The other Clerihew
The story of William Clerihew, relative of the poet Edmund Clerihew Bentley who is known today, if at all, as a minor artist, but who in his lifetime found fame as an inventor and coffee-farmer
Today, ‘Clerihew’ is generally associated with short comic or nonsensical verses about famous individuals, usually in two rhyming couplets with unequal lines, named by the creator of the form, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. However, 150 years ago, it stood for something else entirely.The following lines appear in the 1861 comic poetic epic, Coffee Planting in Ceylon by ‘Aliquis’ (Stewart Jolly):
In places where the weather’s wet all through,
Perhaps you’d better have a ‘Clerihew’.
The term, short for ‘Clerihew Store’ referred to a forced-air crop drier, used for preventing rot in coffee beans. The apparatus, at the time in almost universal use in the plantations of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), then Britain’s major supplier of coffee, later found use in drying cinchona and tea, thus engendering modern tea, coffee and grain driers.
Unfortunately, history soon forgot its creator, Bentley’s great-uncle William Clerihew, whose meagre fame rests on a series of 210 sketches and watercolours he painted, mainly in the Middle East and India. Stephen Rowland Pierce F.R.I.B.A, F.S.A. (1896–1966), who wrote a short biographical sketch of the elder Clerihew in the RIBA Journal, once had possession of these drawings, in three volumes. However, they appear subsequently to have become dispersed – just four being in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s collection today. However, there was much more to Clerihew than this information intimates.
Drawing a comet
Born in Aberdeen in 1811,William Clerihew came from a prosperous Episcopalian family. He went to Marischal College, to which his builder and guild burgess father, George, had bequeathed a bursary. He became an apprentice architect in 1836 – redrawing the plans of the Bannermill, a fire-proof cotton mill in Aberdeen – and, three years later, joined the Royal
Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in London as an associate member. Two founding members of RIBA, Sir Charles Parry and George Ledwell Taylor, and a senior member, George Moore, sponsored him.
A fellow Aberdonian, John Philip, RA, displayed a Portrait ofW Clerihew, Esq at the Royal Academy Exhibition of 1839. Clerihew himself showed off his artistic propensities by displaying a ‘Design for an ornamental bridge for St. James’ Park’ at the exhibition of 1840 and a ‘Design for a triumphal bridge’ in 1841. Apparently Sir Charles Parry, who designed the new houses of parliament, employed him as a draughtsman at the site in 1841-42.
In June 1842, the Indian business magnate Dwarkanath Tagore (grandfather of Rabindranath Tagore) signed Clerihew up ‘to teach Astronomy and Physics to a College of Native youth’. Clerihew embarked on the Justina, bound for Calcutta (modern Kolkata) on 6 November. The ship stopped at Trinidad and Cape Verde, and Clerihew ‘made a
number of indifferent drawings’ of birds, fish and the crew.
Then, in middle of the Indian Ocean, about 600 miles (1,000 km) off the south coast of Ceylon, an extremely bright comet (now identified as ‘C1843D1’) appeared, with the longest tail – estimated at 200-300 million miles (300-500m km) – ever recorded. Clerihew observed it and made four drawings, noting the reflection its light made on the water and measuring its altitude and azimuth. On 11 March 1843 he spotted the comet’s second tail, longer but fainter than the first, and measured the angle between the two. He sent his observations, together with a sketch of the comet, to the astronomer Sir John Frederick William Herschel.The paintings he made of the comet were later presented to the Royal Astronomical Society.
Justina arrived in Calcutta on April fools’ day. Clerihew began sketching and painting the buildings and landscape, including the extensive gardens of the villa that Dwarkanath Tagore built for his wife in the Calcutta suburb of Belgachia. In late 1843, he voyaged up the Ganges, drawing as he went. His watercolours mark his progress: Hugli-Chinsura, Murshidabad, Jangipur, the Rajmahal Hills, Ghazipur, Mirzapur, Hathras and Alighar. By the end of November, he painted the Red Fort in Delhi. He also drew the view from Skinner’s House, the palatial residence constructed at the Kashmere Gate by the Anglo-Indian soldier, James Skinner – the ‘Sikander’ of Vikram Chandra’s novel Red Earth and Pouring Rain – who raised the elite Skinner’s Horse cavalry regiments. One drawing depicts the Fakhr-ul Masjid, the mosque which abutted Skinner’s vast estate. A second shows both the mosque and St James’ church (the oldest in Delhi). Skinner built this church in fulfilment of a vow he made while lying wounded on the battlefield.
On 27 December, Clerihew painted Dypoor below Kanoge at Daipur, a village by the Ganges in the Kannauj district. In 1845, we find Clerihew in Madras (modern Chennai), whence he departed India. But not far, for by the next year, he was planting coffee in the highlands of Ceylon.
Coffee planting
In 1840, the colonial government promulgated the Crown Lands (Encroachment) Ordinance and expropriated all common and forest land; which it then sold, cheap, to potential coffee planters – including many colonial civil servants. One of the beneficiaries of this land policy, the jurist Charles Hay Cameron, husband of the pioneer photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, obtained the 1,185-acre (480 ha) Rathoongodde Forest, in the mountain district of Hewaheta, for £290 – equivalent to about £30,000 today. His father-inlaw James Pattle (great-grandfather of Virginia Woolf) bought the 821-acre (332 ha) Bambaragamme Forest nearby, for £205.
Coffee plantations had become profitable because of the end of slavery in theWest Indies and because another Aberdonian, Robert Boyd Tytler, brought West Indian plantation methods to Ceylon. He also brought with him a second-hand copy of PierreJoseph Laborie’s The Coffee Planter of St Domingo, which quickly became the coffee planters’ bible.
Pattle renamed his estate The Hope, and employed Clerihew as estate manager, probably through the good offices of the latter’s Indian patron, Dwarkanath Tagore. The Aberdonian immediately set his ingenious mind to the task of improving on Laborie’s methods of processing coffee beans, which had been embraced, unchanged, by the coffee planters of Ceylon.
‘When the coffee berry is picked from the tree,’ he wrote later, ‘it bears a closer resemblance to a ripe cherry, both in size and appearance; and several processes have to be gone through before the article known in commerce as coffee is produced. In the first place, the pulpy exterior of the cherry has to be removed by the process of pulping, which separates the seed and its thin covering called the parchment, from the husk’.
Laborie described a coffeepulper, adopted widely, and known popularly in Ceylon as the ‘rattle trap’. In August 1846 Clerihew, together with Josias Lambert, an experienced agriculturalist, received premiums from the Ceylon Agricultural Society for improving on this existing coffee-pulper design.
Life for an early British planter in Ceylon could be lonely, especially if you ignored the local villagers and kept your workers at arm’s length (although planters, not uncommonly, took Sinhalese mistresses), with only your dogs for close companions. Plantations had to be hacked out of the jungle using village labour.The cost of clearing the forest could be much greater than the cost of the land, so it was unusual for large extents to be cleared, the maximum being about 200 acres (80 ha).This meant that large swathes of jungle remained between plantations.
Occasional visits to the local metropolis, Kandy, to catch up with the latest developments, attend meetings of various societies and to watch the races, provided periodic relief, but often ended up in drunken brawls.
However, for Clerihew distance made Kandy only an occasional
In 1840, the colonial government promulgated the Crown Lands (Encroachment) Ordinance and expropriated all common and forest land; which it then sold, cheap, to potential coffee planters
escape.The road from Kandy to Rikillagaskada, the nearest town to Rathoongodde, was for its first ten miles (16 km) ‘a very fair road, winding up and down along the sides of the hills, with the wild stream of the Mahawelli-gunga roaring over a rocky bottom at their base’. Thereafter, however, it shrank into ‘a bridle path, which after running through a small belt of forest, becomes rough, uneven and at some places precipitous’, full of ‘steep ascents’ and ‘ugly looking rocks of all dimensions’.Three major fords interrupted the road along its 22.5 miles (36 km) length, including a particularly bad one at Hanguranketa.
It was possible to travel in a small passenger carriage (called a ‘palkee garee’) over the first ten miles, but thereafter the rough and steep path made the route only navigable by pony.
The trip took only about seven hours each way, but the round trip necessitated an overnight stay in Kandy, especially since the land surrounding the road abounded in wildlife. The bad condition of the road meant that transport of coffee could only be done by bullock caravan (rather less economical than by bullock cart), as well as slowing down the journey to Kandy. Soon after his arrival, Clerihew put his signature to a petition to the governor to complete work on a trunk road into the highlands.
The enforced loneliness led to planters keeping ‘open house’ for any white man who had an appearance of gentility. Clerihew seems to have spent time with his neighbours, and they doubtless visited him to sample the port wine he had been sent by James Pattle.
An Irishman, John Keane, managed the Rathoongodde estate for Cameron. Also in the vicinity another Scot, John Gavin, managed the Mooloya estate, which shared boundaries with both Rathoongodde and The Hope.
Elephant hunting
So it was that Clerihew went to visit Keane, on the afternoon of 13 October 1846. On the way, he noticed an elephant entering the jungle near the gate of Mooloya estate. Unlike today, elephants roamed freely through the hill country of Ceylon. It must have been the first wild elephant he had ever seen.
He spent the night at Gavin’s at Mooloya and, the next morning, excited workers informed them that the elephant was at the gate. Clerihew sent word to Keane and the three of them went elephant-hunting, accompanied by several villagers. Clerihew came face-to-face with the elephant, fired and tried to run away. However, the elephant grabbed hold of him by the trousers, pulling them partly off, pulling out his shirt and covering it with blood from its wounds. Luckily for Clerihew, the firing of the villagers distracted the elephant and he managed to slide down the rockface and find a cavern, where he hid.The elephant trumpeted, charged him and was about to attack.
Keane came up and fired at the elephant, which bolted.The hunters followed the animal, the villagers firing at it continuously. Clerihew and Gavin expended their ammunition, but Keane stood up and awaited the elephant’s charge. He pulled the trigger, but his gun did not fire.The elephant grabbed Keane and dashed him around with its trunk. It then escaped, badly wounded, into the jungle. Keane died three hours later.
Eremacausis and architecture
Apparently unshaken by his dance with death, Clerihew took over the management of Rathoongodde after the demise of Keane. He continued his attempts to improve productivity by tackling one of the biggest problems facing coffee planters in Ceylon. The rain sometimes fell for weeks, and one planter reported having had 3,000-4,000 bushels of wet parchment (un-hulled coffee beans) which had collected on the drying ‘barbecues’, with no sunshine to dry it. It had to be turned over constantly, day and night, to prevent fermentation and decay.
Clerihew studied the ideas of Justus Freiherr von Liebig, the ‘father of organic chemistry’. Liebig had coined the term ‘eremacausis’, for the decomposition of plant
or vegetable matter taking place by absorption of oxygen from the air. Experimentation on the basis of Liebig’s theories indicated to Clerihew that damp, stagnant air in the gaps between the coffee beans caused their decomposition. It struck him that he could remove this stagnant air by means of fans extracting the air in a space between two perforated floors on which the beans were spread.
In 1847, he expounded his hypothesis in a lecture on ‘Eremacausis or Decay’, in Kandy. In October, Robert Richardson Banks of Great George Street, Westminster, a well-known architect who had served under Sir Charles Parry and formed a partnership with the latter’s son (also Charles Parry), registered a patent for ‘New Method of Artificially Curing and Preserving the Berries of Coffee by a Drying Apparatus’ on Clerihew’s behalf.
While experimenting with his apparatus, Clerihew did not neglect the estate. Apart from the coffee plantation, he established a farmyard with an orchard, to provide for his nutritional needs.
‘The good taste and scientific skill of Mr Clerihew,’ wrote Dr Frederic John Mouat, the principal of the Bengal Medical College (which had been endowed by Dwarkanath Tagore), who visited the plantation in 1851, ‘have rendered Rathoongodde the model estate on the island’.
In the two years after taking out his patent, Clerihew seems to have been occupied with developing his apparatus. In 1849, he installed the first ‘Clerihew Store’ at Rathoongodde. A large building, it contained an airtight chamber, encompassing two storeys, the upper made of coir (coconut husk fibre) matting laid on wooden ‘reepers’ (laths) with one-inch gaps between them.Water-driven fans extracted the air and ventilated the beans.The wet beans were dried using heat supplied via hot-air pipes from an external furnace. Clerihew built his apparatus using materials available in abundance in Rathoongodde, including Ironwood (Mesua ferrea),
Satinwood (Chloroxylon swietenia)
and ‘Keena Doom’ (probably Shorea trapezifolia) timber.
Clerihew also decided to improve his living quarters, a not very adequate bungalow – sufficient, however, for human habitation in the temperate climate of Rathoongodde. Mouat commented on ‘the damp, comfortless, unsightly shanties in which the planters shelter themselves.’
‘I lived in a mud and wattle hut
20 by 12 feet partitioned by a mat,’ P.D. Millie, another pioneering coffee planter, recalled many years later. ‘The boxes are stored under the bed, and a big box served as a dining table’.
Clerihew brought his architectural skills to bear and, built ‘the prettiest and most picturesque of Swiss Cottages’.The two-storey ‘bungalow’ (the term covered any dwelling, including the meanest of huts, as long as a white man occupied it) had an outside staircase to the upper-storey bedrooms. He employed a carpenter and joiner by the name of Macleod to construct it, using mainly locallyavailable materials, particularly Doon (Doona, Shorea zeylanica)
timber, available abundantly in the surrounding forests. Instead of paint, he used an excellent varnish made from the colourless gum-resin exuded from the Doon tree, dissolved in spirits of wine or turpentine.
In whatever free time he had left after coffee planting, architectural activities and inventing, Clerihew also tried, unsuccessfully, to get the locals to collect the resin of the Doon tree. He also indulged in a hobby: collecting uncut precious stones. He appears to have continued drawing: Mouat’s book, Rough notes of a trip to Reunion, Mauritius and Ceylon contains woodcuts based on Clerihew’s drawings of Rathoongodde and of the Swiss Cottage.
Meanwhile, the proprietor was getting anxious: Clerihew kept ploughing all Rathoongodde’s profits back into the estate and Charles Hay Cameron feared financial ruin. He decided to go down to Ceylon to look into things, and set off from Southampton in late October 1850, travelling via Gibraltar and Malta to Alexandria.
Cameron arrived in Galle, then Ceylon’s main port, on 26 November 1850. He made his way up to Rathoongodde by 11 December. Whatever his expectations may have been, the progress Clerihew had made surprised and impressed him. ‘O Juley! Juley!’ he wrote back to his wife Julia on 16 December, ecstatic over the beauty of the place, ‘How I wish you could see all that I have been seeing for the last five days’, descending thereafter into a rapturous description of the estate and the view.
Mouat, recuperating from an illness and travelling in search of healthy air, had arrived in Ceylon from Calcutta, and duly came up to Rathoongodde on 28 January, on the invitation of Cameron, who enjoyed discussing ‘Calcutta matters’ with him. Clerihew showed him over his apparatus and the estate, which impressed him a great deal. Mouat left for Mauritius from Galle on 5 March 1851, ‘following a hurried descent from Nuwera Ellia’
Crystal palace exhibition
Although Cameron loved Ceylon, and Rathoongodde in particular, he had to return to Britain. He went down to Colombo with Clerihew and Gavin and, on 20 March the same year, boarded the steamer Victoria, bound for the Indian coast and for Bombay (modern Mumbai). Clerihew’s subsequent peregrinations may be tracked with some precision by following the dates on his watercolours.
On 21 March, Clerihew painted at Cape Comorin (modern Kanyakumari), the southernmost tip of India, before proceeding on to Bombay. He spent four days in Bombay and then left for Aden. Cameron parted company with the others, probably in Alexandria. He joined his wife in Paris in April and
Life for an early British planter in Ceylon could be lonely, especially if you ignored the local villagers and kept your workers at arm’s length
was back in England by early May.
Clerihew painted in Cairo by 25 April, and by 29 April, in Alexandria. He thereupon embarked on a tour of the Middle East – perhaps following in the footsteps of his mentor, Sir Charles Parry, who made a similar artistic circuit of the Levant in his youth. Clerihew’s drawings from this period detail his anabasis – Baalbek, Sidon, Tyre, Caesaria and Jerusalem, ‘where he stayed six days making 16 drawings, some with quite a high standard of finish’.
Leaving Palestine, Clerihew went to Cyprus, Rhodes and the Greek islands.We lose sight of him after 1 June 1851, on the island of Samos. He probably went to London to see the Great Exhibition, which ran from May to October that year, and possibly home to Aberdeen. Certainly Gavin did so, his first visit back to ‘the mother country’ in eight years.
On 3 April 1850, Earl Grey, the secretary of state for war and the colonies, wrote to George Byng, Viscount Torrington, the governor of Ceylon, informing him about the Exhibition of Industry of All Nations (the Crystal Palace Exhibition), to be held in London the following year, enclosing two copies of the invitation to exhibitors. On the 18th, he had written again, advising that 3,000 square feet of space had been allocated to Ceylon by the commissioners for the exhibition. Clerihew responded to the invitation to exhibit by submitting a model of his ‘patent stove and apparatus for curing coffee’.
Clerihew arrived back in Galle on 27 November 1851, aboard the Haddington, from Suez and Aden. He was accompanied by Gavin, so it is probable that both had travelled together. Clerihew took over the management of both The Hope and Rathoongodde.
In the meantime, the Society for the Arts considered an ‘elaborate communication’ from Clerihew regarding his apparatus, wherein he had submitted ‘a full account of the mills, machinery and drying houses erected on Rathoongodde estate, accompanied by a series of well-executed drawings.’The Society decided to grant him its gold medal.
Clerihew departed from Galle on 24 March 1853, aboard the steamer Bosphorus. It sailed via Mauritius, the Cape, St Helena and St Vincent on the Cape Verde islands, arriving at Southampton on 28 May, having experienced a very heavy gale within 700 miles of Plymouth. On 10 June 1853, Clerihew received the Isis gold medal from Prince Albert. This appears to have been the apex of his career.
He moved back to Aberdeen, settling first at Richmond Hill and finally at Albyn Place. In 1856, he married Emily Foottit, the eighteenyear-old daughter of the late Reverend James Foottit, of Newark, Nottinghamshire. Together they had seven children in quick succession.
However, he did not live ‘happily ever after’, since he encountered problems establishing his prior claim to the apparatus which bore his name. In 1858, he wrote to the Planters’ Association in Colombo and established finally that he had, indeed, been the first to devise this method.
The last years of his life were marred by litigation, mainly over an estate in Ceylon. In January 1847 Colonel Martin Lindsay, 16th laird of Dowhill, had died in Kandy.The following April, Clerihew lent £1,000 to David Baird Lindsay, the 17th laird, against an indemnity on the deceased colonel’s coffee estates. A year later, he converted the debt into a mortgage against Dodangallakelle, a forest land which had belonged to the colonel. Just before leaving Ceylon, Clerihew filed action against Lindsay in Kandy, which resulted in a fiscal sale of the estate to John Gavin. Clerihew had lent to Gavin the money needed to buy, clear and cultivate the estate.
However, David Lindsay’s maternal relative, James Hadden of Aberdeen, an executor of and a devisee under the colonel’s will, took issue to this sale and brought an action against Gavin, Clerihew and Lindsay. Appeals and counterappeals were volleyed back and forth between courts. Finally, the privy council ruled that the sale had been in order – not that it did Clerihew much good, since the decision came after his death.
Clerihew died on 6 March 1870. However, his apparatus lived long after him. In almost universal use in the coffee plantations of Ceylon by 1866, probably the first forced-air crop drier in history, it embodied the essence of the modern coffee- or tea-drier. Judging from an article which appeared in The Times about 1866, it may have been the ancestor of the modern grain drier.The external furnace, which came to be known as a ‘Clerihew stove’, was the forerunner of the modern ‘Sirocco’ heaters, which are used in conjunction with tea driers. The original patent also encompassed the use of the apparatus as a forcedconvection solar crop drier, making it the ancestor of modern renewableenergy mechanical crop driers.
It amazing that this genius and polymath is now mostly forgotten. Of his portfolio of some 210 drawings, a sketchbook of 45 drawings and watercolours from his 1851 tour of India and the Middle East fetched just £3,000 when Christies auctioned it in 2010.
Vinod Moonesinghe read mechanical engineering at the University of Westminster and worked in Sri Lanka in the tea machinery and motor spares industries and the railways before turning to journalism and to writing history. He has lectured at the Sri Lanka National Archives. At present he serves as Chair of the Board of Governors of the Ceylon-German Technical Training Institute.