Made for a simple purpose—to store tea securely—antique wooden caddies come in a variety of ingenious forms, some made to confound would-be thieves, others to amaze.
The tree’s branches bore a host of various fruits—red, yellow, and tan apples and pears perched high among the leaves, their color picked out among the dark branches. In many ways, the spectacle recalled the late Renaissance courtly practice of grafting many varieties of fruit onto a single tree to astonish and amuse. The fruits of this tree were a little different: each apple and pear was, in reality, a tea caddy, and not a piece of fruit at all.
Dealer Mark Goodger, who hung these fruit-form tea caddies on an ornamental tree for his display at the LAPADA Berkeley Square Fair in London in October, has built a career, and a strong reputation, on antique boxes. Tea caddies served as an early spark, and they’ve become a cornerstone of his offerings through his firm, Mark Goodger Antiques.
The tea caddy is, as a form, simple. Each piece is a box, devised to hold tea safely and securely. Following the introduction of tea to England around the 1650s, the beverage was given a royal imprimatur with Charles II’s 1662 marriage to Catherine of Braganza, who brought the tea-drinking habit into the palace with her. Tea was a very expensive luxury good, and it was only sensible to store the precious leaves somewhere that would keep them fresh, and secure from pilfering hands. Some caddies have multiple compartments—usually one for black and another for green tea, though occasionally a third for sugar—and some don’t. Some have interior lids, some don’t. Some are small enough to be held in one hand, and others are large enough to rest your feet on. While their primary purpose is obvious, the secondary one is less so. A box to hold tea securely doesn’t require decoration, so why the inlays—often fanciful or botanical designs using fine woods, ivory, tortoiseshell, and mother of pearl—and eccentricities such as those pear and apple shapes? As Robbie Timms from S and S Timms told us, “A great fuss could be made around where the tea was stored, and how impressive the storage vessel [one had] recently commissioned was.” From the outset, the accoutrements of tea consumption encompassed a social, as well as a culinary dimension. Decoration elevated the simple storage container to a status symbol.
The tea trade of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was inextricably linked to the British East India Company, and to opium. As English demand for tea soared, the company sought a trade good to address the growing import-export imbalance. With the company’s control over India expanding, the poppy fields of Bengal provided the answer. Even the term caddy can be traced to tea’s exotic origins: the word is an anglicization of an Asian unit of measure used for tea, and the wooden accoutrement it would become synonymous with proliferated in the eighteenth century to the point of ubiquity in today’s antiques malls and auctions.
But fine examples of tea caddies, were (and are) true treasures, a fact that the remoteness of the days when tea was a precious commodity tends to obfuscate. Back to the tree of many fruits. Goodger dreamt up a display of fruit-formed caddies on a tree as an eyecatching presentation that could seem both everyday and whimsical. It was also an opportunity to re-educate the public about these pieces. Like all tea caddies, the fruit forms are zinc-lined, and examples that retain 70 percent or more of their lining are, Goodger says, “quite good,” although a refreshed lining doesn’t markedly affect their value. Unlike many caddies, they are never divided into multiple compartments, and interior lids are rare. For a long time, the story went that apples were made of apple wood, pears of pearwood, and so forth. This, however, turned out to be a myth. The authors of The Story of British Tea Chests and Caddies (2022), to which Goodger contributed a chapter, had the woods of a number of fruit-form caddies tested. It all came back
the same: sycamore.
This didn’t shock Goodger, as sycamore is a wonderful wood for turning, and the fruit pieces are always turned on a lathe, and it offered evidence to support another theory of his about their origins. The fruit-form caddies aren’t English, he’s found, but from the Continent. A paper label from Baden in Germany served as an early clue, and “as far as I’m aware,” Goodger says, “they are all gifts from spa towns.”
Demand for the fruit-form tea caddies, Goodger says, is high, but Timms finds interest in a different variety of shapely container. “I am very partial personally to the tea caddies in the form of a piece of miniature furniture,” he says. Dressers, sideboards, and chests shrunken down to store tea instead of, say, a winter wardrobe or dinnerware, offer interest and operate as symbols of craftsmanship and wealth. And many may have played their (false) parts well enough to have kept their very real and valuable contents safe from wandering hands.
While a tea caddy may not seem necessary for many tea enjoyers today, the market is thriving. Aside from providing reassurance that one’s footman or butler is not sneaking off with a pinch of PG Tips, the traditional caddy sits well in both traditional and modern settings. The price tag on this addition to your collection varies with rarity and condition. Fruit forms and miniature pieces of furniture demand a premium, with a sideboard example from S and S Timms asking $4,500 and a striking Georgian pear running just under $4,000. Fancifully inlaid examples may be half that, with simple forms setting you back a few hundred dollars.
For those eager to get in on the caddy market, it’s worth remembering that, while the lining need not be original, the finish must be. Original finish is critical for retaining value, Goodger says, and the beauty of the fruit forms is often best found in patina and blushing. Hardware, too, matters. While English-made caddies often have brass hardware, fruit forms always bear steel. This is another clue to their Continental origins, as many of these pieces originated in Germany, which has long stood at the center of European steel manufacturing.
Fakes are, Goodger says, rampant. It’s easy for a skilled craftsman to multiply the value of a small box by passing it off as a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century tea caddy. Buying from the British Antique Dealers’ Association, LAPADA, and accredited dealers is an important step toward verifying a bill of goods, but you also need to go with your gut.
“A gut feeling is absolutely vital . . . if you have hesitance straight away, something’s telling you to walk away,” Goodger says, “The problem is, we all want a bargain.”
