st. john's lodge no 2 - The Trestleboard

rate for tea was then around three shillings a pound, but Lipton priced his at one shilling sevenpence.Lipton's tea empire really began, however, with his first-ever "vacation," to Australia, the next year, when he secretly stopped in Ceylon. There a recent blight had ruined the English coffee planters, and the survivors were planting tea. Lipton bought five bankrupt plantations-eventually acquiring about a dozen others-and unveiled the slogan "Direct from the Tea Gardens to the Teapot."

If the public came to identify the name "Thomas Lipton" with Ceylon tea, that was exactly what the Scotsman intended them to think. He loved to take guests for rather windy picnics on the six thousand foot summit of his favorite Ceylon property, Dambatenne, and gesture possessively at the Miles upon miles of indistinguishable jungle below, as if

the island were one vast tea garden presided over by a genial father figure sporting a goatee, yachting cap and blue polka‐dot bow tie.

Before long he had the world believing Orange Pekoe, the old tea term used to denote the largest grade of leaf, was not the name of a leaf size but a type of tea unto itself for which they should accept no substitutes. "It's brisk!" his advertisements explained, "brisk" being simply taster's jargon for any tea that is not stale or flat-tasting. He was a showman new to the tea trade and showing off the new tea terms he had learned.

An innovator, Lipton pioneered the use of a cable transport system between the steep Mountainside gardens and the valley factories for more efficient production. At a time when most tea was sold directly from open tea chests and weighed out for each customer, Lipton sold his tea in individual packets for consistent quality and freshness and guaranteed weight. After ten years in the business, the millionaire grocer became a multimillionaire tea merchant famous worldwide.

For his American headquarters he chose a warehouse in Hoboken,