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August 25, 2003 - Strategy Magazine
Special Report: Premiums & Incentives

The collector: Bill Eugley
Red Rose tea card junkie

by Sara Minogue
page 20

Seven years ago, Bill Eugley's grandmother passed on a smattering of novelty premiums that she'd collected through years of drinking Red Rose tea. The tea cards - small plastic cards with educational paintings on one side and encyclopedic details on the other - struck Eugley as kind of neat. He remembered playing with them as a kid and soon started to look around for more. With some difficulty, he came up with an entire tea card series.

Along the way, his mother spotted the collection. "Enjoying the cards I gave you?" she asked, absentmindedly. Moments later Eugley and his mother were digging through an old jewelry box. "Lo and behold, there was another little set!" Eugley says.

From 1959 to 1974 (or a tidy 1960 to 1969 in the U.S.) Saint John, N.B.-based Red Rose Tea and parent company Brooke Bond Canada issued 17 series of tea cards (only 10 of which appeared in the U.S.), each containing 48 numbered cards. The first series, "Songbirds of North America," was followed by "Animals of North America," and later, "Wild Flowers of North America." A few years into the project, Red Rose branched into tropical birds, transportation, dinosaurs and outer space as themes, culminating in 1974's "Indians of Canada."

As often happens in these cases, what began as a curious project quickly escalated into a quest. Tea card collectors are few and far between but Eugley managed to add to his collection slowly by attending card shows dominated by football and baseball card swappers.

His favorite was the dinosaur series and he soon had his hands on the entire set. Next he decided to go for all 17 series. After observing that some of the Canadian series that made their way to the U.S. appeared with a black border instead of the standard Canadian blue, he made a point of tracking down both complete sets. "Then I noticed there were different variations in each set, so I had to get a set of each," Eugley told Strategy from his home in Auburn, Me.

After gathering the complete sets and all available variations, Eugley branched into related items. At the end of each series, faithful tea drinkers could mail a checklist, or a completion card, to Red Rose. Collectors would send along a penny for every card they were missing and in return, Red Rose would send out a complete set of cards as well as an album to keep them in. Both the completion card and the albums are now collectors' items.

Eugley has made trips to Toronto, where the cards were originally printed, in search of cards. He once managed to pick up an entire sheet of uncut tea cards at a flea market in Barrie, Ont., along with a classic aluminum Red Rose sign ("Red Rose Tea is good tea").

Brooke Bond Canada, which took over Red Rose in 1931, issued tea cards around the world, from Australia and Britain to Rhodesia and East Africa. Two years ago, Eugley travelled to England to take part in a tea card show. Brooke Bond issued cards in the U.K. as recently as 1999 and British collectors were eager to see Eugley's extensive Canadian collection.

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