All for Tea with the Queen

Text by Lorna Reeves • Photograph by Steve Rizzo

A biographer’s unexpected story of friendship and charity

For Andrew Morton, his most memorable and enjoyable teatimes took place at the stately National Trust homes of England’s West Country that he would often visit on weekends while working as a trainee journalist in Plymouth. Strolls around the beautiful grounds of the regal estates would culminate in what he calls “splendid and sumptuous” afternoon teas, often featuring scones with strawberry jam and clotted cream, which he confesses, are his favorite treat. “Because the clotted cream was local, it would still be quite nutty and very chewy,” he says. “I can almost taste it now.” Dubbed “the king of royal tea” by The New York Times, Andrew chuckles when asked how he feels about that moniker. “It’s nice to be called the king of something,” he says, adding that he does “drink tea religiously” and that it’s always English Breakfast but admitting that the type of tea referenced in that title really has nothing to do with the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant and everything to do with, as Urban Dictionary puts it, “the best kind of gossip.”

Having written more than 20 books about various members of Britain’s royal family, international celebrities, and heads of state, Andrew Morton is perhaps best known for Diana: Her True Story (1992). “It was a disguised autobiography,” he reveals, going on to explain how the princess recorded answers to questions he funneled to her through a mutual friend for what turned out to be “an amazingly secretive and extraordinary collaboration.” He says it was through those recordings that he got the sense of what Diana felt and what was going on in her head and in her heart. His newest work, Elizabeth & Margaret: The Intimate World of the Windsor Sisters (Grand Central Publishing, 2021), tells the moving story of the United Kingdom’s longest-reigning monarch and her sole sibling. “When I started looking at Elizabeth and Margaret, I realized that their relationship as women was utterly unique in broad terms. They were very, very similar but very, very different,” Andrew observes. “They maintained an almost intuitive relationship.”

“Afternoon tea is quite the ritual for the queen. … it’s a very important meal of the day for her.”—ANDREW MORTON

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.