In Darjeeling town, if you are passing the historic Clock Tower and Town Hall and need an ATM, expect to be pointed towards a white building on Laden La Road with elegant fairytale turrets, dated ‘1920’. Now home to ICICI Bank, it served first as a branch of Lloyds Bank Limited.
You may also hear that Lloyds was Darjeeling’s first bank. It was and it wasn’t. ‘Lloyd’s Bank’ was a private venture opened in the mid-1860s in an area called The Pleasaunce, which is now occupied by the Darjeeling District Court and other legal and government offices.
The bank’s founder, William Lloyd (1827-1896), was a nephew of Lt Gen George Aylmer Lloyd (1789-1865) who in 1835 had secured the lease on a tract of land (now broadly ‘Darjeeling District’) from Tsugphud Namgyal, the 7th Chogyal (king) of Sikkim, on behalf of the East India Company. It was intended initially as a ‘sanaritarium’ for ailing British soldiers, but soon became a ‘hill station’ summer retreat for colonial families to escape the dementing summer heat of the Bengal plains.
By the 1860s, the new tea industry was accelerating, with hundreds of tea gardens opening on the Darjeeling hills, among a heavy British military presence. Among the European tea-planters and military officers William Lloyd found a ready clientele for his financial services, while also running several tea gardens in the Terai region south of Darjeeling.
Yet Lloyd influenced the development of colonial Darjeeling in other ways besides. In the 1870s he served with the Northern Bengal Mounted Rifles, a volunteer unit formed of tea planters and Anglo-Indians to protect the estates from local uprisings and bandits. He was also a director of the Darjeeling Steam Tramway Company, which operated the narrow-gauge railway from Siliguri, along which the ‘Toy Train’ runs today.
In 1878, Lloyd gifted 40 acres near Chauk Bazaar for a botanicalgarden, a satellite project for the Calcutta Botanical Garden. Today, Lloyd’s Botanical Garden is a major attraction for visitors, with a vast collection of Himalayan flora, including rhododendrons, magnolias, orchids, conifers, bamboos, and many rare and endangered species, a valuable centre for botanical research and conservation.
Both uncle and nephew lived in Darjeeling until their dying days; on William Lloyd’s death in 1896, his bank was liquidated by the Alliance Bank of Shimla, which took over its operations in the town.
You will find them commemorated together in St Andrew’s Church, among the hundreds of brass plaques dedicated to soldiers, engineers, lawyers, civil servants, and tea-planters of that era.
