Introduction

“Left job, gone to Assam” reads the rather terse entry against my great grandfather, Thomas Kingsley, in the New  Calcutta directory of 1863.

He had been working as an Assistant to the Agent of the East Bengal Railways. Starting as an uncovenanted Civil Servant in the Home Department in 1848, he had worked his way up to the “Despatcher & Keeper of Diaries” in the Miscellaneous Department between 1852-5 before the more serious role of chief accountant in the Public Works Department.

We can only guess at what drove him to leave his secure position and expertise in the financing of railways to head towards the adventure of Assam.

Perhaps he felt that his status would limit his ambition. He had been born in Cawnpore in 1830, son of an Irish sergeant in the British Army. The plum jobs in the Civil Service in those days would always be given to those from Europe rather than those who had been born in India.

Perhaps it was the lure of adventure. The tea business in Assam was beginning to boom. The war against Bhutan had ended, and infrastructure was improving. It was a tough life for planters, more so for the workers, but there was money to be made.

Thomas Kingsley, Tea Planter in Assam

Directories from 1870 onwards show Thomas Kingsley either as manager or proprietor of a numerous tea gardens in Assam. A Kingsley Assam Tea company was well established long after his death in 1899 right up to 1946 when Indian businesses started taking over.

Thomas married his second wife, Grace Edward Norris in Calcutta in 1857. They had  a boy, Gerald Norris Kingsley in 1864. We know that Gerald had one son, also known as Gerald, who was killed at Ypres on the 23^rd October 1914, thus ending that line of the family.

Thomas married for the third time to Mary, and had two sons, Frederick in1877 and Edwin (known as Ned) in 1879. Edwin was my grandfather.

Mary, however, fled the home after the birth of Ned while Thomas was on an elephant catching expedition in Assam. Her daughter (born after the two boys), Sheila Crouchen  (nee Treanor) in her book A Letter to Emma (her granddaughter) says that her mother was shocked at having to share her husband with “native concubines” and fair haired children around the compound.

So while he was away in Assam, Mary’s ayah or servant helped her to procure two bullock carts and  they made what would have been a perilous journey back to Calcutta. Not only was this a momentous step for a single woman to take, the journey through tiger and leopard infested forests would have been interesting to say the least.

There she met a lawyer William Mackie and we will leave them there for the time being. My family’s story and hers become entwined later or perhaps I should say re-entwined.

Fred and Ned at some point in their childhood returned to Darjeeling. They were both educated at St Joseph’s at North Point in Darjeeling, described by some as one of the best in India. They were both helped in the family tea business by their elder half brother Gerald as they grew older.

Fred then in 1897 at the age of 20 sets up in business with the father of his Assamese clerk as an elephant catcher in Assam and in Bhutan. He trades successfully for some 20 years before returning to the tea trade in Darjeeling. Fred apparently had the first car in Darjeeling.

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Liza Hill

Grandfather Ned remained in Darjeeling where he was given the Tea Estate known as Liza Hill. The Estate included a very sizeable bungalow of some 32 rooms, together with tennis court and swimming pool.

It was one of the most impressive residences in the area. We know that then Rani of Sikkim visited, and we believe that an old photo shows George Mallory the climber about to play tennis. Unfortunately part of the house, and the pool and tennis court were swept away in a landslide in the 1960s.

Both Kingsley brothers were keen on horses, playing polo, and Ned on at least two occasions won the Governors Cup at Darjeeling Race course, said to be the smallest and highest race course in the world ( or at least one of them).  

Ned and Nan

Ned married Nan and had two sons, Michael and David. However, Nan too was not keen on the rather remote life at Lisa Hill so she and Ned spent time travelling in Italy, with plans to buy a villa in Frascati. Unfortunately Nan died suddenly. Ned and another relative started to travel through Eastern Europe, ending up in Hungary. Ned there fell in love with a beautiful ballerina from the Buda Pest ballet and wanted to marry her and take her back to India. She felt, however, that she could not leave her parents behind, and so declined.

She gave birth to a daughter with Ned, but Ned died a few years later in 1936, having returned to India and remarried, having two sons, Fred and Ned and a daughter, Marina.  Dark forces were beginning to play in Europe. The ballet dancer was Jewish, and she and her parents perished in the holocaust. As the daughter’s father was both English and Catholic, she was placed with a Catholic family and survived.

Some years later after the War, the daughter turned up in England and met with David, her half brother. Ned had left her 20,000 rupees in his Will, and that had been invested well. Sheila says that the daughter’s fiancée was a son of the family who owned the famous Spanish school of performing horses and so this money could help to restore her new family’s fortune. Sadly we have heard no more from her, but Sheila does observe that while Ned never knew what happened to the mother of his daughter or the daughter herself, she was the love of his life.

My father Peter and his Siblings

After returning to Darjeeling Ned married again, and had three more children, John, Peter and Marina. Ned died in Darjeeling in 1936 at the age of 57, and his young wife and five children came to England, leaving India for the first time.

David and John went to Beaumont School. David excelled at Rugby and Cricket and later became a founding member of Everest Double Glazing. John and Peter, however, were always up to no good, so it was decided to separate them at school.   Peter, my father was sent to Downside, where he continued to make a nuisance of himself until he was made a school prefect. He was then a real poacher turned gamekeeper as he knew where the wrongdoers were and what they were up to. He was a very good boxer, and certainly when I was at Downside, the photo of him captaining the winning team in the Interschools Boxing  from 1953 was displayed on the walls.

Connections 

Families are about connections, and I promised earlier to mention again the family of Mary and Mr Mackie. One of their daughters married into the Treanor family, and who should appear at Downside a few years after I started but one Simon Treanor.

Many years later my brother, Simon Kingsley, was staying at the Windermere Hotel in Darjeeling when he overheard a lady talking about English families before the War, and asked if she had known the Kingsley family.

The lady was Sheila Crouchen and she describes the encounter in her book thus,” Well thank goodness there was a spare chair behind me which I collapsed on saying do you mean Fredrick Kingsley or Edwin St Jean Kingsley? They were my mother’s half brothers! He said Edwin St Jean was my grandfather.”

The cousins from David, John, Peter and Marina recently met up together with Marina, some meeting for the first time ever, some after some 50 years or so. One is in Canada now, one in Spain, one in Ireland and the rest in England, all very different, and yet still with the same blood coursing through our veins, and for some of us, a rather prominently shaped and recognisable nose.

Back to Liza Hill

The connection between Downside and Darjeeling may be slight, made, perhaps appropriately, because one small boy in the late 1940s was too naughty to go to Beaumont. I am reviving that connection, still buying tea direct from Liza Hill, perhaps from a bush planted by my grandfather.

I went back to Liza Hill in 2025, arranging a visit with the current owners, Jayshree Tea. They kindly organised a tea tasting on teas from Liza Hill and a few of the other gardens they have in Darjeeling.