To build resources for missionary work, The Salvation Army became a tea merchant. 

By Lindsay Cox

There’s nothing like an Army cup of tea, or so goes a line from the Gowans and Larsson musical Take-Over Bid which premiered in Sydney in 1968.

Seventy years earlier, Commandant Herbert Booth had a similar thought but instead of a song he launched a “Missionary Tea League”. The members of the tea league pledged to use only tea supplied by The Salvation Army, an idea similar to a scheme already operating in England. Thus members of the League, when sipping with some enjoyment his or her refreshing cup of tea … were really contributing to the support of the Army’s missionary work. The profits from its sale would not enrich any individual, but really go to develop and extend God’s work among the heathen of all lands.

Adjutant Ashley Lamb, an officer out of Bundaberg Corps in 1888, was in charge of the Wholesale Section of the Trade Department in 1897. Commandant Booth gave him the task of taking The Salvation Army into the tea business. Wasting no time, Adjutant Lamb purchased packets of tea from local merchants and re-sold them from his office at territorial headquarters in Bourke Street, Melbourne. 

Promoted to Staff-Captain, Lamb began to buy and blend his own teas and soon was selling over one ton per week. The developing business needed bigger premises and a blue-stone warehouse in Westwood Place, opposite the current site of the territorial archives and museum in Melbourne was acquired where tea with the brand name Hamodava (a Singhalese word for Salvation) – was blended. By May 1898 the growing success of the enterprise caused a further move and the Army leased a substantial warehouse in William Street. Later, even larger premises were obtained in Smythe’s Lane, off Lonsdale Street and behind Her Majesty’s Theatre where a faded Hamodava sign still gives mute testimony to the pioneering activity once operating within. 

The imported tea, mainly from larger suppliers in India and Ceylon, was cut, blended and packed with the Army’s own modern equipment newly installed in William Street. At the same time, in a foretaste of the Fair Trade concept, The Salvation Army purchased land in South Asia and arranged for indigenous farmers to buy the land in payment for their tea harvest.  

Hamodava Tea was a good product for the trade department and a windfall for overseas missionary work. Corps officers sold the tea as part of their regular fundraising activities and tea travellers and agents became established right across Australia and New Zealand. In 1900 with no depreciation whatever in the quality in order to benefit the Mission Fund, coffee and cocoa were added to the Hamodava range.

Ashley Lamb, a brigadier in 1920, stated that if cups and saucers were filled with tea made from the output for one year they would make three lines totalling 3790 miles [6064 km] in length. One row would reach from Melbourne to the Bluff in New Zealand, another right to Brisbane, Queensland, and the third to Albany, Western Australia.

The Hamodava Tea enterprise continued until the 1930s until being forced to close down by the competition of other distributors whose quality was not of the same standard and [with whom] The Salvation Army could not compete [on] price. However, the Army cup of tea continued by way of The General’s Tea which was introduced in the United Kingdom in 1909 to celebrate William Booth’s 80th birthday and was marketed in a caddy depicting H.M.Queen Alexandra and the dowager Empress of Russia with General William Booth at tea at Buckingham Palace.

Ah! There was nothing like an Army cup of Hamodava Tea!