In the grand scheme of things, relocating the country’s tea reserves was merely re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The real threat came from the lack of supply; not helped in the slightest by the German naval blockades and attritional U Boat campaigns in force from 1940 onwards. The Ministry of Food’s response was to ration tea to two ounces per week to anybody over the age of five. Such rationing would last for seven years, until after the war’s conclusion in 1952. And it prescribed a remarkably generous amount of tea: two ounces of could make around three cups a day—yet adults received just two ounces cheese and butter combined.
Outside Old Blighty, the situation was equally dire. After the BEF’s disastrous campaign on the European mainland, the British Army had been forced to retreat from the shores of Dunkirk with its tails between its legs between May and June 1940. So too in the colonies, the British were losing their grip, with Singapore—Britain’s stronghold otherwise known as the “Gibraltar of the East“—falling to the Japanese early in 1942. Desperate times called for desperate measures, and in an attempt to try and keep up morale, in 1942 the British Government decided to put tea at the top of their list of priorities.
The British Ministry of Food agreed to purchase all of the exportable surpluses from the governments of India and Ceylon for the year. This amounted to an estimated 698 million pounds of tea. More amazingly, it meant that for 1942 the commodities that Britain bought, ordered in terms of weight, were: bullets, tea, artillery shells, bombs and explosives. Imports of this scale continued throughout the wartime years. In fact, at any given time it is believed that there were at least 30 million tonnes in Britain.
The Brits’ reliance on tea wasn’t lost on the Germans. During their blitz campaigns over London, the Luftwaffe made Mincing Lane one of their main targets. Known otherwise as “The Street of Tea”, Mincing Lane had been the world trade center for tea (as well as opium and, to a lesser degree, slaves during its long and not-remotely illustrious history). The Luftwaffe failed to cripple the tea industry though. Even during the mid-1950s, Mincing Lane was still the place where one-third of the world’s tea was brought up.
Of course, when it came to how much the British valued their tea, the Germans didn’t have to go far for their intelligence. In one night, the Royal Air Force carried out a supply drop of 75,000 tea bombs over the Nazi-occupied Netherlands. Contained within each were one-ounce bags of tea from the Dutch East Indies along with a message: “The Netherlands will rise again, chins up.” Likewise, when the Red Cross sent supplies to Allied POWs, each supply box would contain a pack of Twinings.