Tea made in Poland! Perish the thought

With Twinings moving production of its tea from North Shields to Poland, what would Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers think?

Sri Lanka acknowledges that it was a Briton who saved the day when coffee rust wiped out the island's previous staple crop in the 1860s Photograph: Sean Smith for the Guardian

Tea's addictively bitter aftertaste is one of many aspects of the British national drink which are given the credit for one of history's great cultural hijackings. Understandable soreness at the Twinings tea factory in North Shields, which closes in September next year, is a reminder of how possessive we are about the cup that cheers.

The closure is a tragedy but local unions say that staff – 263 are retiring or looking for work elsewhere – have resigned themselves to last November's news that production will be transferred to Poland to save money. The firm has given long notice, training support, other jobs within the group and enhanced redundancy. Britain has benefited many times from similar closures overseas and transfers here.

The bitterness, however, has come from the current scheme for Polish workers to visit the Tyne and learn its tea lore from the staff they are replacing. Not unusual, again; most of us will one day have to help someone to fill our shoes. But tea produced in Poland? No, no. That is against the laws of God and man.

In a sense it is. One of the buttresses of conviction that tea is our sacred drink is the fact that it so evidently is not the continental Europeans'. Generations of UK holidaymakers have been appalled at watery rubbish in the lands where coffee rules. The United States is every bit as bad. They crown the offence by a fetish with teabags of gaudy colour and maximum complication (which, alarmingly, through globalisation, are making some headway here).

Yet "British" tea is a sleight of hand, at its cheekiest in the marketing of Yorkshire Tea by Taylor's of Harrogate, whose adverts in distant places such as the London Underground subliminally suggest that the hills of the north are green with plantations of Camellia sinensis. When challenged, the reasoning goes that the blend is especially suited to Yorkshire water; but there are many variants of the latter, all deliciously different, and only a handful of bottled versions are available anywhere near the London Underground.

We do have a case, though, against complaints of brand-theft by the world's original tea drinkers, who start beyond what you might call the Milk and Sugar Curtain, a border which follows the line of the old Iron Curtain and then loops round the Arab world, with its venerable and many-flavoured infusions. Their ceremonies are even more courtly than ours, and have the same mystique about pot-warming, pouring sequence and to-strain-or-not-to-strain – but Britons have laid down many more lives for the drink.

"Follow on!" say the ghosts of Rudyard Kipling's imperial pioneers in Song of the Dead, "For we are waiting, by the trails that we lost." Many of those trails led to survey sites for the planting of tea, or investments which failed in factories for sorting and grading its leaves. Sri Lanka rightly claims some of the best tea in the world, especially high-grown; but its industry acknowledges that it was a Briton – actually a Scotsman, but that is not far from Tyneside – who saved the day when coffee rust wiped out the island's previous staple crop in the 1860s. James Taylor's initial 19 acres at Loolecondera met the demands of Kipling's ghosts, and prompted another grand old imperial saying when Sir Arthur Conan Doyle declaimed in 1892: "Not often is that men have the heart, when their one great industry is withered, to rear up another as rich to take its place. The tea fields of Ceylon [as Sri Lanka was then known in the UK] are as true a monument to courage as is the lion at Waterloo."

It is much easier to say than to do, but that is the way forward for Tyneside. And who knows, it may be helped by the goodwill which comes from helping the Poles to deal with tea. In the same story, De Profundis, Conan Doyle refers to the paradox that this island's history is cosmopolitan, while so much of the European continent's has been insular. That has been another recipe, like tea, for success.

Source-Guardian UK