The Social Importance of the Tea Room by Vicki Delany

Jenn McKinlay: Lately, I've been on a sun tea bender (because Arizona!) and naturally I had to try the two favorite brands of the Brits - P.G. Tips and Yorkshire Gold. While I've enjoyed them both, I've discovered P.G. Tips does edge out the Yorkshire Gold for boldness of flavor, but that's neither here nor there. My point, and I do have one, is that today we have the fabulous Vicki Delany here to talk about her wonderful Tea by the Sea mystery series and the history of the tea room. Enjoy!

Vicki Delany: If I mention a tea room, I bet that puts you in mind of a small restaurant located in a grand hotel or a charming village. It will be decorated in either a flower pattern or pastel shades (or both), with comfortable chairs arranged around a low table, and fresh flowers on the table. Well-dressed guests, women mostly, but some men, pour loose leaf tea from fine China teapots into matching cups and nibble on crustless sandwiches, delicate pastries, and freshly baked scones served with jam and clotted cream. The conversation is light, friendly, and always polite.

Your image would be correct, in most cases, in modern times. But the history of the ‘tea room’ is more complex and meaningful than first meets the eye.

Lily Roberts, the protagonist of my Tea by the Sea series from Kensington, loves the history and traditions of afternoon tea and she was eager to explore the origins of tea rooms such as hers before she opened her traditional afternoon tea room located on Cape Cod Bay.

Book One

In order to keep up with Lily I had to do research for myself, and I was surprised to find to find a far deeper and more significant history than I was expecting.  Tea rooms, in both England and the United States, were of critical importance in the development of women’s emancipation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  This is the history that is often overlooked, particularly in the sort of high school or university courses us of a ‘certain age’ experienced, as regards groups such as women, long considered by the writers of history books as not particularly interesting or worth paying much attention to.

 

The origin of afternoon, as today can be experienced almost anywhere in the world, were anything but radical. It all began in 1840 when Anna, Duchess of Bedford, a friend and lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, felt a mite peckish late in the afternoon.  Her dinner, the main meal of the day, would usually have been served around eight o’clock, and she needed something to see her through.  I think we all can relate to that.

The hungry Anna instructed her butler to bring tea and some bread and butter, perhaps a slice of cake or pastry, to her around four o’clock.

Hardly an earth-shaking act, you would think. But it was. 

Anna decided she enjoyed this so much, she began inviting friends to join her over this afternoon tea. The friends liked the idea, fashionable hostesses leapt on the bandwagon, and the concept spread rapidly through the upper classes of British society.  As well as a ‘snack’, afternoon tea provided an opportunity for women to meet their friends in the middle of the day for company and conversation, something previously lacking in the restricted lives of aristocratic women. So popular did ‘taking tea’ become, some wealthier women created separate rooms or spaces in their gardens specifically for that purpose.  By the end of the century, middle class women were inviting friends to join them for afternoon tea in their homes.  I say ‘in their homes’ because in almost all places, restaurants and pubs and taverns were either closed to women or only allowed women in the company of a man. 

We think of the British as a nation of tea drinkers, and they are, but it wasn’t always so.  For a long time coffee reigned supreme, not just as a drink but as a center of business and political life for men of all income levels and classes who gathered in the coffeehouses. (Women were not allowed). The first coffeehouse was opened in England in 1652 and by 1739 there were over 550 coffeehouses in London alone. 

But the reign of coffee was coming to an end as tea became increasingly popular, beginning in 1662 when the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza arrived in England to marry Charles II. A lover of tea, Catherine popularized it in her new country. For a long time, however, tea was a luxury only the wealthy could afford due to the high taxes on the imported beverage. Smuggling was rife and eventually the tax was slashed in 1783, destroying the smuggling trade and making tea an important part of everyday life.

Women were banned from the aforementioned coffee houses, and thus from the business being conducted there, but they made their mark on the new ‘tea rooms’.  The tea room began to be popular in the late nineteenth century as women who couldn’t afford to have a separate room in their house or a private garden area to entertain their friends looked for a socially acceptable place to enjoy a light meal and conversation in the company of only other women. 

By the beginning of the 20^thcentury, women were moving more freely through the streets of the city, out shopping and the like, but still they lacked a place to sit down and have a tea break or something to eat or to meet with their friends. The tea room provided that.  Thus the tea room quickly became a welcoming place for women. As well as having tea in such a place, owning and working in a tea room was an ‘acceptable’ occupation for a woman, at a time when there weren’t many of such.  

But even more, these tea rooms were public places for women to gather and, in many cases, talk about more than gossip and family.  They began to talk politics and specifically to organize their campaigns for the right to vote. 

The tea rooms run by the Aerated Bread Company were described as “an enormous move to freedom.”  Many tea rooms played a central part in the suffrage movement, providing meeting space where activists could meet outside their homes (and disapproving male relatives), and offer fund-raising venues.  

In the United States, the first tea rooms also provided employment for women, often in their own homes as women would open a room in their house to serve meals to travellers.  Late in the nineteenth century, these tea rooms were moved outside the private home and into the sort of separate business we’re familiar with today.  But they still provided an acceptable opportunity for business-minded single women to earn their own living or married women trying to earn some extra income. 

As in England, in the U.S., women on their own or in the company of other women were welcome in a way they still were not in restaurants. In the early Nancy Drew books, Nancy and her friends often stopped at a tea room for refreshment. This indicates that the girls were independent minded, not needing the company of a man to escort them to a restaurant. 

These days, of course, women can go pretty much anywhere we want, either alone or with women friends, and we don’t need tea rooms to preserve our reputations.  When we gather for afternoon tea it’s usually on vacation or for a special occasion.  

Next time you’re sipping your Darjeeling or Lapsang Souchong, and spreading clotted cream on a buttery scone, raise your fine China cup not only to Anna, Duchess of Bedford, but to the legions of women who had the idea of setting aside a room in their house, or opening a small space on the main street, and thus opening the door to allow women to march through. 

Readers, I’d love to know where you’ve had a memorable afternoon tea? Not your thing? What is your thing?

Book Two

National bestselling author Vicki Delany’s delightful Tea by the Sea mystery series continues, as Cape Cod tearoom proprietress and part-time sleuth, Lily Roberts, stirs up trouble when she unwittingly serves one of her grandmother’s B&B guests a deadly cup of tea . . .

 
Lily has her work cut out for her when a visit from her grandmother Rose’s dear friend, Sandra McHenry, turns into an unexpected—and unpleasant—McHenry family reunion. The squabbling boils over and soon Tea by the Sea’s serene afternoon service resembles the proverbial tempest in a teapot. Somehow, Lily and her tearoom survive the storm, and Sandra’s bickering brethren finally retreat to Rose’s B&B. But later that evening, a member of their party—curmudgeonly Ed French—dies from an apparent poisoning and suddenly Tea by the Sea is both scene and suspect in a murder investigation!
 
Mercifully, none of the other guests fall ill. They all ate the same food, but Ed always insisted on bringing his own special blend of herbal teas. So it seems, amid the whining and dining, someone snuck up to one of Lily’s cherished teapots and fatally spiked Ed’s bespoke brew, but who? Was it Ed’s long-estranged sister-in-law? Did teenage troublemaker Tyler take a prank too far? Or perhaps the family’s feuds have been steeping for longer than anyone realizes? It’s up to Lily, Rose, and their friends to get to the bottom of the poisoned pot and bag the real culprit behind the kettle murder plot.

Vicki Delany is one of Canada’s most prolific and varied crime writers and a national bestseller in the U.S. She has written more than forty books: clever cozies to Gothic thrillers to gritty police procedurals, to historical fiction and novellas for adult literacy. She is currently writing four cozy mystery series: the Tea by the Sea mysteries for Kensington, the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop series for Crooked Lane Books, the Catskill Resort mysteries for Penguin Random House, and the Lighthouse Library series (as Eva Gates) for Crooked Lane. Vicki is the recipient of the 2019 Derrick Murdoch Award for contributions to Canadian crime writing. She lives in Prince Edward County, Ontario.