Davidson Junior and Davidson

MESSRS. DAVIDSON JUNIOR & DAVIDSON, Wholesale Tea Dealers, 48, York Street, Glasgow.

    Begun in the year 1870, and established by Mr. John McCulloch, this enterprise has, under its new and most energetic proprietors, already reached a high degree of prosperity, which, as a visit to Messrs. Davidson’s establishment will show, gives every promise of long continuance and fuller development. York Street, which runs from the leading thoroughfare, Argyle Street, to the harbour, might almost be called the “Mincing Lane” of Glasgow, and in a most favourable situation there Messrs. Davidson Junior and Davidson occupy the ground floor with a very commodious, well-lighted, and handsome suite of offices, admirably, adapted in every respect for the special purposes of the trade. Besides well-appointed and comfortable rooms for the more private transaction of business, there are suitably equipped sample and tasting rooms, in which experienced tea-tasters may be seen busy at work estimating the quality and value of various newly imported samples, or trying to attain an attractive blend for the now most fastidious palates of modern connoisseurs in tea. Besides these departments, and stretching to the rear, are airy and spacious warehouses, fragrant with the long imprisoned aroma of the precious leaf brought across the seas.

    The floors literally groan under the costly load of quaintly adorned chests from the smiling fields of far Cathay, the steamy valleys of Assam, the wooded heights of the Himalayas, or the palm-fringed Island of Ceylon. Indeed, no known quality of Tea — and their name is now legion — but seems to be fairly and even liberally represented here, and great skill is shown in catering for the different tastes of a varied population whose wants are numerous and divergent, and who are becoming, year by year, more critical as to the quality of the tea supplied to them, as the market’s capacity to furnish definite qualities develops with the higher skill now brought to bear on the preparation and growth of this most important beverage of civilized man. However great may be the care manifested by local growers in selecting and cultivating particular plants, and in choosing the most favourable soil, a vast deal can now be done to improve tea for the home market by a judicious blend of qualities noted for strength, flavour, or aroma, as furnished by different brands grown perhaps under entirely different conditions, though all pure teas. In Messrs. Davidson’s is to be seen in active operation machinery of the most improved kind and designed for all the different operations required to perfect the process of mixing tea.

    In all the departments of this enterprise, Mr. Davidson Junior has brought to bear a ripe experience obtained in a first-class London house, and he has evidently applied his knowledge of detail with great practical intelligence and deserved success to the supply of the tea market in the wide and populous area which has its centre in the City of Glasgow.

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