FORRES
(1961/1962)

    Returning to a plantation where one has had no serious problems with workers or staff is uncomplicated. You know everyone and they know you, and those who do not have heard about you; and in the field most is familiar.

   There was a new Head Clerk - the errant Mr. Pillai of Dewalakande notoriety, in his first appointment as HC - but he was errant no more. He was efficient and helpful and we formed a good team from day one. During my act on Forres I had taken to dictating correspondence and reports etc. rather than drafting correspondence and most senior clerks had either learned to write quickly or developed a form of shorthand. It was not till I got to Alton that I came across a clerk who had shorthand. It was also during this stint on Forres that I did something about my long held concern about after-hours bookwork of staff. There was nothing I could do about the time consuming checkroll but I could do something about their having to, every day, rule up a page of the Field Diary and the Factory Diary as the case may be. I got these printed and bound, at considerable cost per book, but it was worth it. I think I also started paying those doing these books after work two hours overtime per day. These was not queried by anyone despite the fact that it was, probably, the first time it was done in the Company. I did this on every plantation I was sent to, again without query.

     This was the first time I had to do the Estimates for the coming year and I enjoyed it. The Estimates consisted of two parts viz. Revenue expenditure (or recurrent expenditure) and Capital expenditure. Since the final determining factor in Estimates was the COP/lb of the revenue component, one had to calculate, on the one hand, the anticipated yield per field which varied according to its pruning cycle and the level of nitrogen to be received via fertilizer, thus getting the yield for the plantation, and on the other hand, the expenditure on each item of the one hundred and thirty five or so items. From this, one would arrive at a provisional COP/lb. Thereafter it was merely a matter of judicious adjustment of the various costs to achieve the desired result. If the final Estimates, or any significant change in an item, or some items, varied substantially from previous Estimates, or if there was any policy change, these were set out in the report on the Estimates and, where necessary, justified. Thereafter, it was a matter of the reviewer of the estimates, previously the General Manager, now GS, and then the Board, approving the Estimate or requiring reductions and/or changes. Neither on Forres, nor anywhere else, was an Estimate of mine changed despite, at times, my making major increases or decreases under specific items and/or in policy.

     One day soon after my return, I was going round the fields with the Conductor when I noticed a small, old earth slip on the roadside and I said to him, 'Did I not tell you to plant that up in Guatemale grass?' - the answer, 'Yes, Sir, you did. That was eighteen months ago!'

     The water supply to the PD's bungalow and to the staff bungalows (and, perhaps to the lines) came from the bottom of a normally small waterfall dropping down from the top of a high rock face behind the PD's bungalow. During rain the volume of this increased. I did not know and did not check where this came from, except that it came from the plantation above Forres. I suspected, but did not check, that this was not water from a spring just out of sight, but this was the only source for Forres. Because the water pressure in the pipeline was very low, I installed a new line starting with three inches at the top and reducing as it descended and, when this was completed, the bungalow had tremendous pressure. As I discovered, so had the staff bungalows but there, the pressure was causing leaks. This was put right.

     Perhaps due to the possibility of the nationalisation of plantations by the Government, all PDs were asked to prepare for the Board, an Estimate with only expenditure reduced to 25% on all items. To me this was all right in theory but not in practice, as the practical implications of such a reduction would have a devastating impact on yield and, therefore, COP. At the time it did not occur to me that the Board was more than likely to be aware of this but needed the information sought, so I wrote an accompanying report detailing all the consequences of such an expenditure cut, consequences such as reduction in yield due to a 75% cut in fertilizer coupled with the devastation that would be caused by blister blight due to the limitation or cessation of copper spraying. Perhaps I was over reacting but, if I was, and this created annoyance at any level, I was not told.

     The procedure prevalent in the CTP of titivating things for visiting VIPs I discarded because a cosmetic show not only cost time and money but was misleading and, therefore, unhelpful. I was of the opinion that they should see my plantations as they were at any given time, and that if anything was, or appeared to be, other than at its best, there was a good reason. This change did not cause any ripples in the pond then or later.

     My VA on Forres proved to be one of the innovative, modern, thinking types; one not hide-bound but well versed in the fast expanding science of tea planting. As it turned out, we disagreed on little and, if we were unable to find common ground, we quite happily agreed to each express his view, he in his report and I, in due course, in my comments on it. One disagreement had to do with the pruning of a particular field. He felt that I had pruned it too hard and I did not. We walked a little, stopped a little, and walked a little, for about twenty minutes exchanging views on this matter without reconciliation and agreed to disagree. He put his views in his report, GS commented in their letter covering the report that they were disappointed, and my reply stated my views, and the Board made no comment. Although I used to discuss aspects of planting with him, and any other knowledgeable planter I could find(39) , outside the plantation, the time spent with him during his visits was very interesting and productive, and we got on very well - both "in the field" and off.

     One of the things I admired about this man was that at the start of a Visit he used to ask me what I wanted him to see, and left it to me to take him where I wanted. On one occasion we walked past a small patch of ribbon grass but he made no comment.

     This was the first time that a factory came within my responsibilities and I made full use of it. It was here that I started the practice of tasting teas almost daily - samples from the previous day's manufacture as well as the usual samples received from nearby factories if available. Tea manufacture was of great interest to me and I set about learning as much about it as I was able and seeing what could be done to improve it on Forres. I also tasted the teas from each invoice(40) and kept in touch with the tea tasting reports received on them from the tea Brokers. I discovered that I had a good palette for tea tasting.

     I started to implement changes to fine tune manufacture and improve prices if that was possible.

     In factories, various records were kept of temperatures at different times in the course of manufacture but I suspected that, where not done mechanically, this record keeping was rather perfunctory. For my purposes, I needed accurate records; particularly in the lofts where I did not want the temperature exceeding the maximum allowable of 800 F as temperatures in excess of this adversely affected the quality of the finished product. The moisture content of the air in the lofts at any given time was also important. Not only did I need the full co-operation of the TM and his staff but also that of the workers who had also to reassured that, if the records showed that a mistake had occurred, the worker responsible would not be punished. I also needed temperatures, particularly in the lofts, and when artificial heat and/or forced air was in use in the lofts, taken every half-hour. I also redesigned the time-honoured format of the factory diary. In the old format, on each page of this diary was recorded all the work done in the one day, although on any given day there would be tea from three different, consecutive, days of plucking, processed from withering to sifting. Packing came later, and that packed could include tea from more than three days. What I wanted was the history of one day's plucking to be recorded on one page of the diary so that if there was any change in quality it could be traced back to a particular day's green leaf. In the old format, the history of one day's leaf, from harvest to the completion of manufacture was recorded on three consecutive pages. I must have improved the prices judging by what transpired later when I was on Radella between me and the "tea" Director of GS.

     The single car garage of the bungalow was at one corner of the garden sixty yards or more from the front door, the closest door, of the bungalow. This seemed silly to me so I converted the last room of the rear wing of the bungalow into a garage, built and apron in front of it, and connected this, round the front and side of the building, by a new roadway to the one by the old garage. The old garage was left for visitor's cars.

     An unusual feature of this bungalow was that the road to it continued to some of the fields, with the result that the lorry drove through the garden whenever there was a need in the fields accessed by the road. Furthermore, the pluckers moving from one to another of the fields bordering the garden used to walk through it. This did not bother me until one Sunday I was sitting out in the front, having a drink, or two, or three, with visitors, when a stream of pluckers walked through, staring and making comments amongst themselves. It was then that I realised that this lack of privacy was not ideal and resolved to rectify it. The solution was to create a field path, a simple and cheap exercise, around the garden, between the hedge and the tea. I was not happy about this, but did it nevertheless, because it seemed to be a slur on the pluckers and because the new path formed two sides of a triangle and the drive through the garden the hypotenuse; thus, the two sides together were longer than the garden part of the drive. On the other hand, they now had easy access to their tea rows by the hedge.

     In the factory I came across a disused telephone set-up of two telephones, one in the lofts and one in the rolling room on the ground floor. This was installed by my predecessor but was impractical because of the noise in the rolling room. I took this set-up and installed it in my bungalow with one instrument in the sitting room and the other next to the kitchen, much to the amusement of many visitors. The reason for this was that I had become aware that the servant/s did a lot of walking when one rang for something from the sitting room. They had to walk about twenty yards to the sitting room to find out what one wanted, twenty yards to the back to get it, twenty yards to the sitting room to delivery it and then twenty yards back again having completed the errand. That is eighty yards for some soda or some ice! With the free new communications this was halved.

     When the tappal coolie(41) was not on his way to or from the post office with the mailbag he worked in the PD's garden - the usual practice on all our plantations. The Forres tappal coolie was doing something in the ceiling of a bathroom in the bungalow one day when he fell through the ceiling on to the toilet bowl. His femur hit the edge of the bowl and broke, and he was despatched to the hospital. About a week later, he returned to Forres and came to see me with his family as the fracture had not been set properly. The break was at the neck of the femur and, therefore, difficult to set, but the plaster cast only went up as far as the fracture, and because of this was ineffectual. There was a large callous above the plaster. They told me that when they had pointed this out to the doctor, he had said, 'Come back sometime and we will break it and reset it.' I was appalled and very angry, and almost phoned the doctor to give him a piece of my mind. The family asked if they could go to Kandy to get the leg attended to there by a Buddhist priest who was an ayurvedic physician and very good at this sort of thing. They did not have to ask me but I, naturally, gave my consent and blessing.

     When they returned a week or two later the leg was perfectly straight and heeled. The bone had not been re-broken, the priest had merely used special oils to soften it and re-aligned it.

     Since I was last on Forres Government approval had been given for a hydroelectric dam project that would eventually flood about two thirds of the plantation and many others around. On Forres, the factory and all the lines and staff bungalows would go under water as well as the usual main road approach to the bungalow. The flood level contour was marked before I came, or while I was there, and what it indicated for the PD's bungalow was that the bungalow would be left twenty or thirty feet above the waterline, the garden plus some tea jutting out a little into the water. It was going to be a beautiful setting. As for the tea, what would be left was a hill opposite the bungalow connected to the three or four remaining fields on the hillside behind and alongside it by a narrow neck of tea.

     The flooding was far enough away in time not to warrant any change to agricultural practice.

     On Laxapana, which was next door to Forres, the factory and the PD's bungalow were to be inundated, and one morning the PD came over with one of his directors who asked me whether I would design a new PD's bungalow for them. This being a wonderful opportunity I happily accepted - although he made no mention of any payment! I spent a most enjoyable time designing a bungalow of about sixty-five squares, one of whose features was that, standing in the front garden one looked through large windows in the drawing room and dining room to another lawn and garden at the back. I have no idea whether a new bungalow was ever built, or whether, if one was, it was the one I designed.

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