Spode in a Teacup
There’s simply nothing like a great cuppa. I prefer it in a fine china cup because there’s just something about a china cup that brings out the very best characteristics of the tea, no matter the brand, whether loose leaves or teabags something happens to it. I’m also betting that you know someone, somewhere that owns a ‘Willow’ patterned tea set or earthenware.
“English Fine Bone china is one of the great classic products, universally admired and generally accepted as the premier material for tableware, an inspiration for passionate collecting and everyday pleasure. It’s also a truly universal artefact: in daily use throughout the world and in its finest and most prestigious forms reserved for the most aristocratic tables. Yet the man who inspired all this couldn’t have had more humble beginnings.
Josiah Spode
At the age of six, Josiah Spode saw his father buried in a pauper’s grave. At seven, he was put to work in a pottery, working a 12-hour day. In 1794 and by the time he was sixteen his life took a turn for the better, when he was apprenticed to Thomas Whieldon who was then the most successful potter in Staffordshire. Five years later he moved on to work as a skilled potter for William Banks of Stoke before opening his own small factory, making cream-coloured and blue painted earthenware.
He was eventually able to purchase the factory from his former employer, William Banks in Stoke-on-Trent where the company has remained ever since. The rest, as they say, is history’. In essence the history of a whole industry because in the space of 30 years Josiah Spode’s outstanding skills and creativity were to produce the two most important developments in English ceramics.
His reputation was initially secured by the perfection of blue underglaze printing on earthenware from hand-engraved copper plates in 1784. It not only ensured the future of his company but was essential for the phenomenal growth of the English tableware industry that followed. But Josiah Spode Snr did a great deal more. In the closing years of the 18th Century he produced the single most significant development in the history of his industry – the perfection of the formula for Fine Bone China. Its brilliant whiteness and delicate translucency inspired new standards of artistry, skill and finish that when it was put on the market led the way forward for the whole industry.
Josiah Spode Jnr
While Josiah Spode Snr was carrying out his pioneering work in Stoke, his son, Josiah Jnr was in London, proving himself equally adept at marketing his company’s products. He’d opened a showroom and shop to sell his father’s wares in Cripplegate and in a short few years he had appointed a travelling representative. It was probably their knowledge of potential markets that led Spode Snr to concentrate on the experiments that eventually created Fine Bone China.
After a century of importing Chinese porcelain, the East India Company started reducing its trade in 1793 and stopped completely in 1799. Profitability had been eroded by an ‘auction-ring’ and demand was drastically reduced by the neo-classic fashion in interior design with which Chinese blue and white decoration was not compatible. Nevertheless, the Spodes were ready to demonstrate their outstanding ability to seize an opportunity.
Use of Bone Ash
The use of bone ash had been known from the Middle Ages when it was first used in cupels (a small cup made of magnesium sulphate that is a material capable of absorbing lead) for the assaying or the analysis of an ore and other types to find out the nature and proportion of the ingredients of metals. Interest in it as a tableware ingredient emerged about 1750 and in the next fifty years several experimental formulations were tried. However, these were ‘soft-paste’ porcelains with the inclusion of bone ash. Whereas what we now know as bone china is a true porcelain of china clay and Cornish stone with 45%-50% calcined (that is, made powdery by the action of heat) bone.
By 1796, Spode I was at the very least on the verge of perfecting bone china as demonstrated by an invoice to William Tatton containing the first known reference to ‘English China’. Certainly, by 1799, two years after his father’s death, Spode II was successfully selling bone china initially branded as ‘Stoke China’. Such was its immediate impact and obvious superiority, that the rest of the industry was forced to follow. With his flair for innovation the younger Spode always managed to stay ahead gaining the Company’s first of six Royal Warrants following a factory visit by the Prince of Wales in 1806.
Spode Blue and the Willow Pattern
Few ceramic wares have aroused so much interest and affection as Spode blue. The Willow pattern was developed by Josiah Spode from an original Chinese pattern called ‘Mandarin’ in about 1790. The pattern has been extremely popular ever since its introduction although the legend attached to it is apocryphal. Many similar patterns were produced in the late 1700s and early 1800s by several different manufacturers.
In the late 18th early 19th century any blue printed design imitating Chinese porcelain was often described as Willow but the main features of the true Willow pattern are:
1. The bridge with three persons crossing it
2. The willow tree
3. The boat
4. The main tea house
5. The two birds; and
6. The fence in the foreground of the garden
There is apparently no Chinese pattern that contains all the features of the standard Willow pattern. Three different versions were produced in the early Spode period (pre 1833) with differences in the engraving technique and the colours of blue used. In the late 1990s Willow was reintroduced as part of The Blue Room Collection by Spode. In June 2000 whilst making repairs to a building at Spode huge quantities of this pattern were found that had been used as foundations for a wall. The pieces were dated to the very early 1800s and included shards from all sorts of tableware shapes. Forest Landscape pattern was also found.”
George Orwell on a Good Cuppa
The writer George Orwell was quite disposed to a good cuppa, so disposed that he made up some rules about how to make it. Aside from sweet-toothed tea drinkers, the author also displayed a distaste for scientists. So to mark the 100th anniversary of Orwell’s birth back in June, 2003 the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC) decided to look at his 11-point formula and rubbish a good many of his supposedly “golden” rules! I’ve written this little storm in a teacup up for your amusement.
Orwell:
1. Use tea from India or Ceylon (Sri Lanka), not China
2. Use a teapot, preferably ceramic
3. Warm the pot over direct heat
4. Tea should be strong – six spoons of leaves per 1 litre
5. Let the leaves move around the pot – no bags or strainers
6. Take the pot to the boiling kettle
7. Stir or shake the pot
8. Drink out of a tall, mug-shaped tea cup
9. Don’t add creamy milk
10. Add milk to the tea, not vice versa
11. No sugar!
Dr Andrew Stapley
Dr Andrew Stapley, a chemical engineer at Loughborough University brought the weight of his scientific knowledge (and shameless personal preferences) to bear on the question of the perfect cuppa and found that Orwell was wrong on a number of points. Orwell’s six-spoons of tea per pot he thought was ‘mightily extravagant’ when the author set down this rule during post-war rationing and some think it’s still too strong these days.
The RSC endorses no more than a single spoon of leaves. For my tuppenneys worth I’d say, fill the pot with hot water from the tap while the jug’s boiling, add 1 teaspoon of tea leaves per person AND one for the pot! My mother always did is the rationale! Rotate the pot three times or a sufficient number of times till you think it’s perfectly dizzy!
As for adding milk to the tea after it is poured, the RSC issues a stern scientific warning against the practice. It seems that dribbling a stream of milk into hot water makes ‘denaturation of milk proteins’ more likely. And who would want that? “At high temperatures, milk proteins which are normally all curled up foetus-like begin to unfold and link together in clumps. This is what happens in UHT [ultra heat-treated] milk and is why it doesn’t taste as good a fresh milk,” says Dr Stapley.
It’s better to have the chilled milk massed at the bottom of the cup, awaiting the stream of hot tea. This allows the milk to cool the tea, rather than the tea ruinously raise the temperature of the milk. Also, unlike in Orwell’s rules, Science seems to bear no grudge against those who would take sugar with their tea, provided it’s white sugar. Indeed, the addition of sugar is praised since it “acts to moderate the natural astringency of tea” which translated into unscientific terms means that it makes tea, wait for it, less bitter!
This of course would have been heresy to Orwell. “Tea is meant to be bitter, just as beer is meant to be bitter,” he said. What would he have made of the alcopop suggested by the RSC? He would recognise and appreciate some elements of Dr Stapley’s perfect cuppa. The RSC brew uses Indian Assam tea leaves which falls within Orwell’s tight stipulations. He said no other nation’s tea made him feel “wiser, braver or more optimistic”. There is no real scientific reason for Assam winning out over other leaf varieties, it just happens to be a strong tea to Dr Stapley’s own taste. “While some things are backed by science, others like the choice of Assam are based on my own preferences.
Finally, the RSC recommends that the perfect cup of tea made by following ITS formula and should be drunk while reading George Orwell’s account of 1930s drudgery and vagrancy Down and Out in Paris and London. Well, no disrespect to the late Mr Orwell, but I beg to differ. Having brewed the perfect cup of tea, I recommend that you sip it while reading yesterday’s blog. Easy peasy!
