Web Page No 2710

8th August 2020

 

1st Picture. Packet of Brooke Bond Dividend Tea

2nd Picture. Dividend Stamp

3rd Picture. Dividend Stamp collecting card

4th Picture. Brooke Bond tea cards

 

Brooke Bond Dividend Tea

 

Tea helped ease the financial hardships of the working classes in the pre and post-war years and evolved into the beverage of choice for an motor racing champion in the 1970s but Brooke Bond Dividend, latterly known as Brooke Bond D, died a quiet death at the age of 83 in 2011, almost entirely unnoticed.

 

Brooke Bond Dividend Tea was launched in 1935 as the company’s value product to compliment the mid-market PG Tips, which it began producing five years earlier in Manchester. Each packet contained a picture card and a cut-out stamp, with 60 needed to fill a book that could be redeemed for cash or gifts. For many years, a full book of 60 stamps could be exchanged for 5/- cash or groceries from retailers.

 

The blend of the nation’s favourite tea and an incentive to save money proved a hit with the working classes. By 1939, the brand was firmly established, and a series of newspaper adverts appeared with advice from a fictional, caricatured ‘Dr Jollywell’, who praised the tea’s qualities for helping the digestive system. In one advert, the doctor told readers: “Take care of your digestion. Drink the digestive tea that gives you FLAVOUR. Brooke Bond Dividend Digestive Tea has a flavour all can enjoy – and it pays a dividend. Brooke Bond Dividend Digestive Tea is blended with expert skill. It gives you your full moneys worth, in favour and digestibility – and the dividend saves you 4d on every 1lb you buy.”

 

The same year, ‘The Brooke Bond Programmes’ aired on Radio Luxemburg and Radio Normandy  six mornings per week. But storm clouds were gathering for dividend stamp collectors with the outbreak of World War II and when rationing was introduced in 1940, tea was restricted to 2oz per adult, per week.

 

Tea rations gradually increased in the years after the war and had reached the pre-war consumption level of 3oz per head before restrictions were lifted on 3rd October 1952. The same year, Gerald Brooke, son of company founder Arthur, retired as chairman, under whose tenure the company’s tea packet trade had multiplied 20 times, helped in large part by Brooke Bond Dividend’s reputation for striking a balance between affordability while maintaining quality with a blend of 30 teas.

 

Gerald was succeeded by his high-powered son John, and the company turnover exceeded £68 million in 1954, with the majority of sales coming from quarter pound packets of tea, of which one thousand million were sold globally throughout the year, and three years later, the company was probably the largest in the world, with a one third share in both the British and Indian tea markets.

These were the boom times for Brooke Bond. In 1958, the head office moved to Cannon Street, London, and by 1963, the company owned 30,000 acres of tea plantations in India, Ceylon and Africa, employing 50,000 people.

 

The tea bag was created by accident in 1908, when New York tea merchant Thomas Sullivan began shipping Indian and Chinese tea to his customers in small silk sample packages. Assuming they were supposed to submerge the entire bag into boiling water, his customers unintentionally revolutionised tea drinking for at least the next 100 years, and in the 1920s the fabric was changed to gauze, though it took until 1953 before Tetley, one of Brooke Bond’s biggest rivals, brought the concept to Britain.

 

To begin with, tea bags were regarded as a gimmick by most in the industry and Brooke Bond resisted the temptation to follow until well into the 1960s, when it became clear that the concept was here to stay. The company went from strength to strength, and in 1968 it merged with Liebig, owners of food brands including Oxo and Fray Bentos.

 

When Britain ‘went decimal’ in February 1971, a completed card of 60 dividend stamps could be exchanged for 25p in cash or groceries at stores that sold Brooke Bond D. Twelve months later, Brooke Bond’s share of the British tea market had grown to 40%. The midmarket PG Tips was brand leader with 20%, while Dividend was 12%.

 

Dividend tea remained popular throughout the 1970s, but by the middle of the decade a giant ‘D’ covered most of the packaging, with the word ‘dividend’ reduced to smaller lettering. The brand’s prominence was maintained by regular newspaper and TV adverts, including one featuring Formula One world champion Jackie Stewart and his wife Helen based around the ‘A Nice Cup of Tea’.

 

As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, the dividend stamp scheme came to an end and the tea was rebranded ‘Brooke Bond D’. Throughout the 1980s, attempts were made to give the brand a cooler edge. Brand loyalty was maintained with incentives such as the ‘Brooke Bond D – Reviving Stuff’ series of cassette tapes featuring classic chart hits, which could be redeemed for coupons on the back of packets, and in the first half of the decade, computer graphics were used in its TV advertising campaign, remember ‘The Tea With the 3D Taste?

Brooke Bond was subject to a hostile takeover by Unilever in 1984, and two years later, Brooke Bond D’s longest-running and best-remembered advertising campaign began with Madeline Bell providing the vocals to ‘I Could Do with a D’, which had varying lyrics to fit the accompanying pictures. A non-PC advert from 1986 featured ‘Only Fools and Horses’ actor John Challis, an early 1990s version Jane Cunliffe as an ever-busy ‘mumsy’ figure to a family with young children, with new lyrics to accompany the by-then familiar tune. There was also a ‘How Many Ds in Match of the Day?’ advert that aired around this period.

 

The 1990s heralded the end for Brooke Bond D. It lived on for another two decades, but its gradual demise was underway. The TV adverts came to an end in the mid 1990’s.

The brand was no longer one of Unilever’s priorities, so the licence to produce Brooke Bond D and Brooke Bond Choicest Blend was sold to Gold Crown Foods Ltd, who produced rival brand Typhoo .

 

The company (now trading as Typhoo Tea Ltd) removed the words ‘Brooke Bond’ from the packaging. The Brooke Bond brand quietly disappeared from the UK, but it lives on in other countries, including Pakistan, where ‘Brooke Bond Supreme’ is the market leader.

During the 2000s and into the 2010s, D Tea, was increasingly regarded as a ‘budget’ tea, sold mainly in local convenience stores and in pound shops, Perhaps this was, in a sense, a return to its ‘dividend’ roots and a ‘tea of the people’.

Typhoo ceased production in 2011. The death knell finally sounded in with the demise of Poundworld, which was the last major retailer with reserve supplies of D Tea.

 

We are now a country that drinks twice as much coffee as tea however, the tea bag won’t be disappearing any time soon.

 

 

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Peter

 

gsseditor@gmail.com

 

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On this day 08th August 1960-1965

 

On 08/08/1960 the number one single was Shakin' All Over - Johnny Kidd & the Pirates and the number one album was South Pacific Soundtrack. The top rated TV show was Rawhide (ITV) and the box office smash was Psycho. A pound of today's money was worth £13.68 and Burnley were on the way to becoming the Season's Division 1 champions. The big news story of the week was Castro nationalises all US property.

 

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