Motoring Celebrities

Glaswegian tea tycoon, Sir Thomas Lipton would have been in his fifties when the camera captured him here - he worked hard to cut a dashing figure in public, active in the sports of yachting and sailing. In his youth he spent several years in the US and the commercial spirit he absorbed enabled him to amass a great fortune in the grocery and tea trades.  Investment in publicity was the key to his success. The Lipton business has been featured here in 2007 and 2020.

The first 14 years of the 20th. century were golden times for both the motor car and the picture postcard. While the motor car was the province of the rich, the postcard was cheap enough to be affordable to almost everyone.  An embryonic consumer society expanded across the nation until the outbreak of war in 1914.  When peace returned in 1918 the postcard went into steady decline but motoring would go on to dominate the next hundred years as the favoured means of transport.  Celebrity culture was in its infancy, mostly populated by military heroes, cricketers, footballers and stars of the music hall and theatre.  Inevitably they came together on the postcard and celebrities self importantly posed at the wheel of an automobile made a popular subject.

The Dare sisters (Zena and Phyllis, born in Chelsea and daughters of a divorce clerk) were truly Made in SW3 Edwardian celebrities and though long forgotten today their maidenly faces peered coyly out of many a picture postcard in their day.  More than 1,500 examples of Zena alone are listed on eBay at the time of writing.  The two sisters were 12 and 9 respectively when they made their stage debuts in a Christmas pantomime in December 1899.  Under the guidance of the ultra-successful actor-manager, playwright, producer and impresario, Seymour Hicks, they would grace the London stage in a succession of dramas, comedies and musicals for decades.

Sybil Arundale was a child performer in the music hall and graduated to Shakespeare and Ibsen parts in the theatre. Cinema and TV followed - she died in 1965.  Gaynor Rowlands’s career as a dancer was curtailed at the age of 23 when she died in 1906 during an operation for appendicitis. 

Constance Collier made the transition from the London stage to Hollywood where she found work in silent movies and went on to become a leading voice coach in the late twenties with the advent of the talkies.  In 1948 she was cast in Hitchcock’s Rope as Mrs. Atwater and her star shines on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.  Her companion, Lettice Fairfax was a stage actress specialising in musical comedy - her career seemed to stall in 1925 and she died in 1948.

 

More Tea From Lipton’s

Following up a post from July 2007 - more examples of postcards publicising the availability of Lipton’s Tea.  Lipton made full use of traditional iconography of imperialism - a team of Indian elephants advancing to market escorted by exotic turbaned outriders. Lipton’s plantations in India and Ceylon formed an empire within an empire with a workforce of tens of thousands toiling in the fields and factories to ensure the British public was supplied with all the consolations of a nice cup of tea.  Tea drinking became embedded in the soul of Victorian Britain and to meet the ever increasing consumer demand the industry mechanised the processing and packaging to cut costs while promoting a branded product with forceful advertising campaigns.  Picking the tea was done by hand and Lipton’s took pride in offering visual proof of the scale of their operations.  Enormous crowds of anonymous labourers were rounded up in front of the camera - some were deployed in formation to spell out the hallowed name of Lipton. The British obsession with tea came at a heavy cost to the environment as vast areas of forest in the Nigiris and Assam were scoured to make space for tea cultivation, destroying the indigenous wildlife in the process.  The human cost could be seen in the deplorable working conditions and starvation wages paid to the native workforce. Throughout the Victorian era and into the 1930s, virtually all the tea production  was exported to Britain. Only when the price of tea slumped on international markets did it occur to British producers that there was an Indian market ready and waiting on the doorstep.  Which explains how tea drinking became an Indian obsession every bit as compulsive as that of the British. (Inglorious Empire: Shashi Tharoor)

 

Lipton Tea

The Lipton brand was created in the 1880’s and developed from its origin as a retailer into one of the world’s major suppliers of tea products. A reputation for colourful and innovative publicity was established by the founder, Sir Thomas Lipton who paid for thin men to parade in the streets of Glasgow carrying placards bearing the words “Going to Lipton’s”; fat men were hired to display placards that read “Coming from Lipton’s”. A few years later, Lipton was selling monster cheeses inside which a number of sovereigns and half-sovereigns were concealed. When warned by the authorities that this could endanger public health Lipton published advertisements advising customers of the perils of choking to death on gold sovereigns. (Source: “Advertising in Britain”, T R Nevett, Heinemann, 1982)


It was common for businesses founded at the high water mark of Victorian power to assume an imperial style when publicising their activities and Lipton was no exception. This group of postcards was designed to impress with the global scale of the business and enhance brand awareness by endless repetition of the trademark, the message being that even in the most distant imperial realm the name of Lipton was proudly and ubiquitously displayed. The brand continues to flourish under the ownership of Unilever but despite a dominant presence in many global markets its British activities are not very prominent, being mainly limited to canned drinks of the iced-tea variety. The tradition of inventive publicity is not yet dead. To see how Lipton has been promoting itself in Egypt recently, please click here.