A History of the World in 100 Objects (78 page)

This particular chronometer sailed on many ships – always issued and set, as others were, at Greenwich; but it is famous because in 1831 it was issued to HMS
Beagle
, the ship that carried Charles Darwin on his great voyage to South America, the Galapagos Islands and on around the world, which ultimately led to his theory of evolution and his great work
On the Origin of Species
.

The
Beagle
was on a mission to map the coastline of South America, work which relied on very accurate measurements of longitude and latitude. The chronometer for the first time allowed absolutely accurate charting of the oceans, with all that implied for establishing safe and rapid shipping routes. It was another great step in the Enlightenment project of mapping – and therefore controlling – the world. To allow for any discrepancies or failures, the
Beagle
carried twenty-two chronometers: eighteen, including ours, were provided by the Admiralty, and four by the captain, Robert FitzRoy, who felt that eighteen was not enough for such a lengthy and important job. After five years at sea, the eleven chronometers still working at the end of the voyage showed a discrepancy of just thirty-three seconds from Greenwich time. For the first time, a detailed chronometric girdle had been put around the Earth.

By the middle of the nineteenth century it was established that all British shipping would take Greenwich as its point of reference for time and therefore for longitude, and all the oceans of the world had been mapped by British ships on that basis. As a result, the Greenwich Meridian and Greenwich Mean Time were increasingly widely used by the international community until, in 1884, the Washington Convention formally ratified the practice. There was one notable exception: the French defiantly stuck to their Paris Meridian for some decades more, but eventually they too fell into line, and every country now fixes its time zone by reference to Greenwich Mean Time. For the first moment in history the world was working to one timetable. Global time, a concept almost unimaginable 100 years earlier, had arrived.

But on the
Beagle
our chronometer was also witness to another, quite separate shift in the nineteenth century’s understanding of time. Darwin’s voyage on the
Beagle
and his subsequent work on evolution pushed human origins – and indeed the origins of life itself – into an unthinkably distant past. Geologists had already demonstrated that the Earth was far older than previously believed, undermining the calculation made by Archbishop Ussher (see
Chapter 2
). This new concept of deep time – going back tens of millions of years – destroyed the established historical and biblical frameworks of thought. The shifting parameters of time and change forced the nineteenth century to rethink from scratch the very nature and meaning of human existence. Professor Steve Jones, a geneticist and expert on Darwin and evolution, considers the significance of the discovery of deep time:

I think what deep time did was to make people realize that the Earth was not unchanging. The biggest transformation since the Enlightenment has been a shift in our attitude to time, the feeling that time is effectively infinite, both the time that’s gone and the time that’s to come. It’s worth remembering that the summit of Everest, not long ago in the context of deep time, was at the bottom of the ocean; and some of the best fossils of whales are actually found high in the Himalayas.

These were enormous and belief-shattering ideas for many people in the nineteenth century, but time was also changing in a much more day-to-day, or rather hour-to-hour, way. Thanks to clockmakers like Earnshaw, precise and reliable clocks and watches became ever more affordable. Before long the whole of Britain was running by the clock, and the measurement of time had been severed from the natural cycle of days and seasons. The clock ruled every aspect of life – shops and schools, pleasure and work. As Charles Dickens wrote, ‘There was even railway time observed in clocks, as if the sun itself had given in.’ Nigel Thrift explains:

The chronometer, an exceptionally accurate clock, meant that gradually an ever more accurate measure of time became possible, and that of course worked through other things in the nineteenth century to produce ever more standardized time. A good example of that is the railway, where standard time based on the meridian was first applied by the Great Western Railway in 1840 and gradually that standard time became general. By 1855, 95 per cent of towns had switched to GMT, and by 1880 GMT became the reference point across the UK by Act of Parliament. But it is worth remembering that until that point, certainly until the beginning of railway time, places had all run to local time, and if you were travelling, Leeds, for example, was six minutes behind London; Bristol was ten minutes. It didn’t matter then. But it mattered when you started getting fast travel. Everyone went on to one time, gradually but very certainly.

Just as people adopted a common standard time, so numerous aspects of working and daily life were becoming rigidly fixed by the clock, from clocking on at work to school hours and tea-time – which is the subject of our next chapter.

What could be more domestic, more unremarkable, more
British
, than a nice cup of tea? You could of course put the question the other way round and ask what could be less British than a cup of tea, given that tea is made from plants grown in India or China and often sweetened by sugar from the Caribbean. It is one of the ironies of British national identity – or perhaps it says everything about our national identity – that the drink which has become the worldwide caricature of Britishness has nothing indigenous about it, but is the result of centuries of global trade and a complex imperial history. Behind the modern British cup of tea lie the high politics of Victorian Britain, the stories of nineteenth-century empire, of mass production and of mass consumption, the taming of an industrial working class, the reshaping of the agriculture of continents, the movement of millions of people, and a worldwide shipping industry.

By the middle of the nineteenth century in Britain some luxuries came to be seen as not only desirable but essential. The most ubiquitous of all was tea, a vital ingredient of life for every part of the British population. The object that highlights this change is a tea set made up of three pieces of red-brown stoneware: a smallish teapot about 14 centimetres (6 inches) high with a short straight spout, a sugar bowl and a milk jug. They were made – as we can read on their bases – at Wedgwood’s Etruria factory in Stoke-on-Trent, Staffordshire, in the heart of the Potteries. In the eighteenth century Josiah Wedgwood had made some of the most expensive stoneware ceramics – in jasper and basalt – in Britain, but this tea set shows that by the 1840s, when Wedgwood produced it, the company was aiming at a much wider
market. This is quite clearly mid-range pottery, simple earthenware of a sort that many quite modest British households were then able to afford. But the owners of this particular set must have had serious social aspirations, because all three pieces have been decorated with a drape of lacy hallmarked silver. The historian Celina Fox explains that tea-time had become a very smart event:

In the 1840s the Duchess of Bedford introduces the ritual of afternoon tea, because by this time dinner had become so late, seven-thirty to eight o’clock, that it was a bit of a gap for the British tummy between lunchtime and evening. For a while there was a revival of tea-drinking, as a sort of meal for sandwiches and so forth, around four o’clock.

Among the upper classes, tea had been popular since before 1700. It received celebrity endorsement from Charles II’s queen, Catherine of Braganza, and from Queen Anne. It came from China, it was expensive, refreshingly bitter and drunk in tiny cups without milk or sugar. People kept their tea in locked tea caddies, as if it were a drug; for those who could afford it, it often was. In the 1750s Samuel Johnson confessed himself a happy addict:

A hardened and shameless tea drinker, who has for twenty years diluted his meals with only the infusion of this fascinating plant, whose kettle scarcely has time to cool, who with Tea amuses the evening, with Tea solaces the midnights, and with Tea welcomes the morning.

Desire for the drink increased in the eighteenth century, but government taxes kept the price high, so a vigorous smuggling trade developed to avoid the excise duty. By the 1770s most of the tea entering Britain was smuggled – it was estimated that 7 million lbs (3 million kilograms) of tea were illicitly trafficked into Britain, against only 5 million lbs (2 million kilograms) imported legally. In 1785, under pressure from the law-abiding tea traders, the government slashed the duty on tea, which wiped out the illegal smuggling trade virtually overnight. The price of tea dropped sharply. It could now become a truly popular drink. But cheapness was only one factor in the nation’s growing taste for tea. At some point early in the eighteenth century, people had started adding milk and sugar, which transformed bitter refinement into sustaining sweetness. Consumption rocketed. Unlike
coffee, tea was positively marketed as a respectable drink for both sexes – with women particularly targeted. Tea houses and tea gardens flourished in London and china tea sets became an essential part of the fashionable household, while less costly versions in pottery – like the object in this chapter – spread through society.

As it got cheaper, tea also spread rapidly to the working classes. By 1800, as foreigners remarked, it was the new national drink. By 1900 the average tea consumption per person in Britain was a staggering 6 lbs (3 kilograms) a year. In 1809 the Swede Erik Gustav Geijer commented:

Next to water, tea is the Englishman’s proper element. All classes consume it … in the morning one may see in many places small tables set up under the open sky, around which coal-carters and workmen empty their cups of delicious beverage.

The ruling classes had a real interest in promoting tea drinking among the growing urban population, who were poor, vulnerable to disease and perceived as prone to disorderly drunkenness. Beer, port and gin had become a significant part of the diet of men, women and even children, partly because alcohol as a mild antiseptic was much safer to drink than unpurified city water. But by the nineteenth century alcohol was a growing social problem. Religious leaders and temperance movements made common cause to proclaim the merits of tea. A cup of sweet, milky tea was cheap, energy-giving, refreshing and tasted very good. Celina Fox explains how it was also a wonderful instrument of social control:

Temperance was huge. Drink for the Victorians was a very big issue. The desire to have a working population that was sober and industrious was very strong, and there was a great deal of propaganda to that effect. Sobriety was tied in with dissent, Methodism and so on, and tea really was the drink of choice. So it’s happening on two levels: dissent and having an upright and working population which gets to the factory on time and isn’t drunk out of its mind, which always seems to be a British problem, and on top of that you have the ritual of afternoon tea. So tea drinking really takes off in a massive way in the nineteenth century.

As tea displaced beer as the defining national drink, it became a symbol of the rebranded British character – polite and respectable, with none of the old boisterous conviviality. An anonymous temperance poem from the nineteenth century makes the point:

With you I see, in ages yet unborn,

Thy votaries the British Isles adorn,

Till rosy Bacchus shall his wreaths resign,

And love and tea triumph o’er the vine.

But a loving, tranquil cup of tea has a violent hinterland. When all tea came into Europe from China, the British East India Company traded opium for silver and used that silver to buy tea. The trade was so important that it brought the two countries to war. The first of the conflicts, which we still refer to as the Opium Wars – they were in fact just as much about tea – broke out more or less as our teapot was leaving the Wedgwood factory. Partly because of these difficulties with China, in the 1830s the British set up plantations in the area around Calcutta and Indian tea was exempted from import duty to encourage demand. Strong, dark Assam tea became the patriotic British cuppa – and sustained the empire. As the century went on, tea plantations were established in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, and large numbers of Tamils were moved from south India to Ceylon to work on them. Monique Simmonds, from Kew Gardens, describes the impact: