Thilo Hoffman’s odyssey in then Ceylon

Excerpted from the Authorized biography
by Douglas B. Ranasinghe

(Continued from Jan. 22)

Thilo Walter Hoffmann was born on March 13, 1922 at St Gallen in Switzerland. He was the eldest child of Walter Hoffmann, a paediatrician, and his wife Gertrud, nee Bopp. Walter’s father was a proprietary farmer, and Gertrud’s father, too, was a doctor. Thilo’s mother and both grandmothers were housewives, as was then the norm.

Dr Hoffmann was well known in that part of the country as a leading specialist in his field, and widely liked. He also wrote and published numerous articles on medical, dietary and educational subjects. Beyond his regular work, he dedicated much of his life to a cause. Every day for nearly forty years he voluntarily spent two to three hours in a children’s institution. Here, without expecting or receiving a cent, he treated thousands of newborn infants and small children.

Thilo had two sisters and a brother seven years younger. They grew up in St Gallen, about 700 metres above sea level, in the north-east of the country, close to Lake Constance and to the German and Austrian borders.

Walter was a keen botanist and a skilled mountaineer. He took Thilo along on walks and journeys from an early age, and introduced him to the wonders and secrets of nature. Before entering school at the age of six, Thilo knew the names of many plants and animals. It is no surprise that interest in nature became a hobby with him. But who would have thought that this would lead him to play an historic role in the protection of the flora and fauna of a distant tropical island?

Thilo led a life normal for a boy of his background. Like all Swiss children, he was sent to State schools for his primary, secondary and higher education. He was a Boy Scout. The sport he liked best was skiing, when the nearby hills and mountains were covered with snow.

At 18-years he took his matriculation examination, and entered the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, a world-renowned university where several Nobel laureates, including Albert Einstein, have studied or taught. Thilo Hoffmann followed a course in Agronomy, and finished with a Master’s Degree in Agricultural Science.

A happy time of youth was interrupted by the Second World War, which broke out in neighbouring Germany. Thilo was then still studying. Food, clothing and energy were severely rationed, traveling was restricted, and austerity prevailed all round. It was impossible to leave little Switzerland for nearly five years, an important period in his life. Like all young citizens, he had to join its militia army and take the 17-week basic training course.

To Ceylon

In 1946, just after the war, a Swiss agricultural firm in Ceylon needed a Scientific Advisor, and inquired from Thilo’s university. They recommended the new 24-year-old graduate. By now he had developed “a romantic yearning for the wide world, in particular for the tropics”. But he hesitated because his mother was unhappy about the separation. When he consented five other candidates had been listed, but the head of the firm, A. Baur, selected him.

Amidst the travel constraints, Thilo left Switzerland by train for the seaport of Marseilles, in the south of France. He boarded a British vessel, Durban Castle, then a troop ship, which would take him to Port Said in Egypt. Here he had to remain for three weeks until another ship was found for the rest of the voyage. Thilo liked that country, and was later to return to it on a number of occasions, on business and as a tourist.

From Egypt, he travelled in the US Liberty vessel Black Warrior, a cargo boat, which stopped at three ports and took two months to reach Colombo. The passage through the Suez Canal was an adventure. Convoys from north and south crossed within it on the Great Bitter Lake, where war-damaged and sunken ships were lying.

For the first time Thilo saw the desert, stretching away on either side of the canal. Beyond, on the Red Sea, the ship stayed two weeks at Jeddah, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, in heat he found almost unbearable – there was no air conditioning then. After a brief stop at Aden, three weeks were spent at Bombay, where unloading and loading were slowed by the nightly curfew due to the Hindu-Muslim riots which convulsed India at that time.

Eventually, on an early morning in October, the ship anchored mid-harbour at Colombo. Travellers then landed at the passenger jetty by rowing boat or launch. There was a little episode. The Managing Director of Baurs came on board for Thilo, accompanied by a junior assistant. But Thilo was not ready. He is a “bad sailor,” feels unwell on board, and was unable to pack and prepare to disembark as long as the ship was still moving.

The big boss did not take kindly to what he perceived to be lack of respect, and stormed off the ship. The assistant was sent back two hours later, to escort the new arrival ashore and help with Customs formalities. It was not exactly the auspicious beginning of a promising career.

Employment

The first Swiss firm to trade in the East was Volkarts, which exchanged manufactured goods from Europe for raw materials from India such as cotton and jute. In 1857 it opened an office in Colombo, and exported coffee, coconut oil and cinnamon from Ceylon.

Alfred Baur was born in a village in the Canton of Zurich, Switzerland. He arrived in Ceylon when he was 19 as an Assistant at Volkarts. A dynamic person, six years later he was a proprietary planter at Rajakadaluwa a few miles north of Chilaw – an area then well known for elephant, bear and leopard.

In 1897 at the age of 32 he established his own firm, the Ceylon Manure Works, to manufacture, import and sell fertilizer. This later became A. Baur and Co. Ltd and diversified into other products and services. The firm, widely known and respected in Sri Lanka, celebrated its centenary in 1997.

Young Thilo Hoffmann’s main job as a Scientific/Agriculture Advisor at Baurs was ‘extension work’. He advised customers on the most suitable fertilizers, and the best agricultural practices, for tea, rubber and coconut, as well as paddy and minor crops. He prepared various fertilizer mixtures, printed booklets for many types of crops and engaged in field work to assist planters and farmers.

Among other things, Hoffmann pioneered a new system for the manual manuring of coconut. This was to turn the soil with mammoties, followed by thatching if possible, instead of opening and closing a trench around each palm as was then the custom. He personally demonstrated the new method in many estates and small-holdings. Today it is the general practice in Sri Lanka.

Thilo frequently visited the three crop Research Institutes – Tea, Rubber and Coconut – and various sections of the Department of Agriculture in Peradeniya. At these places he discussed problems and solutions with the different scientists, especially in the fields of soil chemistry, entomology and mycology (pests and diseases).

He vividly remembers when in 1947 the ‘blister blight’ disease of tea broke out in the hills of Ceylon. It was feared that it would be as disastrous as the ‘coffee rust’ which had ruined that industry about a 100 years before. Thilo was one of the first to experiment with, and then market (for Baurs), a copper spray from Switzerland as an efficient remedy.

That was the time when DDT, the first successful synthetic insecticide, was developed by a Swiss chemist. Thilo recalls how carelessly the new material was handled, because its long-term toxicity was realized only later. Today it is banned nearly worldwide. After the Second World War it was applied on countless humans to control parasites such as lice and fleas. It was also very successfully used in malaria control. Thilo himself took no precautions, freely using the concentrated powder with his bare hands and getting soaked by the spray.

A notable instance was the first time Thilo and his newly-wed wife Mae invited the Managing Director of Baurs, Mr A. O. Haller and his wife to dinner at their small flat. Mae had often complained about being bitten by something, but Thilo ignored her. Now she brought to his office a matchbox in which she had caught one of her tormentors and demanded to know what it was.

Thilo, after consulting some books, found it was a bedbug. He had samples of 50% DDT wettable powder in his laboratory. These he took to their veranda, and threw handfuls at chairs, beds and mattresses, banging them on the floor so the bugs fell off into an ever-thickening layer of DDT. By evening the powder had been removed, and the floors and furniture washed and polished.

“It was the only time we had bedbugs in our home,” says Thilo. They were then common in cinemas, and people took along newspapers to sit on. On returning home one immediately undressed in a place where the insects would show against the background.

One of Thilo’s first tasks at Baurs was to report on a new method of manuring paddy by sending alternating electrical current through the soil, invented by a local engineer. This was given wide publicity in the front pages of local newspapers. The Baurs boss feared for his fertilizer business. After visiting the trial plot in Colombo, Thilo’s report categorically excluded any possible effectiveness of the method.

“Are you sure?” asked the boss. So much had he been affected by the sensational reporting, which claimed that fertilizers had become redundant. After a few months the whole thing just disappeared and was never heard of again.

Many Ceylonese landowners were keen to manage their properties in an optimal manner, and would readily seek Thilo’s advice. Eventually, he became a specialist in coconut cultivation, and was asked to advise plantation companies abroad, in Malaysia and Papua New Guinea for example. He frequently visited Arcadia Estate in Perak with the owner, his friend G. G. Ponnambalam Sr.

Thilo was surprised to find that the Chettiars, the South Indian bankers operating mainly out of the Pettah, were dedicated agriculturalists. Only the best was good enough for the coconut properties they took over in the course of their business. He visited many of these, and was always received with respect, treated to excellent hot meals served on washed and smoked fresh banana leaves and eaten in the traditional eastern way. Usually an interpreter was needed as the owner did not speak English. Thilo’s recommendations were scrupulously followed.

The Baurs plantations

Three months after Thilo arrived in Colombo he was sent up-country to one of Baurs’ tea estates to familiarize himself with all practical aspects of tea planting. He recalls:

I took the night train from Maradana to Bandarawela which arrived there at six in the morning. I had a separate, very clean, wood-panelled cabin with a washbasin. It was as good as any first-class sleeper in Europe. The attendants were in uniform and neatly dressed. Proper white linen was provided for bed sheets. Meals were served in the dining car, run by the Victoria catering service. It was similar to a good resthouse of those times with spotless tablecloth, cutlery and crockery and a vase of flowers on the table.

Thilo was met in the cold morning at the Bandarawela station by Paul Hausmann, the Swiss superintendent of Kinellan Estate at Ella, and taken to the spacious bungalow there, where he was to live and work for two months, until the latter went on home leave. Then he moved to Chelsea Estate off the Bandarawela-Etampitiya road. This was nearly 600 acres in extent and also owned by Baurs.

Between the two tea estates he had to spend a few days at the Bandarawela Hotel, owned by Millers Ltd. There for the first time he saw a bucket latrine. All the rooms had this arrangement. Special labourers had to change the buckets several times a day through a separate door from the garden outside. Another place with the same system then was the Kalkudah resthouse.

At the time European shop assistants and tailors were still employed by Millers and Cargills in all their branches, and by Apothecaries and Whiteaways in Colombo. For several years after the war there were thousands of British and Allied military personnel in Sri Lanka, gradually being demobilized and sent back to their home countries. Many military camps and airfields lay across the island, with the main bases at Colombo, Trincomalee, Kandy, Katunayaka and Diyatalawa.

There were then about 5,000 British planters in tea and rubber estates. Practically all would have left the country by the early 1970s. Thilo recalls how social life and sports were centred on the many clubs which dotted the planting districts. Most have disappeared now, in contrast to India, where British-style club life continues almost unchanged. Planters’ wives tended bungalow gardens which often were outstanding.

The monotony of life in these areas was broken by visits from Chinese hawkers, who brought on bicycles large bundles of Chinese goods wrapped in oil-cloth: embroidered tablecloths, tablemats, household linen and carved knick-knacks. Linen was kept in a camphorwood chest from China to protect it against damp and vermin. There were Chinese shops in the larger towns. The 200-odd descendants of these people were given Sri Lankan citizenship in 2008.Another feature was the presence of ‘Afghan’ (Baluchi) money-lenders moving about on large motorcycles. The tall men in their typical dress were especially conspicuous on pay days, also in Colombo and other towns.

Thilo completed his practical training at Chelsea Estate under George Knox, a senior Uva planter, and returned to Colombo in March 1947. Eight years later, in 1955, he became a Director at Baurs. The scope of his work at the firm widened.

Amongst other things, he took charge of Baurs’ own plantations. As an agronomist, he had a particular liking for estate work, and visited the four tea estates owned by them, which were Clarendon-Avoca in Dimbula, Uva Ben Head, Chelsea and Kinellan in Uva, and their two coconut estates, Palugaswewa and Polontalawa, at least twice a year. For decades he was a member of the committee of the Low Country Products Association (LCPA) and of the Agency Section of the Planters’ Association of Ceylon.

All the Baurs estates were well run. The Clarendon mark frequently topped the tea market. Palugaswewa was the highest-yielding coconut property in the world. Polontalawa was developed from jungle in the 1960s and had, apart from coconut, over 200 acres of lift-irrigated paddy land which produced the first basmati rice in Sri Lanka.

In the mid 1960s the Tea Research Institute engaged a new Director who came from East Africa. Surprised to find that tea in Sri Lanka was grown under shade, he convinced planters that the removal of shade trees would result in higher yields. As a result, the appearance of the up-country tea districts changed dramatically. Thilo opposed this policy for agronomic and ecological reasons, and soon Baurs’ tea estates stood out among their treeless neighbours.

With the change yields did increase, but later levelled out and then declined. Today many tea estates have reverted to shade, high and light in the wet zone, two-tiered (for example, grevillea and dadap) in dry regions such as Uva.

Thilo felt acutely the loss of the Baurs plantations when all properties over 50 acres were nationalized in the 1970s under ‘Land Reform’ – which he describes as a “mislabelled political act”. About two decades later the country’s main plantation industries had been ruined, and the better estates were re-privatized on long-term leases.

This Thilo criticizes, because instead of permitting numbers of small and medium firms and even individuals to participate, some two dozen large companies were created, thus concentrating management of tea, rubber, and to a lesser extent coconut, plantations in a few hands.

After nationalization Baurs were left with a small portion of Uva Ben Head Estate at Welimada, about 1,200 m above sea level. The well-equipped bungalow there has served Thilo as a base for many excursions in the mountains and to other parts of the country, especially to the East.

Baurs were the major innovators in coconut cultivation in Sri Lanka. Palugaswewa Estate, near Bangadeniya, had been developed by the founder of the firm in the 19th century. After the Second World War it was producing over six million nuts on 1,400 acres, or 5,000 nuts per cultivated acre per year, which is 80 nuts per palm on average. The Swiss Superintendent Xavier Jobin and Thlo were responsible for this achievement.

After nationalization in 1974 the total annual yield had dropped to two million and the nuts had become smaller: 25% more, or 1,500, were needed to produce a candy (218 kg) of copra.

(To be continued)