I was going to look for another tea producing country, but a reader sent me a scan of this, and it is a fitting end to the week, as well as a very evocative one of how tea used to, and still does, come by ship, in tea crates, from the docks, from all over the world. So it is probably the most international card we featured all week.
This set does not seem to appear in any of our trade indexes. At first I thought it might be from "Rose of the Orient", but those cards are titled in white boxes on the front of each card, have a different back, and a silver border.
We believe our card today comes from what is a complete set of twelve cards, each measuring 85 x 60 m/m. They are unnumbered, and it is rather an odd set, as it seems to be split into sub series, but all have that same back, of the lady on the ladder filling a teapot of sizwe which could indeed "fill the Nation`s teapot" - and probably several other Nations besides.
The cards are titled as follows, following the journey from the planting to home -
- Tea Planting for ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S ( a man putting a plant in the soil)
- Tea Picking for ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S (three ladies with baskets plucking tea from a bush)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S. Tea Estate (a large building viewed across a brown field of tea bushes)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S. Tea Factory (a red building with palm trees to the left hand side as viewed)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea Blending (a machine with two drums, and two men)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea Packing Machine (a large green machine, no operators)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea Consignment (packing crates at a dock)
- Shipping ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S TEA (a giant ship at the same dock)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea Warehouse, Ordsall Lane, SALFORD and ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea Warehouse, Leman St. LONDON (a double card with two pictures of buildings, one atop the other in vertical format)
- ALWAYS BUY ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S TEA (a scene in a shop with a lady in pink sitting down just off centre)
- ENGLISH AND SCOTTISH JOINT C.W.S Tea in the Home (a family indoors at a table)
that is eleven cards, but there is an odd man out, literally, a caricatured man running with a box of pure Ceylon Tea. He is not like any of the other cards, but he does say CO-OPERATIVE No.11 Ceylon Tea - and he is generally found with groups of these cards