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James Taylor
Sixteen year old James Taylor arrived in Sri Lanka as an
assistant supervisor on a coffee plantation in 1851. Five years after
he first took up his post his employers Harrison and Leake impressed
by his capabilities put Taylor in charge of the Loolecondera estate
and instructed him to experiment with tea. The Peradeniya nursery
first supplied him with tea seeds around 1860, and the rest as they
say is history.
Taylor soon setup his first tea factory on the island. In 1872 he
invented a machine for rolling leaves and one year later sent twenty
three pounds of tea back to England, which was fast becoming the tea
center of the world.
Taylor trained a number of assistants and from that point on Ceylon
tea arrived regularly at London and Melbourne. This led to the opening
of an auction market in Colombo in 1883.
The planters association came into being in 1894 and it was they who
led an aggressive campaign to get the word tea associated with Ceylon.
This they did through a publicity campaign, which saw them send Kaiser
Wilhelm II, Tsar Alexander III, Grand-Duke Nicolas, the Queen of Italy
and Emperor Franz Joseph all receiving sixty coffers of tea accompanied
by an Illustrated album on Ceylon.
Thomas Lipton
Thomas Lipton grew up amidst the slums
of Glasgow and left school at the age of ten to support his family.
In 1865 he sailed to America to work as a manual laborer, and later
managed a successful New York grocery store. It was there he learned
all the techniques of advertising and salesmanship he later used to
put Ceylon Tea on the world map.
Lipton was not a genius in tea growing but rather in the marketing
and distribution of the final product, and his tireless capacity to
invent and popularize clever slogans and effective advertising campaigns
are legendary. He bought four plantations to supply tea to his 500
strong chain of retail outlets.
The name Lipton soon migrated from a chain of grocery stores and became
a trademark famous the world over. In 1897 Queen Victoria elevated
Thomas Lipton to knighthood. In the 1930’s Unilever Corporation
bought the Lipton Company.
James Taylor's legacy, on the other hand, is best summed up in the
words of John Field, High Commissioner for Great Britain in Sri Lanka.
In 1992 he wrote, "It can be said of very few individuals that
their labors have helped to shape the landscape of a country. But
the beauty of the hill country as it now appears owes much to the
inspiration of James Taylor, the man who introduced tea cultivation
to Sri Lanka." |
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