This week, let’s once again talk about tea. If you’ve read any of my books, any at all, you know my characters seem to spend an inordinate amount of time drinking it. And in The Quid Pro Quo, Simon also spends a lot of time having sandwiches or steak and kidney pie at the ABC Tea Rooms. I haven’t written them into stories before–I’m usually a Lyons Corner House sort of historical writer!—but I thought why not ring the changes?
Tea rooms and cafes are such a banal part of our existence now…but in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century they were actually part of a quiet social revolution, because–shock! horror!–women could use them unaccompanied. Nice women avoided pubs, and restaurants were off limits-women without male companions would be turned away.
The ABC tearoom phenomena began in London in the 1880s. ABC stands for Aerated Bread Company. The business was founded in 1882. They made bread without yeast, using compressed carbon dioxide instead to make the bread rise (it sounds yukky). They rapidly expanded with bakeries selling to the general public all across London in the next couple of years and one day someone had the bright idea of also selling tea and snacks to the customers. The first Lyons was opened in 1894 and to keep their market share, ABC began selling home-cooked meals.
By 1923, ABC had 250 tea-shops all over the world and Lyons had 240 in the UK. They both sold light meals. Both establishments were popular with clerical workers at lunch time and theatre and cinema goers in the evenings. However, the really extraordinary thing about them in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was their connection to the women’s suffrage movement.
It was a momentous thing for women at the time, to simply get out and meet each other over a cup of tea and not be harassed or accused of soliciting. And this new freedom of movement and opening up of public spaces they could access brought great strides to both their social existence and their political one. You can read more about the connection between the suffrage movement and tea-rooms here. There were many smaller, independent establishments as well as ABC and Lyons, but the point of a chain is that it’s familiar and comfortable. And that must have made those early women adventurers into the world of unsupervised public expeditions more confident when they ventured out.
The suffrage connection to the teashops must have also impacted the tea-shop staff, because there was obviously a sense of comradeship between them. ABC employees worked a sixty-two hour week and pay was low. Lyons women went on strike to protest their own low wages in 1895. This is newsreel footage of striking Lyons employees from the 1920s. They apparently went out in support of someone who was dismissed for wearing her union badge at work. (Look at the hats—this was obviously just before the advent of the cloche!)
The final thing I should mention is that the Lyons Corner House at Coventry Street, London, was a well-known meeting place for gay men during the first three decades of the twentieth century. (From Matt Houlbrook’s Queer London). The waitresses seated women and families away from The Lily Pond at the far end of the room.
So, remember, when you pop in to a tea-shop for a cuppa whilst you’re shopping–you’re actually visiting what began as a radical space!
