Like Phil, planters rarely lacked faith in being able to do the job—then or in the years that followed. “I had been brought up in an era of empire, and inculcated with the idea that for the British to go out and run colonies and tropical enterprises was perfectly normal,” wrote tea-planter-turned-author Roy Moxham about going out to Malawi in 1961 as an eighteen-year-old. “I had read the short stories of Somerset Maugham, and from his acute observations had a surprisingly good idea of how planters behaved. I had read a good deal about young men who worked in the tropics. The job was challenging but not daunting. I knew nothing about tea, but I could learn.”4 Moxham couldn’t even drive—in his telling, seemingly the only real requirement for the position. But he winged that, too, and taught himself on the rain-slicked dirt roads of the estate before anyone could find out otherwise.5
Determined and confident (more than heroes or scallywags) are perhaps more accurate generalizations of Darjeeling’s pioneers. But also inexperience, even ignorance. Their most common trait was having no idea how or where to plant tea bushes, nor process the leaves. “With no previous experience,” Lama wrote, “they had to rely on information obtained hearsay and it was a pure learn-as-you-earn industry or go-broke-as-you-work business.”6 The workers in the factories and fields also had to learn to prune, pluck, and process tea as they went along.
The planter’s duties were “multifarious,” as the 1907 edition of the Bengal District Gazetteer for Darjeeling noted, and included
the supervision of the cultivation, the control of the manufacture, the management of the large labour force employed, the construction of roads in the estate, and often the erection of the buildings. He must therefore combine, as far as possible, the knowledge and skill of an agriculturist, engineer and architect, and even, to some extent, of a doctor; and above all, he must have firm control over his labourers, the art of management, and generally the power of conduct.7
While few planters act as doctors or road surveyors today, many of the other tasks still exist in the job description, plus a few more. “Police and judge,” said one. “Banker and counselor.”
Not all the planters during the British era in Darjeeling were English or Scottish, and some of the eclectic array of foreigners came to the hills for reasons other than tea. The Reverend William Start, an Anglican-clergyman-turned-Baptist-evangelist, brought a band of Protestant missionaries from the Moravian Church in Germany to India in the late 1830s.8 The small group of young men and women from outside Berlin traveled to Liverpool and then on to India, an arduous journey that took five months around the Horn by ship to Calcutta. From there, they had a further month’s journey to reach Start’s mission on the plains. The reverend believed in communal work, and the Germans had little time to spread the gospel in their day-to-day efforts simply to survive. After two years, Start ordered them to his Tukvar Mission just north of Darjeeling. They started over and struggled even harder in the mountains. Within a few years, the venture failed, and Start—angry, no doubt, that there had not been a single conversion—withdrew his financial backing. The Germans had to abandon Tukvar, the homes they had built, and the fields they had planted that were, finally, beginning a return on their considerable efforts.
Without means to return to Europe, they settled in the newly established town of Darjeeling and tried to support themselves by selling produce, doing carpentry, or whatever they could. Darjeeling’s nascent tea industry soon offered opportunities, and their names are strewn throughout its pioneering decades (and found on gravestones in Darjeeling’s rather unkempt Old Cemetery). The most frequent that crop up are from the Wernicke-Stölke dynasty, with various marriages between them and involvement on numerous estates.
The most successful was the second-generation Andrew Wernicke. Just a handful of months old when his family arrived at the Tukvar Mission, he grew up in the hills. Yet by the time he was coming of age, Wernicke had no plans to work in tea. He was a scholar of Greek and Latin with intentions of entering the church. At the end of 1863, while he was working on a B.A. at Bishop’s College in Calcutta, his father died suddenly, and Andrew was compelled to break off studies and return to Darjeeling to support his widowed mother (a Stölke). His younger brother, Fred, was an assistant on the Soom Tea Estate, and Andrew reluctantly followed, gaining an assistant’s position on Captain Masson’s Tukvar Tea Estate.
Almost immediately, he nearly truncated his new career with a gun accident. “Using an old-fashioned muzzle-loader gun, he returned to his bungalow from green-pigeon shooting. The gun had been wetted by rain. Resting the gun on the edge of the bed, he was wiping it down when it slipped to the floor, exploding with the concussion, and discharged the shot, which shattered the left hand and wrist.”9 His arm had to be amputated below the elbow. Wernicke wore a knitted sock over the stump and carried on. While needing help to get dressed and cut his meat at the table, he rode ponies, played billiards, and even shot birds on occasion. Within a few years, he left Tukvar to manage Makaibari, where he soon married a girl a decade his junior, the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Niebal.
In the 1870s land was becoming available for planting. With his brother, Andrew opened out Lingia and then Tumsong estates, “a bold and arduous venture for father and Fred,” Andrew’s son Frank said years later, “and it was only by exercising the most rigid economy and sacrificing even the simplest of luxuries that they were able to achieve their objective.” A new tea garden doesn’t immediately start repaying its investment. “It takes 5 or 6 years before the tea bush comes into bearing and manufacture can begin. These must have been lean years indeed, waiting for the first returns from the sale of their tea.”10
Andrew Wernicke was over six feet tall, lanky, and heavily bearded. “He walked with a slight stoop and one shoulder slightly depressed, owing to the loss of his left arm,” his son recalled late in his own life. “In expression his face was rather pale, somewhat care-worn and meditative. He seldom smiled and I don’t think I ever heard him laugh. His dress was always simple, and to my childish critical eyes, shabby.”11 Decades of living an arduous, austere life damaged his health. By 1883, Wernicke, severely suffering from rheumatism, was forced to retire. But he wasn’t done with tea, acquiring Glenburn Tea Estate in 1895 and then Bannockburn across the Rangili Valley from it.
Wernicke died in 1904. By then, the Wernickes and Stölkes had owned or managed more than a dozen gardens: Lingia, Marybong, Tumsong, Steinthal, Soom, Glenburn, Bannockburn, Makaibari, Risheehot, Pandam, Aloobari, Goomba, and Tukvar. This impressive list includes some of the most illustrious gardens in Darjeeling.
Among the colorful foreign figures in the nineteenth-century annals of Darjeeling tea is Louis Mandelli. His father, Jerome, from an aristocratic Maltese family, was raised in Milan and fled as a young man to South America to join freedom fighter and Italian patriot Guiseppe Garibaldi, who led the Italian Legion in Uruguay’s Civil War (1838–51). He returned with Garibaldi to capture Sicily and southern Italy from the Bourbons, events that led to the unification of the country. Falling out with his family, Jerome changed his surname from that of his father (Count Castel Nuovo) to that of his mother (Mandelli), which he passed down to his son, Louis.12