Sir Robert Stanes
Sir Robert Stanes ( 13 May, 1841 – 06 September, 1936 ) was a British businessman and philanthropist in India who founded United Nilgiri Tea Estates ( UNTE ) in Coimbatore.
Stanes arrived in India in 1858 while still a boy of seventeen. He immediately launched himself on a successful career as a coffee planter in Coimbatore.
Five years later he established the first inland coffee – curing plant in India, In 1885, Stanes & Co went out of business.
Stanes recalled that “the firm suffered great losses and Messrs Stanes Watson failed in business, which led to the collapse of my firm. I had to begin all over again, all that I had was 500 rupees ( about £40 at that date ).
Failure in business was at that time a disgrace and Stanes’s son, Fred, who was five at the time, remembered both the shame and also having to return to England on a cargo boat.
Stanes wrote that “my dear wife endured it all without a murmur and with the greatest patience”. He started again and the business again prospered.
By the time of his death he owned cotton mills, coffee and tea plantations, coffee curing plants, motor works and tire retreading plants. Coimbatore is still a major Industrial City today, largely through Stanes’s contribution.
When Coimbatore City Council was formed, he became chairman. He set up the Stanes School in the city in 1862. His elder brother, Thomas Stanes, had established the Stanes School in Coonoor, in 1858.
In 1913, he was awarded the Kaiser-i-Hind Gold Medal for Services to Coimbatore and to Education and he was knighted in the 1920 New Year Honours.
The House of Stanes, a proud lineage that began way back in 1861, with Sir Robert Stanes. The organisation was founded as a planting company and the coffee curing works were installed in a temporary workshop acquired from the Madras Railway Company, Coimbatore.
This marked the beginning of an Enterprise, a beginning for greater things to come: expansion of plantation holdings; diversification into Fertilizer mixing ( 1890 ), Automobile Workshop, Tyre Retreading ( 1940 ), and many more.
In its centenary year, 1961 the House of Stanes became an integral part of the Amalgamations Group.
The group with an annual turnover of around 4000 crores is one of the largest light Engineering groups in South India with 29 companies, five among them have completed over one hundred years of operation.
Today, T.Stanes is a large business house from peninsular India, engaged in manufacturing and marketing, encompassing a diverse range of activities that include Automobiles, Tyre retreading, Tea plantations, Chemical fertilizer blends, Organic fertilizers, Biofertilizers, Chemical pesticides, Bio – pesticides, Botanical pesticides, Micronutrient blends, Urea coate, Antitranspirant, Immunomodulators and seeds to name just a few.
