A good cup of tea

Issue 200

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Forget me not
Whaling
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History

Southern sights

The year was 1911. Train tracks had formed an iron corset up and down both of the main islands and the New Zealand Government Railways was a juggernaut, soon to be the biggest single employer in the country. But there was a problem. A profound one. You just couldn’t get a reliable cup of tea.

This was long before the days of onboard cafes. Instead, at certain stops, hundreds of passengers would surge out of the train to a “refreshment room”, secure their cuppa and slurp it down quickly before the next whistle. Standards, unsurprisingly, slipped.

On Christmas Eve 1911, one John Herbert Hankins wrote to head office expressing his rage about the “so called refreshment rooms at Ohakune, Frankton Junction and Mercer”.

“I tried at each of these places to get a cup of tea when the train arrived. In each place I could get none but that in which there was ‘Swiss’ condensed milk already mixed with the tea—a sickening concoction… and so from Taihape to Auckland I had to go without that which these refreshment room keepers are under your regulations bound to supply.”

Records of the time teem with similar complaints. In 1915, the chief health officer of the railways wrote to his big boss, the general manager, Ernest Haviland Hiley, with alarming news: “At some stations, tea is prepared in a doubtful looking bucket out of which it is ladled by a cup.”

This letter caused a proper stir. Hiley fired off a missive to all his district managers asking them to “have careful inquiries made”.

The reports flooded back thick and fast, and despite some consternation about plum pudding provision, the managers were generally happy with the tea situation in their districts. (You have to wonder, though, whether these managers received slightly more specific service than the thirsty masses.)

The reports back to Hiley revealed a tension. It was just really hard to give several hundred people a good cup of tea at the same time. (“I worked as a counter waitress for the railways for three years,” a Putāruru woman told the New Zealand Herald in 1949. “And believe me, that’s the place to get an insight into people and their natures.”)

The bucket-and-cup method was still in use at Mercer and Frankton. At Ohakune, staff struggled with larceny. “The milk is added to tea before pouring out,” a manager reported, “in order to prevent people after drinking their tea helping themselves to a drink of milk.”

In the South Otago town of Clinton things appeared to have gone off the rails a bit. “The tea is placed in a muslin bag and infused in an enamel jug about a quarter of an hour before the arrival of trains. The liquid is all squeezed out of the bag and poured into three enamel teapots. Just before the trains arrive, a little of this liquid is poured into each cup and as the tea is applied for, it is diluted with hot water from an enamel jug.”

Hiley’s office came down like a ton of bricks. There is a staggering amount of correspondence on the matter of tea between his office in Wellington and managers up and down the line; a litany that dries up only as World War One bears down.

More than a century later, a passenger on the North Island main trunk line can order English Breakfast, Earl Grey or herbal tea at their convenience, and milk—not condensed—is available for no extra charge. Hiley would be surprised, or perhaps horrified, that you can also now opt for oat or soy.