Tea for two hundred years

A couple sit together, sunglasses on in the bright sunshine, evident even in the black-and-white photograph.

He is handsome and beaming beneath his smartly clipped moustache. She has a cigarette dangling from the fingers of one graceful hand, smiling too as she looks into the camera.

They look as glamorous as a pair of Hollywood actors – he has the look of a young David Niven, she of Ava Gardner.

They are Walter Walker, then a young lieutenant in 1/8th Gurkhas, and Beryl Johnston, and they were my maternal grandparents. The year is 1938 and they have just become engaged.

They aren’t in California but in Shillong, Assam, where my great- grandparents, Edward ‘Ted’ Johnston, a jovial Irishman, and his wife, Madeleine, lived, on a tea estate called Pabhoi. Ted was the manager.

I had always longed to see Assam. Not just because of the family tea connections but because it is one of the less-travelled areas of India. More remote than Rajasthan, it’s lushly beautiful with rice fields, ornate Hindu temples, wildlife- rich national parks and, on clear days, the distant Himalayas.

This year, I finally got there, travelling by luxury riverboat up the Brahmaputra River which flows through Assam. After two nights in Kolkata – Calcutta back in 1938, when my grandparents got married in its cathedral, St John’s – we flew to Jorhat, Assam.

The boat, the ABN (Assam Bengal Navigation company) Sukapha, has 12 double cabins and a sundeck of gleaming wood, with a bar serving every cocktail you could shake a cocktail stick at.

For seven days, we travelled upstream, visiting colourful villages that were so unused to tourists that we became the attraction. In Kaziranga National Park, we saw dozens of one-horned Indian rhinos thrillingly close, as well as elephants, deer, turtles, wild boar and brilliant bird life.

The highlight was a visit to Haroocharai tea plantation near Jorhat. The owner, Mr J P S Bhamra, showed us the rows of glossy green tea bushes where jungle had once flourished.

In 1823, Robert Bruce of the East India Company was given a hot leafy brew when visiting the Singpho tribe of Upper Assam. It tasted similar to the tea drunk in Britain, which came – as all tea did then – from China.

Bruce learned that these leaves came from trees that grew freely in Assam’s fertile soil. Excitedly, he sent a sample to his brother, Charles, a herbalist in Calcutta. A laboratory test confirmed that it was indeed tea. This new plant was named Camellia sinensis var assamica, differentiating it from Camellia sinensis (sinensis meaning from China).

Assam tea produces larger leaves and a stronger flavour, making Assam tea the finest in the world. Drinking a cup made from Haroocharai leaves, brewed by Mr Bhamra himself, I could only agree. It is both aromatic and full-bodied. The Mouton Rothschild of tea.

In the 1820s, Britain was importing 7,000 tons of tea from China every year. If tea could be grown within its own empire, this was good news for the balance of trade with China. The Opium Wars had been another – somewhat problematic – attempt to balance it.

A tea-plant nursery was established, the bushes thriving in Assam’s fertile soil and humid climate. In 1838, the first shipment of Assam tea was auctioned in London, and labourers were set to work hacking more tea gardens out of the jungle.

By 1885, there were 115,000 hectares under cultivation. Today, there are more than 300,000 producing 680 million kg of tea a year. Camellia assamica was transplanted to Kenya, Uganda, and

Sri Lanka. Its stronger taste meant it proved more popular with the British working classes than Chinese tea.

Tea-planting became another colonial career. My other great-grandfather, Walter’s father, Arthur, began as a junior planter in the 1890s, graduating to manage a tea garden called Tara near Dibrugarh in the east of Assam – still the centre of Indian tea today – until ill health forced him to return to England 1913 with his wife and their three children. They settled in Tiverton, Devon, had three more children, and named their suburban villa Tara after their Assam home.

While their two older sons, Edward and Walter, joined the Indian Army, Peter, their fourth child, followed his father’s footsteps to Assam, becoming a junior planter in 1933. Then war intervened; he joined up and was captured by the Japanese in February 1942.

When writing a book about the Walker family’s fortunes and travails in the Second World War, I tried to discover whether the Tara and Pabhoi tea gardens still existed – but drew a blank.

When I mentioned the names of these tea estates to Mr Bhamra and showed him photographs of my family in Assam, he was delighted, informing me that Tara and Pabhoi are still working tea estates, albeit now owned by big tea conglomerates. His is one of the few remaining independent tea gardens.

Mr Bhamra and his fellow planters face some of the same problems as their predecessors: flies eating the leaves, leopards and tigers ‘invading’ what was their jungle home. One of Mr Bhamra’s dogs had recently been killed by a leopard. It reminded me of the family story of Peter shooting a tiger that had sprung from the bushes and scalped a picker.

A tea-picker’s life was hard and ill-paid then, and remains so today. In the 1920s and 1930s, there were strikes and riots by pickers struggling to survive on wages that were pitifully low and often late or withheld. Sometimes planters were murdered in their bungalows.

Today, wages remain low – although accommodation, hospitals and schools are provided – resulting in riots and strikes. Managers must also contend with the catastrophic effects of extreme weather and a declining global thirst for tea, as coffee edges out the cuppa.

With increasing literacy, few young people want to follow their picker parents into the tea rows. They want office jobs. Bangladeshi immigrants, working for lower pay, are steadily replacing the ‘tea tribes’ who picked Assam tea for generations.

British planters remained in Assam following Indian independence in 1947, playing polo and getting drunk at the club, just as before the war. Some bachelor planters maintained the abusive ‘custom’ of choosing a young female picker to live in their bungalow as their ‘old woman’ – in reality often a teenager – and having children with her, only to abandon her when he married a British wife or retired to England.

The retiring managers were replaced by Indians until just a few planters lingered, like characters in Paul Scott’s Booker Prize-winning novel Staying On (1977). By the 1970s, they had all gone from Assam.

But they left their mark. I have photographs of Walter and Beryl at Shillong Golf Course and the Jorhat Racecourse. These places still exist. So does Dibrugarh Club, from where my Uncle Peter would be sent home late at night, draped over his pony if he had overdone the whisky.

Peter returned to Assam after the war, keen to ‘stay on’ too – but his mental and physical health had been destroyed in the Japanese camps. So he returned to Britain.

Having had a taste of Assam and its tea, I am eager to return, to visit the family tea gardens, and see more of the beguiling beauty of north-east India.

Seeing it by boat made it relaxing and peaceful. No packing or unpacking. No long road trips. Just excellent food, great company, sunsets on the sundeck, picnics on sandbanks and being pampered like maharajahs and maharanis by the crew. It was a wrench to return to dry land.

I went home with a bag of tea from Haroocharai. And now, back home, each time I brew a cup of chai, I am transported back to the jade-green tea gardens of Assam and the tranquillity of the broad Brahmaputra.

Annabel Venning wrote To War With the Walkers: One Family’s Extraordinary Story of the Second World War (Hodder). She travelled with Sampan Travel