Bizarre claims of Perthshire tea blagger Thomas Robinson – bomb disposal, surviving deadly snake bites and inventing Bag for Life

The Courier

a day ago

It was not just the whirlwind success of Thomas Robinson's Scottish tea plantation that prosecutors found hard to swallow.
There were many aspects of the 55-year-old's personal life and Forrest Gump-esque career that were difficult to believe – and even tougher to fact-check.
'I enjoy telling people that I was one of the inventors of the Bag For Life,' he said.
'They don't believe it. Then when they go away and Google it, they come back with a different impression of me.'
Robinson, who was this week convicted of a £550k fake Scottish tea fraud, claimed he was part of a team of three people who produced the now ubiquitous shopping carrier for Waitrose in the late 1990s.
There is no evidence to back up his claim.
Investigators found no connection between the Bag for Life and Thomas Robinson.
Or Thomas O'Brien.
Or Tam O'Braan.
So who is the man behind the Perthshire grown brew that was too good to be true?
Taking the witness stand towards the end of his trial, Robinson was asked to declare his name.
'Thomas James O'Brien,' he said.
Born Thomas Robinson in Greenwich, London in 1970, he said he went to an Irish primary school in County Down.
But he later said by the age of eight he was educated in London.
He said he achieved a qualification in food technology from a college in London's Elephant and Castle in the late 1980s.
'It was the same college where Charlie Chaplin and Michael Caine went,' he told jurors.
Robinson denied he had ever told anyone he was a member of the British armed forces, but said he was part of the 'Irish Defence Force' for a year in the late 1990s.
He served on the Irish border but also went to 'various overseas locations' to guard embassies.
When pressed on how a London-born man with a UK passport would be in the Irish army, he told the court: 'One can have dual nationality.'
Asked by fiscal depute Joanne Ritchie what kind of discharge he received from the army, Robinson replied: 'Regular.'
He insisted he could not divulge any details of his army career.
The court heard how he told Jamie Russell of the Wee Tea Company he saw a soldier die in combat.
Robinson said his former business associate was confused and he had in fact told him he had seen a man in a Hearts top being killed in a road accident in Thailand.
The court heard he had also bragged about being involved in bomb disposal operations and told others he was a military chef.
'You went as far as to make up these elaborate lies so you appeared to be a man of integrity,' Ms Ritchie told him. 'You wanted to appear as someone who people trust.'
Around the same time he was supposedly in the army, he claimed to be studying plastics at the Athlone Institute of Technology in Ireland for 'a year and a bit'.
Meanwhile, he was enjoying a career as a professional rugby player.
He told the court he played 'to a high standard' at several clubs including Blackheath and Liverpool Stanley.
He was so good at rugby, he even had a coaching career, he said.
At some point, he also studied Gaelic in Kilkenny.
But all evidence of his head-spinning achievements during the 1990s were lost in a flood, he said.
All of his qualifications, rugby coaching certificates and paperwork from his army days are now a 'pile of mush' in a water-logged part of an outhouse in Dalreoch.
Robinson then claimed to work in the flour and cereal industry, before moving into plastics, where he supposedly developed the Bag For Life.
By April 2010 when he married partner Grace Wallace in their then-home city of Edinburgh, he had changed his name to Thomas O'Brien.
During his tea plantation days he told people – including the press – his wife was a lawyer but in court he said she worked for the office of national statistics.
Their marriage certificate reveals Robinson was a chemical engineer, also noting his father James Robinson was a colonel in the Royal Artillery.
Asked how he got a job as a chemical engineer with no chemistry qualifications, he said he studied the subject at Napier University – but did not graduate.
At some point, he somehow managed to live on a canoe in the Amazon for four years where he was bitten by a deadly spider, as he told Country Life in 2017.
In November 2010, his company Thomas James Consultants Ltd – set up to protect his 'intellectual property' – received a £20,469 grant from the European Development Fund.
The grant was to develop and test degradable plastics, which became crucial to his tea-growing business in Perthshire.
Robinson became director of a company called EconVerte which carried out crop trials and experiments.
He told the court his work secured him a contract with President Barrack Obama's administration to carry out maize trials in a dustbowl.
Where was this contract now? The same bag of mush in his basement.
He resigned from EconVerte in 2012, the year he moved with his family to Dalreoch Farm, Amulree.
According to Companies House records, the Wee Tea Plantation was incorporated in August 2014.
Sole shareholder Robinson said he had earlier travelled to the Himalayas to see for himself how to grow tea in harsh conditions.
There, he was struck by the revelation that quality tea could be grown in Scotland.
'I spoke to an elder there and he said he had always wondered why we didn't do it in Scotland,' he said.
'We have the right conditions, the hills and the water.'
He shared his idea with his friend Jamie Russell, who he had met at his Bread Street cafe in Edinburgh around 2008.
Robinson told the trial he was a near-daily customer at the coffee shop and the pair bonded over their love of rugby.
At the cafe, he also met Derek Walker, another regular customer, as well as Lindsay Deuchars who was an employee.
Mr Russell and Mr Walker established the Wee Tea Company at an industrial unit in Dunfermline in 2012.
A year or two later, Robinson made a pitch to the fledgling business owners.
'I told Jamie what I was doing,' he said. 'I told him I thought I had worked out how to grow tea in Scotland.'
The trio gathered for a meeting in a freezing potting shed in Dalreoch, where Robinson explained his big secret – a 'unique' polymer sheeting that better retained moisture in the soil and prevented crops from being smothered by weeds.
Robinson said the plastic sheeting allowed his plants to grow at a much faster rate than normal.
He described the sheeting as 'known technology' but used in an innovative way, comparing himself to Steve Jobs inventing the iPhone.
Prosecutors said it looked like a bin liner.
His role, he said, was to attract larger retailers while supplying Mr Russell with wet tea leaves grown at Amulree.
It was decided Robinson would became Tam O'Braan 'for press purposes'. He named himself after the river that runs through his plantation.
The plan was to aim for the higher end of the tea market.
While they claimed the Dorchester, Balmoral and Fortnum and Mason among their stockists, Robinson had further lofty targets including Harrods and the Savoy.
One of the tricks he used to secure sales was to tell people his produce was a favourite of the Queen.
When pressed on this, he said he had at some point received a call from a member of staff at Buckingham Palace who told him how much Her Majesty had enjoyed his tea while visiting the Dorchester.
Robinson's Wee Tea Plantation was dissolved in October 2019, around the time the Food Standards Scotland probe was getting into full swing.
Since, Robinson said he has worked for an environmental company in Birmingham and driven a school bus for Stagecoach during the Covid lockdown.
He most recently secured a job as a senior chef at the plush Taymouth Castle, near Kenmore.
He told jurors his job had been kept open for him after an industrial accident in 2023, which left him with cognitive and memory issues.
When asked what happened, he said: 'I tripped over an electrical wire and fell into the basement of a castle.'
Taymouth Castle declined to comment on the alleged incident, which is understood to have happened without witnesses and was not caught on CCTV.
During his evidence, Robinson apologised for some unusual mannerisms such as taking deep breaths before reading printed words.
'I know it can look a bit strange,' he said. 'I'm better with pictures.'
When the jury were out of the room, he appeared in discomfort or pain.
Concerned, Sheriff Keith O'Mahony told Robinson he was welcome to sit and give his evidence, instead of stand.
'I just want to come across as normal as possible,' Robinson replied.