fires. Drying was necessary for the long voyages to Europe or the United States, as too much moisture left in the tea would cause mould and ruin the cargo. The Japanese drying method was simply not good enough and the foreigners were banned from leaving the Treaty ports to supervise and organise the operation themselves. The tea could be bought only through Japanese agents.
Glover got round this by establishing a tea refiring plant in Nagasaki in August 1861 – a building where the tea could be properly dried and prepared for a long voyage – this solved the problem but added expense. A long and not very successful struggle with the tea business had begun for Glover.
A second Glover brother reached Nagasaki that same month. Tom had gone to Shanghai and returned to Nagasaki with his older brother, James, arriving off the Japanese port on the night of 7 August 1861. They arrived on the Gharra and high winds kept their ship from getting into Nagasaki harbour that night. James Glover’s photographs show him to be tall, slim and dark, thick hair stiffly parted, physically a complete contrast to his younger brother.
Accompanying the two Glover brothers on the Gharra was Edward Harrison, another young China-based trader being sent to Nagasaki as an agent for a British firm, Blain, Tate & Co. The trio waited until the following day for the winds to abate enough for their ship to drop anchor and for them to be rowed ashore. Despite all the problems confronting his tea business, Tom Glover must have had some hopes for success in bringing over his brother to join him.
Jardine, Matheson were still a little cautious of their young agent. In an earlier letter they had told him that they were interested only in establishing a sound trade – not in speculative adventures. How much heed to this warning Tom took is not known but the company rapped his knuckles in a letter of 10 September, saying:
Your draft for $2000 has been presented & honored – we should, however, beg you to note that we wish to be advised beforehand when you are in want of funds, for we make it a rule not to accept drafts unless permission to draw on us has been granted.
Clearly the headstrong Glover, presumably still resident in the lower half of the company’s warehouse/office complex on the Nagasaki waterfront during the building of his bungalow on the hill, would have to be held on a tight rein.
The planned regatta went ahead on schedule at the end of September. The winners of the various races were not published on that occasion but over the years the Glover brothers did well in what became an annual event at the port. Their training in their father’s Coastguard boats in the rough of the North Sea was evident.
Early in October Glover sent off a muster of tea samples to Shanghai – ‘tea pressed and fired in our own establishment’. His ‘establishment’ at Oura employed several hundred Japanese women heating, packing and sorting teas. They would have been supervised by a Chinese who separated and graded and generally ran the show. The sound of crying babies strapped to their mothers’ backs, the singing women, the shouting Chinese and the clattering of hundreds of iron heating pans were joined with the aroma of roasting tea and a mixture of all of this wafted out on to the streets of Oura – an unforgettable memory for visitors to the Treaty ports at that time.
Despite the industry and employment Glover’s tea business had brought to Nagasaki, costs remained high and profits low and by the beginning of 1862 he was forced to look at other possibilities of making money. He was not short of ideas.
It was now necessary for him to bring in like-minded people to his organisation. With Francis A. Groom, he founded Glover & Co. on 1 February 1862. Groom had been a partner in Robert Arnold’s firm in the port and his move to Glover would indicate that he was impressed by the ambitions of the young Scot.
Jim Glover and Edward Harrison, who would specialise in property management, became the third and fourth partners in Glover & Co. later that year. Harrison had arrived in Nagasaki with Jim the previous August and, like the Glover boys and Frank Groom, was young and bright and prepared to have a go.
Even with the new talent to help, Glover’s tea business stubbornly refused to pick up. The company were not happy with his product or with the price he was charging. But with his usual optimism he was sure he could reduce production costs once his plant was fully utilised and a temporary shortage of tea pickers and inspectors was over. Tom’s enthusiasm seems to have won over the hardheads in Shanghai – the company agreed to go on backing his project.
Other avenues of business were also beginning to open up. Harrison’s property expertise now began to show dividends and they were also dabbling in foreign exchange, moving currency between Yokohama and Nagasaki to gain from the considerable swings in the rate between the two ports. This particular enterprise would have been only just within the law. They were young and eager and into many things. Even with the backing of Jardine, Matheson and their regular supply of market prices in Europe and the United States, trading in those days was at times not much more than a form of gambling. Three months or more could pass between shipment in Japan and arrival in the West and wild changes in the price of goods were common.
Life in the port was improving for the foreigners. For example, 1862 saw the opening of an Episcopal church, a Dutch-supervised hospital, a bowling saloon and hotel and a two-monthly overland postal service to Yokohama.
Glover by this time appears to have become a leading member of the community and well settled in Nagasaki. On 12 May Dr William Willis, described as a gentle giant of an Irishman, stopped off at the port en route to take up his post as medical officer at the British Legation in Edo. He stayed at Glover’s home while in Nagasaki and found his host kind and courteous – descriptions of the Scot which consistently recur. Willis wrote of his stay at Glover’s home:
It is surprising the affluence of all good things here . . . the real comforts that are to be found in Nagasaki. It is the custom here to have some eggs and tea early in the morning and a late breakfast at 12 p.m., where all good things of the season and a number of European delicacies are met with, such as can be preserved. Dinner is at 7 p.m. equally good.
Willis became a well-known figure in Japanese and foreign circles during the following years, both as a doctor and a diplomat. Another new arrival at the British Legation in September that year – a student interpreter, Ernest Satow – would have a profound effect on the destiny of Japan. But despite the apparent comforts of Nagasaki in 1862, that year also saw a worsening in the political situation.
The adolescent shogun, Iemochi Tokugawa, had married a sister of the emperor in an attempt by his advisers to placate what was growing into a powerful alliance of discontented samurai of various clans. Some of these samurai were beginning to use the Japanese emperor as a rallying point. But the marriage had little effect. Part of the Tokugawa shoguns’ strengths over the previous centuries had been distrust between rival clans. Now younger and more radical samurai in many of the clans were developing a common cause, a cause which would demand that inter-clan rivalries be put aside.
Two incidents that summer of 1862 brought an already uneasy situation to the boil. In June a marine corporal was killed in another attack on the British Legation in Edo. A second incident in September was even more serious and brought Japan and Britain close to war.
A British party from Yokohama left that Treaty port on a riding trip. Their journey took them through the nearby village of Namamugi. On a road near there they failed to give way to a Satsuma clan procession which was on its way from Edo to Kyoto. Leading the procession was the Satsuma daimyo’s uncle, Hisamitsu Shimazu – the regent and effectively the ruler of the powerful clan. His escorting samurai attacked the Britons, killing one – Charles Lennox Richardson, a merchant based in China – and wounding two others.
The murdered Richardson was no innocent. Earlier a Consular Court in China had fined him for a brutal and unprovoked beating of a Chinese servant.
