TRAVAILS OF AN EARLY COFFEE PLANTER – by Hugh Karunanayake If one lived in Sri Lanka in the mid 1900s, a name such as F.L. Dick would have raised more than a few titters. The unfortunate man lived in Ceylon a century before  such a possibility, in an age  when neither “F.L.” nor Dick  meant anything other than a mere name. Frederick Lacy Dick  was the elder son of Samuel Dick  a wealthy landowner from the Isle of Wight who invested heavily in opening up coffee plantations in Ceylon  in the mid 1800s and which eventually  succumbed to the ‘coffee crash’ of the time.  Fred and his brother who came out to Ceylon to manage their plantations lost their means to a livelihood  as a result of the coffee crash. That was the time when the country was a Crown Colony and the British who were running the country were ...

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