Edward Bramah

Feb 15 2008 by Peter Elson, Liverpool Daily Post

WITH the rise of the frothy-coffee fashion, this tea-drinking island of ours is not as fully powered as it once was by the cup that cheers, but this beverage still defines Britishness.

The old tea brands create a poetry of their own: Lipton’s, Home & Colonial, Horniman’s, Maypole, Ridgways and Mazawatte.

The coffee house, though, also has a long and distinguished history in lubricating our leisure and political and cultural debate.

All the more reason why both drinks should be celebrated in a dedicated museum. An ideal candidate to achieve this was Edward Bramah, a man with a double career in tea and coffee, who has died, aged 77. His perhaps obsessive pursuit of his interest gave him the reputation as a world expert on tea and coffee, and he declared: “There are no better things in life than tea and time.”

After a chance meeting on a train in 1950 with a tea planter, Bramah, released from Royal Navy National Service, joined the tea trade as a taster with J Lyons & Co. In fact, a relative, Sir Joseph Banks, introduced the tea trade to India.

Switching to a coffee brokers, he worked in Tanzania and Kenya, but in 1956 rejoined tea with China’s national tea trade corporation, with a brief to boost China tea consumption, only for his job to be axed in the Cultural Revolution.

A decade later, believing that tea drinking was in decline, he started his own company and designed coffee filter machines. The early coffee machines he based his research upon and discarded formed the core of his historic collection.

Bramah traced British tea-drinking to King Charles II’s wife, Catherine of Braganza, who introduced it to courtiers. The teapots in his museum, in Southwark, near London’s rebuilt Globe Theatre, date back to 1690 and he included the invention of the tea bag. Naturally, the latter was not his “cup of tea”.

With two relocations, it was tough to keep the museum viable and a two- year gap elapsed before its 2002 reopening. Bramah’s 1972 book, Tea and Coffee, 300 Years of Tradition, was also lapped up by that other great tea-drinking island nation, Japan, and he was deeply honoured when the Japanese ambassador visited the museum.

Edward Bramah, tea and coffee merchant; born April 4, 1931,died, January 15, 2008