There it was, in a cardboard box behind the brown furniture in my West London lock-up, absolutely packed with meaning and promise. The Goblin Teasmade of 1979.
Insanely British – what other nation could devote a whole household shrine to morning tea-making, or could build in so much technical ingenuity to prolong the magic moment?
I should explain, in the interest of clarity for the tiny minority of Oldie-readers who don’t know the Teasmade’s role in our national life and its astonishing list of competencies.
Basically, the Teasmade, launched on the waiting world in 1936, is a bedside device that makes you a pot of tea whenever you set it to. It’s also an alarm clock, bedside light and, in some cases, a radio.
In its most familiar form – the 870 model – it’s vaguely Art Deco, filtered by the 1970s and rendered in a cream plastic housing with nice big easy rocker switches for each function. In no sense is it born of the age we live in. It’s retro – even slightly risible for the modern person, who might just buy one as a joke.
It’s chock-full of meaning for any mature Brits, because it offers a unique combination of modest luxury and Empire resonances. It allowed people to start the day with the tea ceremony, to solve the 1930s servant problem and stay in bed for several lovely minutes more. When it woke the user up – tremendously loud buzzer – it put on the light and, in some models, the wireless, set to the Home Service and, later, Radio 4. It could persuade anyone, against all the evidence, that things were all right in the world.
Nothing that contains a kettle and a teapot can be miniaturised. Nor could it be rendered in matt black and stainless steel without looking silly. It’s fine as it is.
The great social shift that marginalised the Teasmade isn’t about curious design or its association with everyone’s grandparents but rather that, according to the Times, coffee has beaten tea as Britain’s best beverage. The magic coffee rituals don’t include the Teasmade. There’s no reason you couldn’t slip Taylors of Harrogate’s clever coffee bags into the Goblin teapot, but it doesn’t really look the part for the baby barista group.
From vintage dealers to film-set dressers, old small appliances and iconic objects live a half-life, stripped of meaning by changes in the market or the technology.
Just think of the hard-travelled- European-correspondent or novelist message in the Olivetti portable typewriter. Lightweight and tough, it conjured up the world of Orwell in the Spanish Civil War or Graham Greene, adrift in ’30s Britain. A piece of kit that announced your job. A piece of kit that showed you were serious and travelled, smoked Gitanes and drank coffee small and strong. And it was Italian design, cousin somehow to the marvellous
Gio Ponti or the marvellous Carlo Mollino – all sur le continent.
The charmless, modern, global anonymity of the early laptops – a bit heavy at first – started the rot, and the 21st-century smartphone-and-tablet combination finished off that classic style. You’d expect to see it in those Euro films of the ’50s and ’60s, but not on the table in the Eurostar.
Journalists and writers more generally had a fair few ‘positional goods’ to show what kinds of people they were. The Rolodex on your desk at home, stuffed to near immobility with the co-ordinates of important people, displayed how very connected you were. The Rolodex said its owner knew everyone and was about to get out there, anywhere from Munich to Moscow, at a moment’s notice. And, of course, it was fun to play with.
But now you’ve got the world – as many thousands as you like – literally at a fingertip drag away, and the phone set up to call.
When the New People joined the new Groucho Club in Dean Street, Soho, in 1985, absolutely everyone had a Filofax, the premier positional tool of the emerging ‘creative industry’ types. These were people who were somewhere between traditional media/book- publishing roles and new industries, such as promo video producers or stand-ups on the new comedy circuit.
The Filofax said not only that you were travelled and out there but also that you networked like mad – like those yuppies everybody had been reading about.
In the exciting love-you-till-Tuesday world of people who were building personal brands and setting up production companies, the Filofax was where it was all noted and quoted. The cover materials, and the deployment of the sections, were the subject of constant fetishistic comparisons.
It was a Rolodex in your pocket and so much more (rather more easily carried in those nice unisex canvas-and-leather fishing bags everyone sported then).
A whole world of engaging kit has vanished into the Cloud. How much of it remains in cardboard boxes and as potential material for a next generation of biographers?
In the meantime I’ve installed my aunt’s Teasmade on a bedside table. It’ll see me out.
Peter York co-wrote The Official Sloane Ranger Handbook (1982)
