EARLY POST TEA / LATE POST TEA

'The British Post' was originally dispatched from England to Colonists in India, and was supposed to be a kind of newsletter from home, with the major news stories of the month and a long-winded society section, which interested itself with marriage announcements and garden parties. There was also a regular page entitled ‘India Welcomes’ which heralded the imminent arrival of new colonists.

The Post later set up an office in Delhi and was published every day, apart from Sunday. Predictably, It began to focus less on the goings-on in Great Britain and more on the life of the Englishman abroad. The society part of the paper soon became dominated by an obituary section, which was sub-divided into the most common forms of death among the colonists, beginning with those who had been unfortunate enough to die of Dysentery and ending ominously with ‘other causes’. All too often, the deceased had guested in the ‘India Welcomes’ column only a few months earlier.

During the wood pulp shortage of the 1850s the owners of The Post were unable to secure sufficient quantities of paper and resorted to printing their news sheet on a substitute made from pulped tea leaves. They soon noticed that street vendors were boiling the pages in their kettles to make tea. The then editor reportedly purchased a glass and complained that the tea had a dark greasy residue, which he took to be the liquefied newsprint.

With the end of the wood-pulp shortage, The Post was, once again, printed on normal white paper. However the broad centre sheet of The Post continued to be made from pulped tea leaves, although nothing was printed on it because of concerns regarding health. The sheet was perforated and could be torn into several small rectangles, each the equivalent of what would now be one teabag.

Towards the end of its existence the paper began the introduction of a breakfast tea in its morning edition and a variety of afternoon teas for issues that were published later in the day.

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""All my friends are soldiers
and they are getting drunk
Oh, Johnny come and save me
I believe my luck has sunk.""

- Jeffrey Lee Pierce"