Donald Macfarlane, Born 1916
tea planter in northern india
Donald Kennedy Macfarlane was born on 31st October 1916 in El Paso, Texas, son of a mining engineer, Archibald Kennedy Macfarlane of Argyllshire, Scotland. He spent his first eleven years in Mexico and Texas, and had a happy childhood with a lot of freedom with his younger brother and sister. His uncle Jim Elliot had been a tea planter in Assam, northern India, and it may have been his knowledge that engineers were in demand on Indian tea plantations, which led to Donald Macfarlane becoming an apprentice at the Glasgow engineering firm of John Brown on the Clyde. Donald left for Assam aboard the 'Modasa', the day after he was formally recruited into the Assam Tea Company on 7th November 1936, aged just twenty. He spent his subsequent career as a tea planter in Assam.
Source: Extracted in 2021 from the autobiography of Donald Macfarlane’s son Alan Macfarlane.
Connected life stories:
His wife: Macfarlane, Iris. Born 1922. (461 pages). Writer and wife of an Assam tea planter.
Their son: Macfarlane, Alan. Born 1941. (3074 pages). Anthropologist and historian.