Thomas Heslop Hill

Thomas Heslop Hill (20 October 1850 – 8 November 1915), a British planter, was the most important coffee-planting pioneer in Malaya, and is also credited with being the first private individual there to plant Hevea rubber.

Early life Hill was born on 20 October 1850, and was educated at Brighton College, England.

Ceylon In 1868, he went to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to work as an assistant on a coffee plantation at Wanarajah, before moving to Dimbula to work for Lawrence St. George Carey, Ceylon's largest private estate owner, on his Agra Patnas, Aribica coffee estate. Later, he left to work on his own account in partnership with a J. D. Massey, a leading engineer, who purchased three coffee estates in Matale District. He also experimented with Liberian coffee, coconut and cardamoms but was unsuccessful due to the climate being too dry. In the late 1870s, coffee estates in Ceylon were ravaged by leaf disease, and Hill and Massey were ruined.

Hill's railway building operations were less successful. Around 1886, he undertook the construction of the Sungei Ujong railway in association with A.A. Swan, Engineer, but it was never completed due to unhealthy local conditions and labour disputes. However, it was his road building work which subsequently enabled him to launch his coffee-planting business in 1879. His success in that field was acknowledged by Frank Swettenham, Governor of the Straits Settlements, "Hill was a road maker, and as such helped the beginning of the States enormously". Hill soon established new estates, first in 1879, with Liberian coffee in Sugei Ujong at the Linsum Estate at Rantau, and with Arabica coffee at Bukit Berimbum, which were the first coffee estates to be established in their respective states. 1879 also saw the opening of the first coffee estate in Perak. These were followed by the opening of new Liberian coffee estates by Hill at Weld Hill (1881) and Batu Caves (1884), Selangor.

Death In 1907, Hill retired, selling his rubber business and returned to Hampshire, England where he died on 8 November 1915, aged 65. He was survived by his wife, Helen Eveleen Mabel, sister of his business partner Ambrose Rathbone, whom he married in 1888, and by his only child, a daughter.