Bettys vs Taylors – the battle for the cup

At Bettys, we know how much better everything is when you come together over a freshly brewed cup. And one reason why is that we’re lucky to have Taylors as our sister company, supplying the teas and coffees in our cafés, shops and online. But it wasn’t always that way for these one-time rivals.

Bettys may be more than a century old but when Frederick Belmont opened his first tea room in Harrogate in 1919, it was a young upstart in the café world. The town was already home to Taylors, founded in the 1880s by the brothers Charles and Llewellyn. As well as being prize-winning tea and coffee blenders and wholesalers that supplied grocers’ shops, they ran their own cafés. While the original Bettys was located at 9 Cambridge Crescent, Taylors’ flagship branch was the Café Imperial at 1 Parliament St – just across the road and close enough to exchange dark looks over the teapots.

The Café Imperial occupied a fine corner site overlooking Montpelier Gardens. But World War II and years of rationing afterwards made it hard to succeed. By the 1950s Taylors, now run by the founders’ sons and nephew, was struggling and its premises were faded. A turning point came in 1962, when by chance the manager of Bettys Harrogate overheard a street conversation about Taylors being put up for sale. She passed the news on to Bettys’ then managing director (and Frederick’s nephew) Victor Wild, who didn’t waste a minute.

You might be forgiven for thinking that Bettys’ purchase of CE Taylor & Company was a bit of a liability. In addition to the collection of cafés large and small, the business’s blending sheds were a hotchpotch of buildings around the back of a listed Leeds townhouse. Twice a week the front window of what had been the drawing room had to be removed so that freshly packed tea and coffee could be transported on a temporary conveyor belt to the delivery vans.

Over the next few years, Taylors was fully welcomed into the Bettys fold. First was their Ilkley café and shop, which became a Bettys in 1964. The Leeds blenders found a less cramped new home at our Starbeck site in 1976, while four years later the Parliament Street café reopened as a beautifully refurbished Bettys.

Like all the closest siblings, Bettys and Taylors have a lot in common but also recognise each other’s unique talents. Taylors’ tea and coffee buyers travel the world in search of the best quality, nurturing relationships with suppliers based upon quality and fairness and staying true to founder Charles Taylor’s belief that a good blender is ‘as much an artist as a good painter’. And in turn, we make sure that you’ll never run out of biscuits to enjoy with that cup.

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