On this day, 2 April 1976, shooting of the first Star Wars movie began at Elstree Studios in England. While its US director George Lucas apparently had admiration for the technical skills of the British crew, he was bewildered by their working practices: in particular the tea break. After decades of organising, and many strikes, workers in many industries in the UK had set tea breaks where they would not do any work.

At Elstree, work started at 8:30 AM, ended at 5:30 PM with a 1-hour lunch break, with tea breaks at 11 AM and 4 PM. When it was time for a break, the crew would stop work immediately, even if they were in the middle of shooting a scene.

This working class culture, of putting drinking tea and having a chat above the work ethic and the profit motive, was one of the things Conservative politician Margaret Thatcher set out to smash a few years later. This earned her a lot of hatred amongst working class communities but attracted admiration from even her rivals in the political class, for example the president of the European Commission Jacques Delors, who told Thatcher’s biographer Charles Moore “She demonstrated a sort of revolt against the old British system with their tea breaks. I had respect for that.”

We’ve produced some merch commemorating the struggle for tea breaks to help fund our work: