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Overseas Trading Corporation

Next time you are driving, painfully slowly, along the Inner Road at First Tower look out – on the right coming into town – for a pub with the unusual name of The Earl Grey. Opposite the pub is a granite faced wall with a large decorated gate showing a stylised rising sun. The name above reads Overseas Trading Corporation.

But the gate leads nowhere; behind it is First Tower School and the entrance to that is round the corner. That gate is all that remains of a proud piece of Jersey commercial heritage, the Sun Works. And what went on there? The clue is the name of the pub named after a blend of tea.

The Earl Grey Pub Sign

So when you are waiting for the traffic to clear and you see that gate, you can reflect that it dates from a time when it was, literally, the gateway to the world. It dates from a time when Jersey was, to put it simply, a tea caddy to the world. It was said you could hardly go anywhere in the world and not have a cup of tea which had been blended and packed in Jersey.

Overseas Trading Corporation

OTC, the Overseas Trading Corporation was a tea blending and trading company with a world wide customer base – in its latter years it was the export division of the Allied Lyons empire – in other words Lyons tea, Tetley’s and Horniman’s were blended, lacked and exported round the world from Jersey – but Allied Lyons didn’t create OTC, it had bought into an existing world wide operation

Why Jersey? To answer that we have to go back to April 1876 when Thomas Cook -Ìý not him another one - an export Merchant from Reading, with flourishing markets in South America and the Far East, came to Jersey.

He rented premises in Commercial Buildings, Old Harbour, St Helier, from where his new tea-packing business was launched. According to John King who was the last Managing Director of OTC the Overseas Trading Corporation which grew out of that start in the 1870s it was all to do with tax.

Growing tea

Yes even in the 19th century there were those who preferred not to pay tax if at all legally possible and Mr Cook imported tea into Jersey, packed it and shipped it out across the world and thus avoided paying the British tea tax.

Cook was killed in a hunting accident in 1890 and the business passed to his relative Joseph Walker who, with his five sons, continued to enlarge the firm. Most of Walker's sons established themselves in Buenos Aires, building up a reputation for tea sold throughout Argentina under the brand name of Te Sol.

The Jersey end of the business rapidly outgrew its premises in town and in 1900, the company bought a large plot of land at First Tower and constructed a modern factory there including, eventually, leisure facilities such as a bowling green (now the Sun Bowling Club). Joseph Walker appropriately named it the Sun Works said to a testament to Jersey’s climate as much to Te Sol, the south American tea brand.

Expansion

The first stage of expansion, as with many business successes, came about through chance. A chance meeting on a boat back from South America between directors of the Jersey operation and the English Tea Company Horniman’s resulted in an agreement for the companies to merge their export sides and The Jersey Company took on the export distribution of Horniman’s.

Growing tea

Other brands were gathered including Lyon’s Tea and in the 1960s OTC was purchased by Lyons and during the next three decades this largely forgotten building in First Tower was the export arm of the Allied Lyons Tetley tea empire.

Every year 100s of tons of tea, and that takes up a lot of space, tea doesn’t weigh that much, were imported into Jersey, packed in tea caddies or later into tea bags and re-exported all over the world under the Lyon’s Tetley’s or Horniman’s labels. It was a source of amazement that Jersey was such a world player in tea.

Almost wherever you went in the world you could have a cup of tea that had been blended, packed and exported from this Island. To achieve that there had been a small team of dedicated and hardened travellers based in Jersey but circling the globe, away for weeks at a time.

And in those days they travelled without instant communication. Not everyone had a fax or even a telex machine. E-mails, blackberries and all the other essential tools without which modern businessmen won’t, or perhaps even can’t function were not there. When you travelled you were on your own, your decisions had to be justified back home later.

Picking tea

But it was a quiet success, Jersey as a whole seemed unaware of the company’s global reach and it was seen as no more than a source of tea chests. Seventeen years ago the decision was taken to centralise all the Lyons tea divisions in the UK and a profitable company was closed down even though it was a profitable operation.

Jersey light industry

But perhaps it was inevitable; a combination of politics in London, combined with the knowledge that we had money coming out our ears suggested to many that we didn’t need manufacturing and trading companies. OTC joined the long and sorry list of companies that once made Jersey’s light industry sector.

Looking back this list included Kentredder, RCA, Rediffusion, OTC itself and even the Ann Street and Randall’s breweries. The light industry side to the Jersey economy has disappeared.

Perhaps the DVDs and CDs of today are the tea of yesterday and perhaps there is another product waiting in the wings which will be the tea of tomorrow. Perhaps, but nothing will bring back what was once a very impressive chapter in the history of Jersey’s commercial activities.

Tea in a basket

Tea bags may not have the glamour of the Canadian cod trade, nor the perceived glamour of the finance industry, although it has to be said that glamour is much tarnished since the arrival of the credit crunch.

But it went, quietly and with almost no interest from Island residents and, so it seems, even less interest from the authorities, that gate in the Inner Road opposite the Earl Grey pub is testament to the fact that OTC, the Overseas Trading Corporation was once a world beater.

From an un-regarded suburb of an insignificant town on a rock between England and France, one company faced it out and held its own against international competition. That’s something to think about next time the traffic holds you up on your way in, or out, of Town.

Once and for a long time, Jersey was a tea caddy to the world. Then came 1992 and it became a discarded tea bag. All we have left is the gate and what was once a staff leisure facility, the Sun Bowling Club.