Over three hundred years of tea-drinking in this country has left us a wonderful selection of things used in connection with tea—and also a wonderfulconfusion about some of them. So one ought first to try to distinguish between terms like tea caddy, canister, chest, and teapoy.

Tea was enormously expensive when it first arrived here, so it was put away in a canister, usually of silver. For more security, and also because it was much grander, these canisters would be kept in a trunk-shaped box covered with leather and shagreen, and later in a tea-chest.

These chests came along in time to pick up all the ornament beloved of the Chippendale age—the carved foliage, scrolls and husks, the serpentine shapes, the ormulu handles. Besides a pair of canisters, the chest carried a container for sugar and such items for tea-drinking as a silver mote- skimmer, a spoon with a perforated bowl used for snapping up any “strangers” floating on the surface of the tea.

Antique Collector MagazineBut as tea became cheaper and the use of it spread through all classes, so there arose a demand for something rather less grand to keep the tea in. Instead of free-standing canisters, containers became the tight-fitting boxes we know today, with hinged or sliding lids, and lined with metal foil. It would also be kept in individual tea-boxes known as caddies. The word comes from the Malayan kati, a measure equal to about 1 -k lbs., used in the tea trade and applied first to the little containers in which it was sold.

Eventually the word caddy came to be applied to a tea container, whether it was a single-compartment affair or whether it was the evolved tea-chest with its three fitted boxes.

You will find these caddies in all manner of styles. Beinga highly conspicuous piece of drawing-room equipment, exposed to the full critical gaze of one’s friends and neighbours, they were as lush as the owner could afford. Apart from the richly mounted affairs of Chippendale’s day, the Sheraton era brought in others more restrained in form, but still with veneered panels of expensive woods like hare- wood, satinwood, burr-walnut and fruitwoods, showing fine natural grain effects. Sometimes they were mounted on ball feet, and they often bore an owner’s crest or initials in silver. They were great favourites as gifts, filled with tea, in late Georgian days.

Perhaps the most collectable of the caddies are those in special shapes, like the urn-shaped one. They come in a variety unbelievable until you set out to look for them. There is a whole race of them in the shape of fruits: melons, apples, pears, plums, with a single compartment and the upper part opening as a lid. They even appear as cottages and pagodas.

In materials too the caddy offers extraordinary variety, for quite apart from all the well-known woods (and a good many obscure ones) they are to be found in Pontypool or Usk ware, namely, japanned and painted tin, made first in those Welsh places, and later in the Wolverhampton area. They also appear in papier-mache, some of them with painted views and mother-of-pearl decoration.

Tartan tea-chests were a famous novelty of Victorian days, produced at Laurencekirk in Kincardineshire, by Charles Stiven. They are also very occasionally to be found in what is called paper filigree. Here a pattern is made with rolls of paper glued by their edges in sunken panels in the sides of caddies. The edges of the paper were sometimes gilded, so that it had the appearance of gold filigree. Where a protective glass panel has been put in, these decorations remain fresh and attractive. They were mostly made about the beginning of the nineteenth century.

The teapoy has an interesting history, but before relating it I would like to explain what a teapoy is not, namely a small porcelain or silver jar used for holding tea—which is a canister. How this confusion arose is lost in collecting history, but the error is still used in auctioneers’ catalogues.

This is a tea- caddy which has got itself up on legs, and is a first cousin to a worktable. It started, in fact, as a small three-legged table used especially for tea, and dated from the mid-eighteenth century, when it was the custom for each guest to have his or her tea served individually. The table itself seems to have originated in the East, for it comes from the Hindu tir, for three, and the Persian pae, for feet. The Oxford Dictionary says that the sense and the spelling of the word was influenced by tea, and so—with our old habit of converting foreign words into the sense we want them—we had teapoy.

But in the course of time the separate-table idea faded out, and the small tripod tables were used to hold the caddies; it was but a logical step from there to make both items into one. This first appears to have been done in Regency days, so that the full flower of teapoys is to be seen in the materials and styles of the Victorian era.

The early ones were usually rectangular, the caddy or chest taking the same form as if it were independent, and were usually inlaid with mother-of-pearl or buhl. Afterwards they were made in many different shapes, including the circular. Here too, papier-mache enjoyed a vogue which lasted most of the century, and a real prize would be one of those with a finely painted landscape inside the lid.

Only, remember that not all “japanned or black- painted” pieces are made of papier-mache: the Victorians were great ones for imitating one material with another.

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