INTRODUCTION

From Bivouacs to Bungalows

A party of eager young men accompanied by a troop of labourers toting tools and wooden chests containing their belongings, hacked their way along a trail close to the sacred mountain of Adam’s Peak. Their destination was Dickoya, a small settlement in a valley by a river some 50 miles south of Kandy. They were on a mission to clear the forest to plant coffee on land bought from the Crown.

The young men, most of whom had only recently arrived from England to be assistant planters, spent that first night in Dickoya in bivouacs of jute sacking and jungle branches. The development of coffee plantations began slowly with only three estates - Dickoya (with the aptly named “Squatter” Davidson in charge), Darrawella and part of Dunbar - opened up in 1861 by those doughty pioneers.

Because of the commercial success of coffee growing, over the next ten years they were joined by others who opened up the land to create coffee-growing estates at Castlereagh, Dunkeld, Norwood, Summerville and Tientsin among others.

That first wave of planters in Dickoya were men in their early twenties, lured to Ceylon because of the chance to escape from family or professions in Britain and perhaps to make a fortune. They lived simply, camping out on their plantations with their labour force until they managed to build makeshift dwellings of mud with a thatched roof of palm leaves.

One 19th century writer described a planter living in “ a miserable little cabin …at one end was a jungle bedstead formed by driving green stakes in the floor and walls, and stretching a rope across them.”

By family background these were religious men and one of the first permanent buildings in the Dickoya district was Christ Church, Warleigh, built in 1878 and overlooking what is now the Castlereagh Reservoir. It is still there today, with the graves of many of the pioneering planters and their children. The headstones reveal the perils faced by the planters. William Brown, age 29, drowned while crossing a stream in Maskeliya, in 1888. Many are the children buried there, including Edward Gray Brown, beloved child of James and Annie Brown, who died at Norwood, age 18 months, in 1897.

The young planters were a gregarious crowd and as well as building a church, they soon set up clubs where they could spend their evenings roistering with colleagues and weekends in hunting, fishing and playing rugby and cricket.

The foremost of these was the Dickoya & Maskeliya Cricket Club, known as the Darrawella Club because it was located on the Darrawella Estate. Founded in a bivouac in 1868, it exists today: now a rambling structure of wooden floors, walls and beams with a solid granite block exterior. Photographs of rugby, cricket and hockey teams ranging over 100 years hang on the walls, a visual reminder of those planters. There is a black and white photograph, dated 1870, of a team of hirsute young men, looking like jolly scallywags, standing before a tent with coffee fields in the background.

While they were opening up Dickoya to coffee, a veteran planter, James Taylor who had arrived in Ceylon from Scotland a few days before his 17th birthday in 1852, planted the first field of tea on a commercial basis near Kandy. The year was 1867.

Taylor’s timing was fortuitous as the railways came to Kandy that same year, providing swift transportation for plantation crops to Colombo for shipment to England. It was also the time that a pernicious blight began to spread slowly killing the coffee bushes; it eventually wiped out the colony’s entire coffee plantations.

In Dickoya, planters were slow to realise what was happening. By 1883 Dickoya had become a thriving plantation district with about 32,994 acres, most planted in coffee. As the blight spread, estates failed, the owners went bankrupt and plantations were sold cheaply.

Seeing the growing demand for tea, new planters uprooted the coffee bushes and scrambled to convert their fields to tea gardens. Within a decade, Dickoya was exclusively a tea growing region.

As prospects improved, the planters converted their mud huts to shacks of handhewn timber felled in the forest and then to single storey dwellings made with granite blocks and slate roofs. For those first bungalows, they selected prime positions at the highest point on their estates from where they could survey the vast swathes of tea, their labour force, and the enchanting views that reminded them of the Scottish highlands that many of them called home.

From 19 acres of tea planted by James Taylor near Kandy in 1867 there were 32,000 acres of tea throughout the planting districts in 1883. After six years, by 1889, this had increased to 205,000 acres. With speculators purchasing estates from bankrupt owners and the conversion of plantations from coffee to tea, ownership slipped from planters themselves to companies. Many were UK-based and had Estate Agency Houses as their agents in Ceylon, who employed superintendent planters to manage their estates.

As the 19th century ended, the category of arriving planters changed, from foolhardy and adventurous bachelors to educated young men trained to be leaders, accustomed to being obeyed and happy with their own class. They built bungalows emulating the country manors of the English shires. Women, looking for husbands, followed them to Ceylon and the planters were happy to marry and have a wife to share the plantation life and duties with them.

James Taylor

The lifestyle of planters, with servants for inside and outside the bungalow drawn from the local and imported Indian labour force, took on a regular routine. Men from British upper class public schools fitted in easily with plantation management and club social life while others educated at British grammar schools but from good stock, quickly blended in, aping each other in plantation etiquette and social conventions.

As bungalows were built, the planters’ wives dutifully managed the household staff, doing voluntary welfare work for the labour force and tending the bungalow garden.

The spread of tea added some 100 British planters and their wives to the Dickoya population. They were a sociable crowd and their wives joined in too, taking part in sport meets and picnics, although in the Club House they were confined to the Ladies Lounge.

Known in Tamil as Dikosi Pakkam, Dickoya’s plantations were located from 4,000 to 5,000 feet above sea level. From 1876, the district was accessible by train from Colombo via Kandy to what was then called Hatton Garden station. The railway service facilitated easier shipment of crops from Dickoya to the Colombo docks.

From Norwood a public horse-drawn coach made a daily trip every morning via Dickoya to Hatton and returned in the afternoon. The fare for the seven miles journey (at an average speed of 10 mph) from Norwood to Hatton was Rs 2.50.

With the introduction of the motorcycle in Ceylon in 1903, planters were no longer compelled to hike through the hills or ride on horseback to inspect the tea gardens and monitor the labour force. For them, it must have seemed a charmed life and many planters stayed on the same plantation for years. Some fought with distinction in the two world wars.

As the 20th century progressed, many planters became enthusiastic motorists, partial to open top sports cars like Austin Healeys and MGs, which they would park alongside their bungalows where horses were once stabled.

After Independence came to Ceylon in 1948, the British planters began to retire and return “home” to Britain. They were replaced by Ceylon-born planters, many of whom had been trained by the British or were half-British and half-Ceylonese. For several years, the bungalow lifestyle remained the same. The planter’s wife lived in the bungalow, trained and supervised the household staff and was an extra pair of eyes and ears as she dedicated herself to community welfare work.

In time, however, the Ceylon-born planters of European extraction sensed a change coming; many emigrated to Canada or Australia. Ceylon became Sri Lanka in 1972 with a new constitution and the Land Reform law being passed, leading to the nationalisation in 1975 of all plantations and estates over 50 acres in area.

Dedicated planters who remained and cared for their plantations, bungalows and labour force as though they were their own, were disparaged. They were no longer allowed to spend years on the same plantation and in the same district and the loyal camaraderie of the old days was lost. The planter’s wife did not live in the estate bungalow but stayed in Colombo no longer being a part of the plantation and village community. Many bungalows were neglected, their valuable antique furniture replaced with cheap utility products. The old planter’s spirit too was diluted by modern managing methods.

By 1992 when the plantations were returned to private sector management, the passion and traditions of planting were gone. Over time, some plantation bungalows, superfluous to requirements, were rescued by entrepreneurs and transformed into tourist accommodation. Ceylon Tea Trails was formed to enable visitors to experience an idea of those gracious days of the Plantation Raj.

Each bedroom in the five Ceylon Tea Trails’ bungalows is named after a tea planter associated with the bungalow. Some were wealthy and well-bred, others were journeymen or adventurers who came to Ceylon for larks. Following in the footsteps of James Taylor, all of them shared an affection for Ceylon and her people, inspired by a determination to succeed, whatever challenges they faced.

These Ceylon Tea Trails properties remain as a testimony to the dedication of generations of bygone planting pioneers…and their successful graduation from bivouacs to bungalows.