All for Tea with the Queen

Naturally, when asked about with whom he would most like to have afternoon tea, Andrew is quick to respond that it would, of course, be Queen Elizabeth at Buckingham Palace. “Afternoon tea is quite the ritual for the queen. It’s a time when she catches up on all the family news, gossip, and sees people for 20 minutes to half an hour,” he says. “And it’s a very important meal of the day for her.” In his book Meghan: A Hollywood Princess (2018), Andrew reports that the queen often enjoys thinly sliced sandwiches, scones, and cakes during teatime along with her own blend of tea named after her paternal grandmother, Queen Mary. In fact, Queen Elizabeth invited Meghan Markle to tea for their first meeting. To prepare, Meghan, a native of Los Angeles, visited Rose Tree Cottage, a British-style tearoom in nearby Pasadena, California. Englishman Edmund Fry and his wife, Mary, who have owned the renowned venue for decades, were delighted to equip her with the necessary tea etiquette. Acting on a tip from a neighbor about the training the couple were providing for the royal encounter, Andrew, who divides his time between London and Pasadena and was in Southern California at the time, ventured to the tearoom to see if he could glean any information for the book he was writing about Meghan. What started out as a fact-finding mission has since blossomed into a close friendship between Andrew and the tearoom owners, who devote most of the profits from the business to a school for underprivileged children in Kenya.

Because he penned an authorized biography about Daniel arap Moi, the African nation’s second and longest-serving President, Andrew feels a strong connection to Rose Tree Cottage’s charitable endeavor. He spent a lot of time in Naivasha, Kenya, while doing research for that book, so he was astonished when he first learned that the school Edmund and Mary support is in that same area. “They asked me to be patron, and I was delighted to accept,” Andrew shares. He often gives talks at the tearoom and does book signings to raise funds for the school through the Frys’ charity, Bloom Where Planted. “What brings tears to your eyes is the gratitude that these children feel just to get a cuddly toy or a bike or something, which kids in America and in Britain take for granted,” says Andrew, adding that Mary and Edmund get a lot of pleasure out of seeing the joy the school children get from the containers full of shoes, books, pens, paper, and toys they send on a regular basis.

Surely Queen Elizabeth herself would be quite pleased that in a roundabout way, it was an invitation she issued for afternoon tea that ultimately brought together “the king of royal tea” and two tearoom owners for the good of children in Kenya, the very place where, in 1952, she arrived as a princess and eventually left as queen.