I live in Surbiton in England
I was born in Darjeeling on 4th November 1939, and was brought up in the town.
See the photo on the right - I am on the right in the grey suit with author Terry Martin (now passed away) who wrote 3 volumes of books on the DH railway and Hazel (Innes) Craig former Secretary of the Old Mount Hermon Students Association (also passed away).
My website is www.oldmhs.com which is still going strong and has photos of Darjeeling and the school - click here
My great-great-grandfather, Joachim Stolke, started the very first tea garden in Darjeeling, (Steinthal tea estate) using tea saplings from China, and employing imported Chinese tea-labourers to grow them.
He came out to India with the Wernicke family (the two families intermarried with each other), as German Moravian Missionaries in the mid 1840s, and the next generation of the family owned/managed about 14 of the well-known tea gardens in the Darjeeling District.
A book on the history of the family "The Darjeeling Pioneers" has been written about them by author and historian Fred Pinn in 2003, and the families settled in Darjeeling for over 100 years. I was the last to leave Darjeeling in 1957.
I attach a photograph of my father, Tracey Sinclair, with his tea workers taken at Steinthal T.E. in the 1930s which has been published in various books (like Jeff Koehler's book "Darjeeling - A History of the World's Greatest Tea," published in 2015), and appears on many websites. It is rather unique as there are not many photographs of European tea planters with the tea workers. |