DEWALAKANDE
(2000 acres approx.)
Jun. 1966/Sept. 1969

    Dewalakande was one of the senior appointments in the CTP but I did not get it because of seniority. Apparently, others more senior than I had been asked, and for various reasons had expressed a preference not to accept the post. My attitude had been, and remained, that picking and choosing was contrary to duty and responsibility so I accepted the post even though my feelings for tea planting were the direct opposite of my feelings for rubber planting. As it happened, there was some material as well as moral compensation in that, not long after, I received a 25% increase in salary out of the blue and without explanation. Perhaps all PDs got the same.

   Since I was last on Dewalakande the remote "division" had been sold and the SD on Troy replaced by a Conductor who I was to find was extremely capable and loyal. The plantation was in excellent condition and the factory a showpiece. In fact, the plantation was famous for its sole crepe and visited by local and overseas people interested in the manufacture of this product.

     SDs and Conductors were provided with motorcycles and the PD had a Land Rover as well as a sleek Wolsley 4/40. During my stint the floor of the Wolsley was found to be rusty and, because import restrictions precluded the purchase of a new vehicle, this had to be remedied by a local panel beater. Since the restrictions on imports imposed by the Government car mechanics island wide had demonstrated exceptional skills in the maintenance of vehicles, and this skill was evident in the finesse with which the floor of this car was renewed.

     I took over from the man who was my PD some ten years before.

     I had been told by GS that the retiring PD had wanted the SD on Dunedin sacked but that they had insisted that the question of dismissal or otherwise be left to me. There seemed to me to be something left unsaid in this regard but that was immaterial as far as I was concerned and, as soon as convenient, I invited the SD concerned to drinks and we talked about this. From this and other discussions, and my knowledge of my predecessor, I concluded that, for various reasons, the cause of the problem was that my predecessor had taken a personal dislike to this SD, and that his treatment of the SD undermined the SD's authority at work, his self-esteem and his self-confidence. It was obvious that he needed long term nurture to turn all this around. This I gave him and he proved himself well. Perhaps, the following illustrates the point.

     I discovered later that he was staying out for whole nights without having told me that he would be doing so, and at times even returning for work late in the morning. For instance, having decided one day to do a Dunedin round I arrived at his bungalow only to be told by his servant that he gone out the previous evening and not yet returned. I summoned him to my office and found that the secondary cause was a girl in Colombo - the primary cause being lack of responsibility. After a long discussion and advice I told him that if this happened again I would sack him and he assured me that he would not do these things again. Then one day he came to me in the office and, saying that he had dishonoured his assurance to me and was, therefore, resigning, he handed me a letter. I took it, and read it, and told him that there were other ways to deal with this, but he insisted; so I opened the safe, put the letter inside, and said, 'I will close the safe very slowly. When the door shuts, that's it.' Facing the safe, I closed it very slowly, and at the very last second he said, 'I take it back Sir.'(51) He had not sat down so I asked him to sit and said that I had something for him more difficult than resigning. He asked me what it was and I told him. I said, 'You are gated for three months.' He was taken aback, thought seriously, and then said, 'On one condition, Sir.' I dismissed a fleeting urge to tell him that it was not for him to place conditions on me, and asked him what it was; and he replied, 'That at the end of three months when I have a celebratory party you come to it.' I gave him that guarantee.

     The punishment of gating had long since disappeared, and a few PDs meeting me at the club expressed the opinion that I was being too harsh but, reminded that it was far preferable to losing a job, had nothing to say. Besides, they did not know how I treated my SDs. However, after a month during which he had stuck to the bargain, I considered the point to have been made and released him. He had his party and I attended! There was no more trouble with him.

     The SDs quite frequently came to my bungalow for drinks and I once asked them why they did not ride to the front of the bungalow instead of parking by the garage (which was quite a way away at the end of the garden) and they said that with the previous PD they were not allowed to ride to the front.

     Dewalakande had a new PD's office. It was a splendid affair situated between the factory and the end of the bungalow garden. The previous office had been put to factory use and the previous SD's office was now at the front end of a new store sited between the PD's office and the factory. The office had two large rooms, a storeroom and a toilet and washroom for the staff. One of the main rooms was for the HC and his four or five clerks plus a part-timer, and one for the PD (the staff referred to him as Manager!). There was a telephone switchboard for at least five telephones. Late in 1967 or so, a blind man came to the office and asked me for some money. I refused this but wanted to help him. I realised that we were at that time making thousands of wire cup holders for putting around the trees to hold the coconut shells in which the latex collected after tapping. These were made by bending wire around an arrangement of nails on a board so I explained this to him and he said that he could do it. We agreed on a piece rate and the job was his. Thinking further about this I realised that my clerks had to get up every so often to work the telephone switchboard, that this was not conducive to good work and that the blind were often trained to operate switchboards. I asked Claude (let's call him that) about this and he said that he was a trained telephonist. I asked him how he managed without access to a telephone directory and he said he remembered every number he used. Before I offered him the job there was the question of how to pay him as I did not feel that I could legitimately charge him in the books, so I put a proposal to my clerks and some other staff members that was that, if I paid half of Claude's salary would they chip in to pay the other half. They agreed, and after he had finished the cup holders Claude started as telephonist and proved to be a boon to all. When the Estimates were next done I included a telephonist, explaining the benefits the trial had demonstrated and it was passed without comment. All because I was unwilling to give him money!

     Troy, though run as part of the group, was owned by The Proprietary Tea Plantations Co. and had a separate set of accounts. Estimates, reports etc. too were separate. Its annual production was apportioned according to a formula applied to the group's production in each year - about 2 million pounds.

     Problems of staff attitude and discipline that existed in the past were nonexistent.

     One of the first to pay me a visit of welcome at the office was the Thalaivar, Sivaperumal who had been Thalaivar when I was last there. He arrived with a beaming smile on his face yet very respectful, and I was happy to see him, as I was to see all my old friends. Some, like the old Conductor, had retired or died.

     In the Dewalakande factory were the RM, ARM and one or two junior RMs, and some of the girls were just as beautiful as before, although beauty and/or sexual favours would no longer be criteria of employment. The RM of my SD days was still the RM and I had been concerned about his possible state of mind since he heard of my transfer to Dewalakande. I wasted no time in calling him to the office and assuring him that I was not one to carry a grudge and that, as far as I was concerned, the past was the past and he had nothing to fear from me. A very relieved RM left the office. However, I found out that he still had power far in excess of his position. He still virtually had the power of hire and fire over those who worked in his factory - something that I felt should only reside in the hands of the PD. Even where an SD made a decision of dismissal the final say should be with the PD. The sexual exploitation of female workers was also, apparently, still in existence. It was also commonly stated on the plantation and in the club that he had been procurer for friends of the PD, and organized girls to be transported to various rest houses for hunting parties etc. My first step in putting a stop to this sort of thing was to put the SD in overall charge of factory labour, but without interfering with the day-to-day running of the factory. The RM was excellent as a maker of a top quality product and I wanted to do nothing to interfere with that.

     Compared to the manufacture of tea, which had both chemical and mechanical components and where the harvesting had a bearing on the final product, that of rubber was relatively straightforward in that it was essentially mechanical. The only chemical aspect was the addition of acid at the start to cause coagulation and, in the field, the only thing that affected manufacture was rain which caused contamination of the latex as well as dilution.

     The following, relative to the factory, covers the whole period of my stay on Dewalakande for ease of narration and reading.

     As mentioned relative to Ingoya, in rubber the whiter the end product the higher the price, and more so with sole crepe. Soon after my arrival it seemed to me that the colour of the rubber was not as white as it was when I was there before. I put this to the Forbes & Walker buyer/broker who handled our rubber, and had once been an SD on Troy, and he told me that he too had had the same impression. He thought it was due to the advent of clonal rubber into the mix. Much later, I was going round the factory with the RM when I noticed a sheet of sole crepe with a dark splodge in it, and there were a few more sheets thus affected. He said that it must be a tadpole and was surprisingly accepting of this. I pointed out that there was a filter system at the river from where the water was pumped and told him to call the mechanic to accompany us to the river. As a matter if interest, the factory used 4500 gallons of water per hour.

     The filter system consisted of a twenty or twenty-five foot groin into the river(52) filled with river stones decreasing in size from the bottom up. This lead to a small tank from which a pump extracted the water. When this tank was opened there was a two-foot monitor lizard in it - so much for filtration. The groin was in need of repair and the stones in it renewed. I took samples of the water from the supply at the factory and sent them off to be analysed, and was not surprised at the results that came back. For the various contaminants reported that were relevant to us the readings were 200 - 300 times the allowable figure. I made enquiries about filtration pumps and possible alternatives but was running out of time because the window of opportunity was the month of January when the rubber trees shed their leaves, latex flow ceased and, in turn, manufacture. This was the time when factories carried out all their manufacturing machinery maintenance and that of anything vital to manufacture that could not be done when the factory was working. It was also the driest time of the year and the river at its lowest for the year. We were into, or almost into, January and there was no time get involved in high cost capital items, company approval etc., so I bought three twenty to thirty foot lengths of 9" PVC, had them drilled with ¾" holes, had teak bungs made for one end of each (no PVC end pieces were available) secured with brass screws, had a new pump feed tank built, moved the sand in the river bed out of the way, laid the three PVC pipes like the radii of a circle with the centre ends in the new tank where they were concreted in, put river stones around the pipes, followed by smaller and smaller ones and, when that was done, covered everything with the river sand and levelled the new bed. When we tried it a few days later it worked perfectly - we had clean water!

     When the January accounts went to GS there was no money left in the item "Water Supply" and they wrote to me saying, 'We are indeed surprised that you have used up the whole years estimate under "Water Supply" …… etc.' I replied telling them what had happened, the circumstances in which I found myself, that a decision had to be made and that I, as Superintendent, made it. The response from the Board was, 'Tell Mr. Gardner that, should he need further funds under "Water Supply" during the year he is to ask.'

     Again, in the factory one day, The RM and I were at one end of the factory and at the other end I noticed a young woman walking gingerly on the wet floor with a roll of "lace" on her head. She slipped and nearly fell, and I said to the RM, 'That is dangerous!' and he replied, 'It has always been like that Sir' To this my response was, 'Well, it won't be any longer! Within a week I want a suitable rubber carpet laid the length of the wet area.'- and it was done.

     On another occasion we were walking past a roller. Because these rollers work at high pressure their bearings get very hot and are, therefore, cooled by a constant flow of water in a gland around them. I noticed that there was only a trickle of water coming out of the glands of the roller and pointed this out to him and queried him. He said that the pipes were rusty and many rollers were like that so I told him that the next morning I wanted to check a pipe and to organize it. It is relevant to mention that all the pipes in the factory were colour coded in pink and blue and yellow etc. to facilitate the tracking of a pipe from its end point to its source - a very good idea and it looked good too. On checking the pipe the next day I discovered that, instead of being two inches in diameter inside, it was about half an inch, and subsequent checks of the other pipes revealed the same acute problem. For the next year, therefore, all expenditure on keeping the factory beautiful was eliminated and funds provided for the replacement of all the old piping with PVC piping. Colour coding was left for later.

     A firm of auditors visited the plantations without notice, this for obvious reasons, and caused fear in the hearts of the clerks and some PDs too. During this period of mine they visited Dewalakande and there was nothing adverse to report, but they did want me to do some things that I felt were all right in theory but unacceptable in practice because they interfered with the smooth administration of the plantation. These I told them I would not implement. On Alton or Radella similar demands were made and my response was the same.

     An SD on another CTP plantation, a friend of mine, was having problems with his PD and, to help him out, I spoke to the CTP Director in GS saying that I was willing to take him as one of my SDs. He asked me whether I could control the individual and I said that if I could not, no one could. He was, therefore, transferred to Dewalakande and I put him on Dewalakande division where, to my mind the senior SD should be, and later had to move him to Dunedin and the Dunedin SD to Dewalakande. The SD who had been on Dewalakande division to that time had done a good job in his quiet way.

     When it fell due my report on my new SD was not a good one for varied and numerous reasons - I was wearing my PD's hat for that and never had difficulty in keeping one hat on the rack when the other was on my head. Soon I heard that this SD was travelling around the planting districts saying all sorts of nasty things about me but that was not my problem. One friend of mine who was told these things told me that he had said, 'That if not the Ian I know.' I also heard that the SD had submitted to the GS CTP Director, then Chairman of GS, a list of some twenty malpractices for which, he claimed, I was responsible. I went to see this Chairman and asked whether what I had heard was true and he said that it was and took out a large sheet of paper from a draw in his desk and said, 'Ian, as you know I am leaving in a couple of months. When I go, this gets destroyed'. I said, 'I want an enquiry held into this, if I am guilty you sack me, and if he is wrong you sack him.' And his rather curious reply was, 'We do not believe in holding enquiries in to our Superintendents.' I too was leaving in a couple of months and could not be bothered with this. Reading between the lines of a recently published book by a later Chairman of GS, it appears that Mr. Brookes wanted this SD sacked but was talked out of it by GS.

     The Dunedin factory was the Cinderella of the two factories because it made low quality brown rubber and, unlike Cinderella, it stank to high heaven. There was not much to do here and it ticked over well enough with the SD, an RM and an ARM.

     The SD's bungalow, a one time PD's bungalow, was a big one with three bedrooms, and because of this was allocated an extra servant on plantation account. I designed alterations to its plan to make it smaller and with one less bedroom and effected these alterations whilst at the same time reducing the extra servant allowed. I added on a room to the Dewalakande SD's bungalow, that being the senior SD's and a senior SD being more likely to be married. The former changes were effected officially via the Estimates and the latter informally through the sack account properly kept by the HC and stored in my safe.

     To get to Troy and Dunedin from Dewalakande one had to travel on the main road. This road, just off the lower boundary of Dewalakande, used to flood very easily and the villagers living close by had a way of making a few rupees out of this. At one time a train ran along the lower boundary of the plantation and after it was dismantled the path it took remained as a rough earth road that could be used as a bypass, provided that the flood was not over a certain height, if not for one bridge of which only the frame remained. The villagers would produce sturdy planks that they would place on the bridge in two lines and guide vehicles over at a price - a small one. One morning I had gone over to Dunedin and it poured with rain so much that when I tried to return home it was impossible as the water was over the bypass as well. Expecting the rain to stop and the water subside as was usual, I returned to Dunedin where, incidentally, work had stopped because of the rain, and was given the hospitality of the SD. The rain did not stop and I spent two days and a night with my SD, marooned on Dunedin. We drank and played poker for most of the time in the company of neighbouring planters who were confined to their plantations but could come over the hill to Dunedin.

     Because the estate vehicles did a lot of running to and from Troy and Dunedin, I decided to shorten the distance a little by opening a short section of road from near the rear of Dewalakande factory to the main road. The gate, a hinged bar, at this new entrance was to be kept locked at night. When I was an SD on Dewalakande division I would have liked to have had a way of getting in and out of the division in my car without having to pass the PD's bungalow . {To get to the SD's bungalow one had to cross the cattle grid at the main entrance below the PD's bungalow, drive up the rising road with a hairpin bend below the PD's bungalow(53), continue climbing just below the PD's bungalow and, having passed the factory gate, drive along a flat stretch on the hill across from the other side of the PD's bungalow - no chance of sneaking back in the wee hours!} There was a field road from half way up the road to the SD's bungalow to a cart road that lead, via the other side of the hill from the PD's bungalow, to the factory and, therefore, past the new exit road. Now, as PD, I converted that field road into a cart road leading to the new road that had been created behind the factory. The new SD appreciated this.

     Labour disputes on the group were minimal. In fact, I cannot remember any but I do remember one occasion when I attended a meeting, accompanied by my two early SDs and the CEEF(54) adviser, with district representatives of a union. In addition to the regular workforce, the group had a significant number of casual workers, with those on Dewalakande itself numbering in the hundreds at times. Some months after the new SD arrived we began to have a progressive decline in the number of these workers and, on many occasions, I spoke to him about this in an attempt to ascertain the cause and his explanation was that there was an exodus to the Ratnapura area where there had been a new gem strike. I accepted this explanation but there was a certain disquiet in me as it somehow did not fit with my knowledge of my workers. I believed in the principle that one should trust one's SDs, and staff for that matter, as a prerequisite to maintaining a sound management team - trusting, that is, until and if that trust proved to be misplaced. We had almost reached an acutely critical labour shortage when, driving on a field round on a village road, I came across one of my casual workers. I enquired as to why he was not at work and he explained that the SD was driving them too hard, demanding of them "tasks" that they could not sustain. Sadly, I trusted this man's version more than I trusted that put forward by my SD, and pieces of information I had been picking up on the estate and in the club started to form an unpleasant and unsatisfactory picture. Consequently, as mentioned earlier, I transferred the SD to Dunedin and the situation on Dewalakande returned to normal in days.

     One day this SD reported to me that the Dewalakande RM had abused him verbally. This abuse, which I cannot recall, amounted to a serious breach of discipline. I asked the RM whether he had spoken to the SD as the SD had reported and he said that he had, so I told him that he was suspended from duty without pay pending an enquiry, and that if the conclusions of the enquiry warranted it he would be paid his lost salary. Later that day, I was informed by some of my staff that there was to be a strike of all (monthly paid) staff from midnight that day and that, although many did not support it they had no option but to support it due to intimidation. Perhaps by phone, the Conductor on Troy told me that he going to work despite the threats as he did not agree with the strike.

    I called a meeting of my SDs and the Troy Conductor for that afternoon and, when they had sat down, I said, 'I am going to run this place without staff. Each of you run your own division; you, go and organize lorries and drivers from Abilino(55) ; you, run your factory; I will run this factory and the office.' I told all the leading hands in the main factory, ' I don't know much about manufacture here so I want all of you to do what you know well and keep up the high standards. If, when the rubber is sold, we do not suffer a reduction in price, I will pay each one of you a months pay as a bonus.' I called Sivaperumal, the Thalaivar, and said to him, 'You know what is happening, I am going to run this estate without supervision, but if there is even a hint of bludging or bad work I will close the whole place down!' He said, 'Dorai, we will work well, and if we have to carry the latex for five miles we will do so!' Later, during the strike, he came to me and asked if I wanted his people to go up the hill above the senior staff quarters at night and stone their houses. I answered that that was unnecessary and that they would probably end up in prison, which was not a good prospect.

    No doubt I phoned GS and told them what was happening, and that I was not going to shut down work.

    Next morning, the factory workers sent me a message that they could not get into the factory because the RM refused to give them the keys. So I went to the factory where the sixty-five or so workers were gathered - this was now high drama! - and sent a messenger to the RM, whose house over-looked the front door of the factory, with a note stating that the keys were the property of the Company and that he was to send them to me. He declined. I then walked up to the front door, smashed the glass with my stick, and let the workers in.

    With help from my wife I spent long hours in the office, and I kept an eye on the work in the factory and whatever else was going on in the immediate vicinity. I remember sitting outside the factory with an SD or two, enjoying dinner and a drink brought to us by my wife. Everything ran like clockwork except the office where we were restricted to the basics by time, ability and numbers. Meanwhile, the staff on all the CTP estates joined the strike but I heard, somehow, that Mr. Pillai, once on Dewalakande and Forres and now probably somewhere else, had expressed the opinion that I would not have acted as I had without good reason.

    The strike continued for over a month and, on Dewalakande, all those working were pretty relaxed about the whole event. But I once got a phone call from my friend, the PD on Somerset, who opened the conversation with, 'You bastard, you cause this strike and then run your place while all of us are shut down!' We then chatted about what was going on.

    One morning I heard that some union officials had surreptitiously driven into the estate during the previous night crept and that the workers and watchmen had blocked their progress, at one place with barrels, in the three possible directions and held them there for some hours before letting them leave the property. They had tried to enter at night by the main gate before but had not been allowed past the factory by the watchman.

    When the strike was called off Dewalakande had not lost a single pound of rubber nor suffered any loss in prices and, as far as I became aware, there had been no loss of quality in the work in the field. The CESU(56) took legal action against the Company but the case had not been heard by the time I left the country for good.

    The PD's bungalow was not, strictly speaking, a bungalow because it was a two storied affair. It was very big, though with only three bedrooms. When I arrived, the double garage was at the 'bottom' of the big garden past the old tennis court, now a lawn, so I later created a driveway around the outer perimeter of this lawn to the back of the house where I turned an unused, large room into a garage for the car. In heavy rain, of which there was plenty during the two monsoons, this was a blessing. The double garage was left for the Land Rover and visitor's cars. Upstairs, outside what we used as the master bedroom, I had a section of the eight-foot verandah which surrounded three sides of the front half of the house, enclosed, with glass louvres on the outside, as an office. This had a pleasant outlook on to the garden. There was also the "serious" problem concerning the downstairs bathroom, situated directly below one upstairs, servicing the bedroom usually used by guests and visiting VIPs. The problem, which I discovered by chance one day much to my dismay, was that, although the upstairs bathroom had a thick concrete floor, the sound of any activity in the toilet was clearly audible below! Of course, this had to be rectified so I had a false ceiling installed downstairs. The house had not been rewired in a long time and I decided to include this in the next years Estimates whilst at the same time disposing of the unsightly timber casings of the wiring and putting the new wiring into the walls, and then repainting the internal walls. Included in this project was the installation of yellow bulkhead lights around three sides of the house, halfway up, to deter the myriad of mosquitoes and insects.

    I also decided to estimate for air conditioning in the main office. It was often extremely uncomfortable, with temperatures in the high nineties and humidity almost as high. One could not really expect clerks to work efficiently in such conditions and sweaty arms could cause smudging of the ink on books if care was not taken to avoid this - another inconvenience for them. The VA's office on Moralioya was a spartan affair that did not even boast paint on the walls but whitewash and was, therefore, in sharp contrast to the Dewalakande one. He and I had played rugby together and we got on well socially, as well as where work was concerned. On his visit at the time it was hot but, on the subject of air conditioning the office, perhaps the first time on any estate in the country, he said, 'Why do you want air conditioning? It is cool enough in here.' And I said, 'Ah! But I have had my garden coolie sitting up on the roof with a hose for some hours and he is still up there!' We went out to have a look and there he was with a broad grin on his face. Anyway, my Estimates were approved by GS and the Board unaltered, although I left before the new year.

    At one time I decided to have a party for my staff, at my expense, and the SDs were to be there too. At, or soon after, the appointed time in the afternoon they started arriving, the married ones with their wives, the Land Rover transporting those from Troy and Dunedin. As was to be expected, they were rather formal and stiff as this was an unusual experience. However, after a couple of drinks things got freed up at least where the men were concerned - the women did not drink. After more drinks some were getting quite jolly, particularly the Dewalakande RM who was becoming a serious embarrassment to his wife! Soon, when he started falling about the place he was removed via the Land Rover, much to the merriment of the others. In the end a good time was had by all, and had I remained in the country I would have made this an annual event.

    The HC was a meek and respectful person who, according to the tradition of the Company, had been promoted according to seniority, as had been the case with the executive staff. This may appear to be a fair practice but it sometimes resulted in someone moving beyond his ability and being out of his depth. The Dewalakande office, in terms of staff numbers, would have been amongst the top three in the Company and I was to find him wanting in many respects. For one, he lacked control of his staff - I often found, when I turned up unexpectedly, that, except for him, they were playing around instead of working and, as time went by I had to pull him up over many things. In the end I took him to my bungalow after work one evening and had a long talk with him. I suggested to him that I would arrange for him to go to a smaller plantation with no loss of salary, but he refused. He was a quiet man who never said much but he was quietly adamant. I went to the CEEF for advice and was told that I needed to build up a case for dismissal by writing to him each time he made a mistake. I thought that this approach would only make things worse, particularly because of the nature of the man - and it did. There was no resolution to this at the time I left.

    The entrance to Dewalakande was set back about forty yards from the main road and formed a very wide funnel from the main road to the entrance. On one side of this was a villager's house and, at one time, at night he used to park a dark green ten-ton lorry outside his house on the side of, but within, the funnel. As this was dangerous in the dark, I sent two messages to him telling him not to park there but he persisted. Then, one night, I was coming back from somewhere after midnight and the lorry was parked in the usual place, so I went up to the bungalow, found about fourteen four-inch nails, free wheeled the Land Rover down and stopped it above the cattle grid at the entrance. I then crept up to the lorry and carefully placed the nails at various strategic points under the tyres, returned to the Land Rover and freewheeled out on to the main road for some distance where I started the engine, turned back, and made a pretence of returning to the plantation for the first time. The lorry was never parked there again.

    The Firestone rubber plantation in Liberia was 200,000 acres and had it own airstrip. The executive structure started, at the bottom, with what they called Supervisors running the agricultural aspects of, I think, 40,000 acres each. The other aspects, such as administration and manufacture, were probably centralised and in charge of more senior executives. One of the Supervisors was sent to Dewalakande for a few days to learn what he could. It was when talking to him that the seeds of our leaving Ceylon were sown and I even briefly contemplated trying to get a job with Firestone in Liberia. It was good that I did not take the matter any further because, within a couple of years, Firestone had pulled out of Liberia. By this time the prospect of nationalisation of the plantations in Ceylon did not seem far away - I gave it five years but it happened in half that time. I was one for whom the mere running of a plantation was not interesting enough; I needed the added impetus of new roads, buildings, machinery, methods of manufacture, agricultural science etc. and I knew that nationalisation would not provide these. I also thought that, at any time, the CTP might put its Ceylon plantations on a care and maintenance basis pending nationalisation; it had already been investing heavily in Kenya. Furthermore, the Government had made Sinhalese the language of education and I saw problems for my daughter if she studied in Sinhalese and then went overseas to advance her education. Then there was the question of salary which was expected to fall dramatically under nationalisation, especially as we were seen as overpaid and under worked. All this crystallized into a decision to give up planting and leave for Australia before I got too old to start again there.

    The Government's foreign currency restrictions meant that when emigrating from the country my family was only allowed 325 Pounds Sterling. As a means of raising a few more dollars in Australia I hit upon the idea of crating the few possessions we were taking in a crate made of mahogany and selling the wood in Australia. There were two large mahogany trees growing together in the garden of the Dunedin bungalow so, much to the dismay of my SD there, and some heartache on my part, I had one cut down and sawn into planks. These were charged to stock and then bought from stock by me at cost. I supplied the planks to the firm shipping my goods with clear instructions to put nails and screws into the last few inches of the planks so as to minimize their loss in value but, when we reached Australia, I found that they had put the screws and nails more than a foot from the ends and, as a result, I was not able to sell them.

    At some time during this stint on Dewalakande I realised that it was possible that I would be offered rubber VAing. I did not think that I was qualified, but the prestige of the plantation made it a possibility though not a probability. That was not the point, however; the point was that the thought occurred to me that I would have to spend too much time away from home and the plantation and, in any case, the extra income would take me into the 95% tax bracket. I decided that I would turn down any offer if one were made. I do not know whether my decision would have been different had I been on tea and an offer was to do with tea. Not this time, nor on Radella, did the kudos associated with being a VA have any attraction for me.

    From February to May 1967 I was away on furlough in London and the Isle of man and left Dewalakande for Australia in August 1969. The Company not only paid for the passages of myself, my wife, and my child to Australia but also paid me an ex gratia payment of Rs 5000. Both the Board and GS thanked me and said that I would be missed. It had been an honour and a privilege to work for the CTP and a great pleasure to deal with the CTP Director, his Assistant and the "tea" Director at GS & Co.