T.E. Stockwell

Lyrics

[Intro]
(a market stall, a barrow, coins)
Here is a man with several thousand shops named after him.
He founded none of them.

[Verse 1]
Jack Cohen sold surplus groceries off a barrow in the East End,
did well, bought stock in bulk, and one day bought a load of tea
from a supplier — a tea merchant — name of Thomas Edward Stockwell,
and when he came to brand the tea he wanted something short,
so he took the merchant's initials, T-E-S, and then
he stuck the first two letters of his own name on the end.

[Chorus]
TES-CO! It's a tea supplier and a grocer glued together!
T.E. Stockwell, who sold him leaves, and Cohen, who sold everything!
And the shops went up, and the shops went up, and the shops kept going up
until there's one in every town in Britain with his letters on the front!
T.E. Stockwell. He supplied the tea.
That is the entire extent of his involvement. That's it.

[Verse 2]
Now I have tried to find out what became of Mr. Stockwell
and there is almost nothing. A merchant. A supplier.
A man who sold a consignment to a barrow boy in the twenties
and got three letters of immortality he never asked for.
No portrait. No biography. No blue plaque anywhere.
Just TES, in front of CO, above ten thousand doors.

[Chorus]

[Bridge]
And there's a comedy in this that I genuinely enjoy:
of all the ways to be remembered by an entire country,
being the man who once sold tea to the man who did the work
is surely the most accidental immortality available.
He's not a founder. He's not an owner. He's a footnote
that got promoted to a shopfront by an abbreviation.

[Chorus]

[Outro]
(the market, closing up)
He sold him tea.
That's all he did. He sold the man some tea.