I am, Sir, your obedient servant,
(Signed) J. K. CROSS.
The Secretary, Indian Tea Districts Association.
It is possible, therefore, that some improvement will now be accomplished.[107]
But at the Crutched Friars Warehouse (belonging to the East and West India Docks) a great advance has already been made. The Tea there is now bulked, and re-packed by machinery. The Directors most kindly invited me to come and witness the process. I went, and was more than pleased with what I saw. The machinery, and all connected with the process, is so well described in an article in the Home and Colonial Mail, I cannot do better than give it here:—
Tea Bulking at the East and West India Dock Company’s Warehouses, in Crutched Friars.
It is not a little strange that the importance of effecting improvements in the present system of Tea bulking, which has exercised the minds of Tea growers and importers so much of late, should have hitherto been neglected or ignored by the proprietors of the various bonded warehouses in London wherein the Tea is bulked and stored. That Tea may be, and only too commonly is, bulked by an antiquated and unsatisfactory process is a fact which is well known to all who are interested in the matter. How this result is arrived at will be seen later on; at present we desire to show that at least at one warehouse the question has received the attention which it deserves, and to explain, so far as may be possible, the steps which have been taken in the matter.
It is, then, that old and powerful body, the East and West India Dock Company, who have taken up the matter. At the instance of Mr. Du Plat Taylor, the able and energetic secretary of the company, supported by the equally energetic warehouse superintendent, Mr. Robert Adams, the arrangements for bulking Tea at the warehouse of the Company have been very greatly improved. More than this; there has been invented and set up a special and very ingenious machine for the bulking of Tea in a manner which avoids all the failings of the old system. What this machine is, and what its peculiar merits are, will best, and perhaps only, be clearly understood by a brief description of the two systems as we lately saw them in operation at the warehouses of the company in Crutched Friars, which we may mention are nearer than any others to Mincing-lane, an advantage securing to planters and importers the certainty that their Teas will be sampled by the trade generally.
Under the old system, then, each chest of a break, after having been subjected to certain preliminary formalities, is opened, and the Tea turned out in a heap on the floor of the warehouse. When this is done the Tea is bulked by means of wooden spades, each spadeful being thrown to the top of the central heap, so that it falls over and on all sides. Here the Tea lies until it is placed back again in the chests after they are tared, there being a considerable interval at some of the London warehouses between the bulking and refilling. The refilling is thus accomplished. The Tea is first put into bags and weighed on a machine at the side of the bulk. The bag and chest are then taken off the weighing machine and the contents of the bag are emptied into the chest. The Tea, however, requires some pressure to force it into the chest, and this pressure is obtained by an expedient of a very primitive kind. When the chest is partly filled a man gets in and presses down the Tea by treading on it. So soon as the Tea is all in the chest the package is properly secured, and the operation is completed.
Now the serious faults of this plan are at once apparent. In the first place the Tea, being in heaps on the floor of the warehouse with a large surface exposed to the atmosphere, runs the risk of losing a great deal of its freshness and aroma, this risk being largely increased by the doors of the warehouse being kept open in order to discharge or to receive merchandise in all weathers. No atmospheric influences are calculated to benefit Tea. Then, again, the shovelling of the Tea by means of wooden spades, and the treading into the chests, can hardly do otherwise than injure the Tea—the filling in a minor degree and the treading to a more serious extent, the result being, of course, that the Tea is depreciated.