A promotional film produced for Ringtons Limited by Turners Film Productions that follows the cycle of tea production and distribution, from the Ceylon plantations to the Ringtons Tea factory on Algernon Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, and from the factory to the customer’s doorstep. In the kitchen of a modern suburban home a woman puts on an electric kettle to boil water for her teapot which stands beside her on the hob. Title: The Cup That Cheers Produced for Ringtons Limited by Turners Film...

A promotional film produced for Ringtons Limited by Turners Film Productions that follows the cycle of tea production and distribution, from the Ceylon plantations to the Ringtons Tea factory on Algernon Road, Newcastle upon Tyne, and from the factory to the customer’s doorstep. In the kitchen of a modern suburban home a woman puts on an electric kettle to boil water for her teapot which stands beside her on the hob. Title: The Cup That Cheers Produced for Ringtons Limited by Turners Film Productions. Newcastle Upon Tyne Credits: Photography: Bryan Copplestone Lighting: Peter Smith Commentary: Richard Baker In Charge of Production: Brian Nicol A.R.P.S. Over the following title card the kettle whistle begins to below. Title: The scenes in Ceylon and London are reproduced with kind permission of the TEA BUREAU, 22 Regent Str. London S.W.1 The kettle boiled she pours the water into the teapot placing it onto the nearby kitchen table. She takes a seat at the table and begins to pour herself a cup of tea from the teapot, in a caddy beside her the Ringtons Tea. At a tea plantation in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, with women make their way into the tea fields carrying wicker baskets across their back held in place by straps across their heads. The women make their way along rows of tea plucking the top two leaves and bud tossing them over their shoulders into their baskets. Along a roadside the woman sits beside their baskets waiting for theirs to be weighed. A wagon is parked nearby and each woman comes over with her baskets pouring their content onto a set of scales. With the weight recorded the leaves are dropped onto a larger pile where they are collected into larger baskets and loaded onto the back of the lorry. The now full lorry leaves for the tea factory, at another plantation a ropeway is used to transport sacks of plucked leaf to the factory. The wagon arrives at the factory being pulled by a tractor and the baskets are loaded onto a conveyor and taken to an upper floor where a man spreads out the leaf over hessian shelfs. Twenty-four hours later he returns and uses a large wooden spatula to scrap the now withered leaves off the shelfs. In another room a large rolling machines break up the green cells and liberate the juice over the surface of the leave. The tealeaf is then broken up over sieves and taken to the Fermenting room where the tea is laid out evenly on a table to oxidise turning the leaf from green to a bright copper colour. A worker pours the oxidised tea onto a conveyor which takes the tea over a drying machine after which the finished leaf is collected in baskets at the base of the machine. A man comes over and takes them away. Another machine shakes the leaf that will sort the tea into different grades and finally women pick over the tea for the removal of stalks. The now finished tea comes down a shoot dropping into a wooden tea chest with ‘Product of Ceylon’ printed onto it. Two men carry it outside loading it onto the back of a lorry alongside other chests for the journey to Columbo. The busy streets of Colombo and at the dock’s where men work along a quayside loading tea chests into the hold of a waiting ship. A tugboat pulls a ship towards a berth at Tilbury Docks in the Thames Estuary. Now tied up the tea chests are unloaded via a pulley system onto a waiting barge for transportation to a bonded warehouse near Tower Bridge in the City of London. At the warehouses the chests are unloaded via another pulley system and moved along a roller conveyor. A hole is drilled into the side of one of the chests and a sample of tea is collected. In the Buyers Room at Ringtons Limited in Newcastle, two Buyers in white laboratory coats stand at a counter looking through a tea catalogues. They stamp it to identify which samples of tea they would like to have ordered. On another countertop a collection of half-pound Ringtons Tea packets in green and red labels. Three women work to prepare samples for testing in the Buyers Room. A box of tea samples is dropped out into a counter and sorted. A woman uses a set of scales to weight the exact amount of tea needed for the testing dropping it into large pot. Next, a second woman carrying a large brass kettle of freshly boiled water pours it into each pot, following behind a man placing a lid onto each of the pots. After five minutes of infusion the liquor is strained into China bowls with the wet leaf placed in the pot lids for inspection. Two men in white laboratory coats make their way along the line of samples testing the liquor in each of bowls using a spoon, slurping it and spitting the content out into a spittoon. They also look carefully at both the wet and dry leaf before moving on, beside them a woman seem previously helping to set up the testing taking notes. A woman sits at teleprinter typing a message to their London agents with regards which teas to bid on. A man walks out of Plantation House in London while in the Tea Auditorium an auction is taking place. The Tyne Bridge crossing the River Tyne and the nearby Newcastle Quayside where a consignment of tea chests is unloaded from the hold of a Tyne-Tees Coaster by stevedores and crane. At Ringtons Limited head office on Algernon Road the tea chests arrive by lorry and are transported to an upper floor via a conveyor system. The chests are moved for temporary storage until needed for blending. In another room two men work to create a miniature blend by measuring out various teas and proportions using a set of scales and placing each sample onto a sheet of white paper. The blend created it is placed into tabletop blending machine before being taken to the Buyers Room for sampling against the blend it is replenishing making sure it is identical. A third man Douglas Smith Jnr, Marketing Director of Ringtons Limited carries out the testing alongside the two testers from earlier in the film. With approval of this blend give, the process moves to the warehouse where a man checks the weight of each garden-marked chest against details of the bulk blend. All in order the content of several chests is poured into a sifting machine changing to a man demonstrates how the large permanent magnets at each side of the machine guard against stray bits of metal. An operator mans the giant drum double delivery blender on the floor above, he watches over cotton lined chest being filled with this blend. Once full the chests are weighed on scales and taken away. The magnetised strips on the chutes are demonstrated with a hammer becoming stuck to the strip. One of the chests is then unloaded into a hopper which feds the high-speed automatic packaging machines on the floor below. In the packaging room a man watches a woman watch over the large automatic packaging machines that is working to accurately weigh the tea for each packet, wrap it in greaseproof lined vanilla packets and finally packaged with the Ringtons label. A montage sequence to music follows of the machine in operation filling, sealing and labelling the half-pound packets of Ringtons Tea. The final part of the process is a machine that perforates a detachable dividend stamp on the label that is exchangeable for cash changes to a woman’s hand sticking Ringtons dividend stamps onto a Ringtons Dividend Card. In the Printing department, coloured labels are produced for the packing departments in both the Newcastle and Leeds. One workman checks on the red ink being used in the printer while a second checks on the quality of the print of the sheets of Ringtons Tea labels. The finished sheets are stacked in piles beside other coloured labels. A precision cutting machine is then used to guillotine the labels to their correct size while back in the packaging room the machine perforates the dividend stamps in operation. Packets of finished Ringtons Tea come along a conveyor where they are placed into large cardboard boxes by women. A man in a white laboratory coat conducts a random quality check on a package coming of the conveyor. The full boxes are loaded onto a pallet before being moved to the loading bay ready for distribution to local depots. As well as stacked boxes of tea, the loading bay also contains boxes of coffee ready for distribution. In another part of Ringtons a Roaster scoops Kenyan coffee beans from a sack into a metal container which he then dropped into a gas-fired roasting machine. Using a small scoop, he shows the camera a sample of the now roasted beans before transferring them all into cooling trays and finally into a grinding machine. Freshly ground coffee comes out of the base of the machine into a large metal container. Back in the Packing department a boxes of ground coffee packages are sealed and stacked with the others in the Loading Bay. Boxes of Ringtons tea and coffee are loaded into the back of a distribution van that leaves the Algernon Road site. A larger distribution lorry arrives at one of Ringtons delivery depot changing to maps of showing the Ringtons delivery network across Cumbria, the North-East and Yorkshire. A black, green and gold Rington delivery van drives along a country road crossing over a bridge and passing a road sign pointing towards Carlisle. A colliery wheel and miners leaving a mine at the end of a shift changes to a Ringtons delivery van driving through a modern housing estate past children playing in the street. After the van pulls up outside a house the film changes to another van now driving onto Palace Green in Durham passing the cathedral as it makes its way towards Durham Castle. Its delivery made the van drives away back towards Owengate and Saddler Street. Another van and a lorry both depart the Ringtons delivery depot on Ladypit Lane in Leeds, built on the site where once stood the home of the company’s founder Samuel Smith. From the cliffs about, Scarborough Lighthouse and Vincent Pier below changing to a Ringtons van driving through and out of town. Crowds of holidaymakers walk along the promenade at Scarborough as another Ringtons delivery van driving past. Returning to Newcastle a traditional Ringtons horse drawn delivery van travelling along a street. The film changes to a Ringtons salesman pulling up outside a house in a modern motor van and gets out carrying a selection of Ringtons products in his arms. He walks up to and rings the doorbell on one of the houses in the street and the woman from the start of the film answers and purchases several items including a packet of Ringtons Tea. Back at the kitchen table she finishes pouring herself a cup of tea and drops a sugar cube into it. The film ends in the living room where two women sit on a sofa enjoying cups of Ringtons Tea. End title: Good Tea is More Economical and More Refreshing