Who was Colonel Lockhart? Nobody can say — but here is the man who planted the estate

There is a sentence about this pass that appears on dozens of travel sites, and it is always the same sentence: the estate and the factory are named after Colonel Lockhart, who played a significant role in developing the region’s tea industry. No first name. No regiment. No date. No source. We went looking for him in English and in Malayalam and could not find him anywhere except in that repeated line.

That does not mean he never existed. The High Range is covered in estates carrying the surnames of men whose only surviving trace is a hillside, and a great many of them are as undocumented as this one. It does mean that if you read that Lockhart Gap is named after a Colonel, you are reading a claim rather than a fact — and Roampedia prints it as a claim.

What is documented

Lockhart Estate was planted in 1879 by Baron John von Rosenberg and his son, Baron George Otto von Rosenberg. That date puts it among the very first plantations in the High Range: 1877 was the year the Poonjar Raja signed away roughly 136,600 acres of the Kannan Devan Hills to John Daniel Munro, and 1879 was the year Munro formed the North Travancore Land Planting and Agricultural Society to work them.

The Rosenbergs did what every planter in these hills did in that decade, and in the same order. Cinchona first — the tree that yields quinine, without which living at this altitude in the 1880s was a gamble. Then coffee. Then, when the coffee failed as it failed across south India, tea. Cinchona to coffee to tea is the whole nineteenth-century story of the Western Ghats, and Lockhart went through all three.

The photograph

In the Lockhart Tea Museum, 4.6 km from the gap, a framed press reproduction hangs on the wall: a long sepia group portrait, several dozen men in white and dark suits arranged on a lawn, with a printed caption beneath it. Somebody photographed it and released the picture into the public domain, and it is the closest thing to a face this page will ever have.

The caption reads: "The memorable meeting at which the representatives of 12 planting associations got together in Bangalore in 1893 and agreed to form UPASI." And then it names the standing row, from the left: O Scott Skirving, H Campbell, Baron J von Rosenberg, H W Raikes, M N Subbaiya, V A Coelho, James W Rhodes, L P Stopford, R K Walker, J C Abbott, J G Hamilton, H G Parsons, C E T Lucas, J W Hocking.

The man who planted the tea you are looking at from Lockhart Gap is standing third from the left at the founding of the United Planters’ Association of Southern India — an organisation that still exists, still speaks for the tea, coffee, rubber, pepper and cardamom growers of three states, and still keeps its headquarters at Glenview in Coonoor.

One detail does not reconcile, and we are printing both halves rather than choosing. The photograph’s caption says twelve planting associations met in Bangalore in 1893. UPASI’s own account of that day says thirteen district planting associations assembled, on 28 August 1893, at the Mayo Hall.