Tea by Roy Moxham (Constable, £14.99)

WHEN, in October 1747, 30 members of the notorious Hawkhurst Gang broke into the custom house at Poole, Dorset, it wasn't the barrels of brandy and rum they were after, but the 37cwt of tea.

Such was the value of what has become the national panacea, that afterwards, a pursuing custom's official was buried alive and an informer had his nose sliced off, before being hanged and then thrown headfirst down a well.

It was thanks to the Portuguese princess Catherine of Braganza, whose dowry when she married Charles II in 1662, included a chest of tea, that England first fell under the spell of the drink.

It was the beverage of the very rich and because of the monopoly exerted by the East India Company and high duties levied by the Government, tea was, until the late 18th Century when tax on it was almost obliterated, highly-prized by smugglers.

Like the heroin trade of today, it was a cut-throat business and just like 21st Century drug deals what was sold on the streets was even adulterated. It was easy to add copper sulphate to the early green teas and it was such acts that directly led to the popularity of black varieties.

Tea, of course, is a drug. It contains caffeine and the craze for it in the 18th Century was unprecedented.

James Hanway - who introduced the umbrella to London - made a venomous attack on it. Dr Johnson said it was not proper for the lower classes to drink it and even John Wesley called for people to abstain from imbibing it. However, he later recanted and was presented with a gallon teapot by Josiah Wedgewood.

Moxham, who grew up in the Vale of Evesham, where he spent his school holidays picking fruit, knows all about tea.

In November 1960, at the age of 21, he placed an advert in the Personal columns of The Times seeking a position on a tea plantation.

His only reply set him on course for a five-year stay in Nyasaland, managing 500 acres and a workforce of more than 1,000.

Lying about his ability to drive and gently nave - he used to shoot the giant fruit bats that flew over his bungalow at dusk thinking they were ducks - Moxham found himself amid bigoted colonials, who regarded Africans, in general, as illiterate and inferior and considered it a cardinal sin to drink whisky before sundown. Gin, however, was perfectly all right.

During those dying days of the Empire, which, of course, was partly built on tea, he discovered the plantation lands had been fraudulently gained or exchanged for baubles such as a few yards of calico, a gun or a red hat. They were first used to grow coffee and when that failed, tea.

In Moxham's day, Nyasaland - now Malawi - was producing 30 million pounds of tea, two-thirds of which found its way back to Britain.

He uses his time spent in Africa as a springboard to paint the bigger picture of tea.

It's an often bloody and murderous history, all done for profit and to satisfy a nation's thirst for a cuppa.

David Chapman