Stirring up a story in a teacup (From The Northern Echo)

Stirring up a story in a teacup

10:38am Saturday 7th November 2009

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A DELICATE aroma wafts on the wisps of steam rising from the teacup. Usually, it’s a sweet citrusy perfume, but this morning, the scent of the Earl Grey has a whiff of dismay about it.

Twinings wants to close its tea-packing plant in Earl Grey Way, North Shields, jettisoning 263 jobs as it moves to Poland’s cheaper shores. In doing so, it will sever a strange North-East historical link, because the Earl Grey of the scented tea is the same Earl Grey who scans the skies of Newcastle from the top of his monument.

Hailing from a long-established Northumbrian family, Grey was an incredibly ambitious, but easily discouraged politician. A brilliant orator – one of his speeches is said to have hastened Prime Minister George Canning’s death – he flitted for most of his career on the edge of power, often in despair and regularly retired in a huff back to Alnwick.

George IV hated him so much he banned him from government for a decade, but the king’s death in 1830 coincided with revolutions breaking out across Europe, and 66- year-old Grey surprisingly found himself in Downing Street.

Nowadays, he’d get nowhere near the top job. In the early 1790s, Grey had been “a fractious and exigeant lover” of the Duchess of Devonshire who refused to leave her husband for him. In 1793, she fled to France to have Grey’s baby which was then brought up at Fallodon in Northumbria by Grey’s parents as his sister.

He married in 1794, his wife faithfully bore him 11 children, but even when he became Prime Minister at the time of his life when most men think only of Viagra, he was having an affair with a Russian princess.

But as PM, he saved Britain from revolution.

Throughout his career, he advocated parliamentary reform to clean up corruption and give more people the vote. In 1832, the House of Lords rejected his reform and London was on “the eve of the barricades”.

His Conservative rival, the Duke of Wellington, was unable to form a government in such hostile circumstances, and so Grey returned with a powerful mandate to push through the Great Reform Act. True, you still had to be pretty toffish to get the vote, but it allowed Britain to move gently into the new age where industrialists became the new aristocracy.

In the same year, Grey passed another momentous piece of legislation, abolishing slavery in the British Empire.

Exhausted after changing the political landscape for ever, he retired in 1834 to Howick, in Northumbria, where he died in 1845.

It is said that somewhere along life’s journey, Grey somehow saved the son of a Chinese mandarin from drowning. In gratitude, the mandarin gave him some aromatic tea.

When Grey was down to his last teapotful, he gave the leaves to Richard Twining, head of London’s poshest tea importer, to replicate.

Twining discovered it was oil from the rind of the bergamot – a yellow orange which is less sour than a lemon, but nearly as bitter as a grapefruit – that made the Earl’s tea so piquant.

And even though Grey had never set foot in China, and even though he had never saved anyone from death by water, and even though bergamot – which grew only in Calabria in Italy – was unknown in the Far East, it is this Earl Grey who is to be found in the finest caddies just as sure as it is him to be seen on the top of his tall column in the centre of Newcastle.

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