James Taylor
The Father of Ceylon Tea, Part I
By Karen P., Customer Service Manager & Master Tea Consultant
In October 1851, 16-year-old James Taylor left his native Scotland and stood on the bow of a ship, the Sydney, headed for a new land — the pear-shaped, tropical island of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), located in the Indian Ocean 15 miles off the southeast coast of India. He had just signed a letter of engagement with a Mr. George Pride of Kandy, Ceylon, which committed him to a 3-year contract “to act in the capacity of assistant superintendent” at the Narenghena Estate, a budding coffee plantation. Accompanied by his cousin, Henry Stiven, on the 3-month voyage, the two young kinsmen arrived in Colombo in February 1852.
James “Jamie” Taylor was born on the 29th of March 1835, in a small croft called Mosspark, which was part of the Monboddo Estate in Kincardineshire county on the northeast coast of Scotland. His father, Michael, a carpenter, was described as “a respectable hard-working man,” and his mother, Margaret (Moir), was descended from an artisan-class background — her maternal grandfather, Charles Stiven, was a famed expert in snuff-box manufacture during the late 1700s. When James was a boy, the nearby countryside village of Auchenblae (Gaelic for “field of flowers”) was a thriving community of 550, a picturesque place where the majority of residents worked as artisans, farmers, and linen manufacturers. The local minister, John Philip, described Taylor as “a quiet steady-going lad with…a heavy and thoughtful expression.”
Devoted to learning from an early age, Taylor attended the local Free Church school where his academic education included arithmetic, writing and reading as well as the classical languages of Greek and Latin.
This devotion stayed with him into his adult years and served him well as he built his career in Ceylon, despite his father’s desire that he pursue a life of local manual labor. With a national system of schooling, a cultural importance placed on education and the profound respect for schoolmasters, it is little wonder that the area of Scotland where Taylor grew up had the best literacy rates in the country during this period. This educational background made the young men from this area highly sought after to be the future managers and planters of Ceylon.
Taylor’s cousin, Peter Moir, traveled to Ceylon in 1843, where he managed Messrs. Hadden’s properties there. Six years later, he returned to the Laurencekirk, Kincardineshire area of Scotland to recruit young men to return to Ceylon with him. He contacted Henry Stiven, who in turn had a long talk with Taylor, and the cousins, along with fourteen of their compatriots, followed “a well-mapped route from Laurencekirk to Colombo.” Taylor’s letter of engagement:
Messrs G. & J. A. Hadden London October 1851 Gentlemen, I hereby engage myself to Mr. George Pride of Kandy, Ceylon, for the space of three years to act in the capacity of assistant superintendent and to make myself generally useful and obey the orders of those set over me — at a salary of £100 say a Hundred Pounds per annum to commence from the time of my arrival on the estate and to have deducted from my salary the amount of money advanced by you for my passage and outfit. I am, Gentlemen, Your obedient Servant, James Taylor
After the cousins arrived in Colombo in February 1852, they left for Kandy, currently one of the 7 tea growing regions in Sri Lanka,shortly thereafter where their paths diverged—Stiven to Ancoombra Estate and Taylor to Narenghena Estate. Taylor’s first boss, Mr. George Pride, was “a little fellow who in his passions was fearful and had no control of them,” often exhibiting uncontrolled outbursts with the workers. Six weeks after his arrival at Narenghena, Taylor was sent to Mr. Pride’s neighboring Loolecondera Estate where he settled down in a tiny bungalow that he shared with a fellow worker, Mr. Hoffman, a “quiet sort of gentleman” from Calcutta. Their bungalow was rustic, “constructed of a few posts about the corners with boards nailed across, overlapping each other like slates, as open as well as can be, with about a foot of opening above between that and the thatch…and then the wind, of which we have plenty at this season of the year, blows a perfect hurricane in the bungalow, sometimes so as to put out the lamp.”
Taylor had arrived just as the 110 acres of Loolecondera Estate were being developed into a coffee plantation, coffee being the crop of choice in mid 19th century Ceylon. Acquired from the Crown by Mr. J.J. Mackenzie back in 1841, all that had been accomplished in the last decade was land clearing and timber burning. Now it was time to get the roads created and the ground prepared for planting. Taylor dedicated himself to these tasks and, within a year, they were growing coffee, his primary responsibility in the years before he became famous for his achievements as a tea planter.
In 1857, Taylor wrote home with the news that Mr. George Pride had passed away and all of his estates, Loolecondera included, were sold to Keir, Dundas & Co, the leading agency house in Kandy. They placed two gentlemen in charge of the estates, J.L. Dundas and John Gavin, whom Taylor noted as “the business man of the lot and perhaps the most important man in all of the Kandyan country…” Gavin was interested in the idea of diversification from coffee, a prophetic notion given what was to take place in the years to come as the dreaded coffee leaf disease, Hemileia vastatrix, spread with alarming speed from estate to estate, eventually decimating the coffee industry of Ceylon. However, from the ashes of coffee rose the great phoenix of tea as Taylor began experimenting with growing tea in the 1860s.
In Part II, we shall explore the rise of the tea industry in Ceylon and how James Taylor played a key role in its development and success.
Resources: Tea & Empire, James Taylor in Victorian Ceylon by Angela McCarthy & T.M. Devine A Hundred Years of Ceylon Tea by D.M. Forrest