 Grey’s mixture, in the Morning Post in 1884, announced that “this choice Tea can only be obtained of the Introducers and Sole Proprietors, Charlton and Co” of Piccadilly.
The story took a surprising twist when researchers on the Foods of England site found that Charlton and Co had advertised a tea in 1867 as the rather expensive “celebrated Grey mixture”, with no reference to any aristocratic connection, though it did boast of its “most distinguished patronage”. Might the business have added a noble association later on as a marketing ploy, one that was to be copied by others? It could well have done. Victorian advertisers weren’t renowned for their strict adherence to truth.
The search for the name runs into the sand at this point. But it’s not the end of the story. The use of bergamot as a flavouring and scent long predates any connection with Earl Grey — for example, it was added to snuff early in the eighteenth century. But its early associations with tea are disreputable. A newspaper report in 1824 was ominously headed, “To render Tea at 5s a Pound equal to Tea at 12s”. It explained:
If we can discover any fine-flavoured substance, and add it to the tea in a proper manner, so as to make it agree and harmonize with the original flavour, we shall be able to improve low-priced and flavourless teas, into a high-priced article of fine flavour. The flavouring substance found to agree best with the original flavour of tea, is the oil of bergamot, by the proper management of which you may produce from the cheapest teas the finest flavoured Bloom, Hyson, Gunpowder, and Cowslip.
Lancaster Gazette, 22 May 1824.
While this would better be described as adulteration, it has to be viewed against the background of the shocking “improvements” that were made to many foodstuffs at the time, such as adding alum to bread to make it more fashionably white and colouring sweets with poisonous compounds of copper and arsenic. Tea, being expensive, was subject more than most to adulteration, including adding Prussian blue to green tea or graphite to black to make them look better (facing them was the trade term) or variously adding black lead, copper carbonate, lead chromate and turmeric to used tea leaves to tart them up and sell them as fresh. In this context, flavouring cheap tea with bergamot was a trivial offence, though in 1837 an injunction was awarded against a London grocer to prevent it selling its tea:
Brocksopp and Co.’s Mowqua’s small-leaf gunpowder was so inferior a tea, that deponents could not set any price upon it ... it was artificially scented, and appeared to have been drugged with bergamot in this country.
The Bristol Mercury, 13 May 1837.
It’s hardly likely that an aristocrat such as Earl Grey would have lent his name to a mixture that had such unsavoury undertones. The absence of any contemporary evidence of a link means that we have to look elsewhere for the origin of the name. Perhaps the Grey mixture sold by Charlton and Co later in the century was named after some other Grey? The Foods of England site identified a candidate in William Grey & Co of Morpeth, which advertised in 1852 (it may be merely a coincidence that its shop was only about 25 miles from Howick Hall).
As always, there are loose ends. But the stories that connect Earl Grey tea to a nineteenth-century aristocrat have been debunked. Earl Grey never drank Earl Grey.