Picking the tea could not (and still cannot) be automated, but starting in the 1870s its processing could be...

The rise of India's tea industry had a devasting impact on China's tea farmers and further contributed to the instability of the country..."

"India remains the world's leading producer of tea today, and the leading consumer...(23%), followed by China (16%) and Britain (6%)."

*** And Wedgwood allegedly got the production line idea from reading Père d'Entrecolles, the French Jesuit missionary whose letters recording the processes of Chinese porcelain production were published in 1735. See my blog: January 8, 2009 - A Note on Wedgwood.

Extracts from Around The World in Six Glasses by kind permission of Tom Standage.

A Short History of Tea

If anyone is coming to this blog as a result of A Cup of Tea Solves Everything (which it doesn't, really) and is interested in the history of tea, may I recommend A History of the World in Six Glasses by Tom Standage, in which there are two chapters on tea that offer a concise socio-political story that is a quicker read than other books on tea (listed on this blog). You may want to go on to read those other books (or you might go on to find out about the other beverages Standage covers - coffee, Coke, beer, wine and whiskey).

It's published by Atlantic Books and available on Amazon for seven quid. Standage is business editor of The Economist, is an expert on technology, and is just about to bring out a book about food called An Edible History of Humanity. He has written three other books including The Victorian Internet (described by the Wall Street Journal as a "dot-com cult classic"). He writes a blog at tomstandage.com and describes his speciality as the use of historical analogy, offering a way of seeing the past in the present, and the present in the past. Right up my street.

A note on Wedgwood

From "Ten Thousand Things: Module and Mass Production in Chinese Art" by Lothar Ledderose (1998)*...

...porcelain production in China was a highly systematized, sequential process...it involved a strict division of labour...The most detailed account was given by the French Jesuit missionary Père François Xavier d'Entrecolles (1664-1741)...In 1712 and 1722 he wrote two long letters on porcelain production in Jingdezhen, relying in part on information from Christian converts in the porcelain trade. The Jesuit Jean Baptiste du Halde included the two letters in his monumental and influential Description de la Chine, which was published in Paris in 1735-39 and soon translated into other languages...

It seems no accident that it was during the 17th and 18th centuries, which saw the rise of state factories in France and the beginnings of the industrial revolution in England, that Europe admired China intensely and was intent on learning from it...In Europe, the invention and introduction of machines led to the substitution of mechanical operations for manual work on a large scale. Yet machines were not the only factor that brought about the industrial revolution. The organisation and control of the workforce and the techniques of division of labour were also essential.

In 1769, Josiah Wedgwood (1730-1795) established at Staffordshire, England, the first porcelain production in Europe to enforce factory discipline and make full use of labor. Each of his workers had to be expert in only one part of the production, which was a revolutionary concept at the time. Wedgwood derived the idea from his reading of the letters of Père d'Entrecolles.

*The A.W.Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts, 1998. Published by Princetown University Press. Permission being sought.

Birds Eye View

The first Western balloon flight was in 1783, 25 minutes from Versailles to Paris. The first international flight was in 1785, Dover to Calais in two hours. By this time the fashion for chinoiserie was fading, and yet the Willow Pattern was born and became hugely popular. David Richard Quintner in "Willow! Solving the Mystery of our 200 Year Love Affair with the Willow Pattern" writes:

"Technically, the Willow Pattern design is formed from a series of receding horizontal planes in which, as a rule, the nearest objects to the viewer are shown the largest, and the farthest smallest. Nothing...to challenge European art norms..."

And no exception to ancient Chinese codes for landscape painting. Except for the birds."It is in the way the pair of birds suddenly appears as a design element that we can find the most significant clue to the psychological mind-shift that occurred in western Europe in the 18th century...

"The plate design's aerial view...offered highly charged elements which were the talk-of-the-town...Man and avian nature face to face, eye to eye...The Caughley design...might well have deliberately marked the success of manned ballooning.

"The success of ballooning gave humankind a new perspective on the world; it changed the nature of art's vision; it changed the essence of mapmaking and of concepts of waging war; it changed the way Europeans saw themselves and their symbols."

But how come the Chinese developed the aerial view, Quintner asks, and it is here he speculates on the idea of the Chinese having invented ballooning in the 14th century. After all they had already invented gunpowder in the 9th century, and rockets originated and were developed between 1150 and 1250 AD, and by 1350 multi-stage rockets were actually designed and used...

He also quotes from Chinese Art by William Willetts:

"In China (there is) the 'law of three sections'...each plane is drawn as though seen from the same angle of vision. Buildings and other objects in the middle distance and background, which should show a foreshortening proportional to their height above the horizon, are drawn as though they were at ground level. There are, in fact, three separate horizons...Separate objects are drawn as though the eye were free to vary the horizontal direction along which it looks into the depth of the picture...As a convention of primitive landscape, the bird's eye view may have been suggested by early experiments in map making."

Excerpts from Willow! by kind permission of the publishers: General Store Publishing House, Ontario, Canada. ISBN 1-896182-78-X www.gsph.com

Balloon image: 'Utopian flying machines of the previous century', printed in Paris c.1890-1900. More images: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Image:Early_flight_02561u_(2).jpg