Tunbridge Wells

Last year this mural was installed on Platform 2 at Tunbridge Wells station. The jovial fellow in yellow leaping in 1606 is Lord North.

Dudley, 3rd Lord North, had been feeling under the weather suffering from “a lingering consumptive disorder”. He went to stay with his friend Lord Abergavenny at his hunting lodge, Eridge, about two miles outside Tunbridge Wells, for six weeks but felt no better. On his way back to London he came across a sulphurous spring and hoping it would have medicinal qualities bottled some of the water. It seemed to do the trick as he lived to be over eighty and Tunbridge Wells was put on the map as a spa. You can read the full story on the History of Parliament website.

The mural does not record Tunbridge Wells’s fame as the HQ of MP Evans, grower of palm oil in Indonesia, whose AGM was held yesterday. It was well attended and as a veteran of these meetings I noticed that there was a tendency for some shareholders to ask multiple questions. If this becomes the norm the rather good al fresco lunch will be wasted. On the other hand these portfolio questions were answered adroitly by the Chairman and Board.

The Chairman’s statement can be summarised as: planting of palm oil up, extraction of palm oil up, and price of palm oil down. If you’d like to get down and dirty it is here. It perhaps encapsulates the MP Evans philosophy that the Chairman name-checked a shareholder present. He had joined the company as a post boy seventy-five years ago and gone on to become a director. Unless there is a successful take-over bid MP Evans intends to stick to its knitting and increase its production of palm oil.

If you have environmental concerns about the palm oil  industry, the Chairman reminded the meeting that alternative sources of edible oil (soya, rape) need acreage ten times larger to achieve the same production. He also emphasised the firm’s high ethical standards but put this in context by saying that MP Evans only produces about 1% of Indonesia’s palm oil. Nevertheless, all other things being equal, he expects MPE’s production to double from the 2016 level by 2020. Rather remarkable for a company in Tunbridge Wells with just four staff and three executive directors. (There are some 5,000 staff in Indonesia.)