John Muir
Nearly 20 years after Kirkman Finlay’s death in 1842, a second major influence began to make itself felt. In 1861, John Muir, who had joined the company in 1849, became a junior partner and began systematically to buy out the other partners. By 1883 he had become sole proprietor. Meanwhile, he and his cousin, Hugh Brown Muir, had revolutionised the activities of the company. The outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861 brought British textile mills to a standstill, obliging Finlays, among others, to find alternative sources of cotton. They looked to India. In 1865 Hugh Brown Muir re-established the Bombay office, reopening the Calcutta branch in 1870. In 1871 the firm opened a small London office.
John Muir made his first visit to India in 1871, setting up Finlay Muir & Co that year as a private business to act as agent for his own ventures, while the Glasgow firm continued to act as home agent, selling piece goods to Bombay and Calcutta. He opened a jute press in 1871 and a jute mill in 1873; their foundation, the start of a major interest in jute, marked a first move into new commodities.
In 1873 John Muir also moved into the infant tea industry, acting as agent in Calcutta for two small tea estates in Northern India, and then buying up other estates as they came on the market. He was one of the first to realise that tea estates operated best in large groups under central control, rather than as individuals, a management pattern that was to be adopted throughout the industry.
In 1882, he floated the private North and South Sylhet Companies, based in present day Bangladesh. By 1896, Muir owned tea estates throughout the Subcontinent. In addition to tea and rubber, a variety of other crops were also grown. In 1894, Muir bought a large tract of high altitude virgin jungle in the South Indian state of Travancore. Between 1896 and 1898, a reorganisation of the estates owned by Muir, or managed by the Finlay Muir & Co agency, resulted in the formation of The Consolidated Tea and Lands Co. Limited, The Amalgamated Tea Estates Co Limited, The Kanan Devan Hills Produce Co Limited and The Anglo-American Direct Tea Trading Co Limited, all of which were floated on the Stock Market.
John Muir set up London warehouses at Orient Dock and established his own tea brokers and tea tasters. He owned a controlling interest in a tea packing and confectionery concern, George Payne & Co Limited. By the 1880s James Finlay was Scotland’s largest employer of overseas labour. By the 1890s, says The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Muir was the world’s major stakeholder in the growing and marketing of tea. At his death in 1903 he had some 90,000 employees on the payroll in Britain and the Indian subcontinent.
Under John Muir, Finlays had maintained Kirkman’s commitment to the production of cotton cloth in Scottish mills but its major theatre of operations had moved to the Indian subcontinent. Throughout the 20th century, Finlays also developed a string of successful agency businesses. One of the largest of these was the Clan Line for which, as a founding partner, Muir had secured all the agencies East of Suez.
Kay Muir
In 1909 John Muir’s son, Kay, converted his father’s heterogeneous collection of businesses into a private company, owned by members of the extended Muir family. In turn, the new company held substantial interests in the tea and jute companies, some of which were wholly owned subsidiaries. The First World War saw Finlays making a modest profit from military staples: sandbags, khaki cotton cloth and tea. In 1924 Finlays became a public limited liability company and was floated on the Stock Exchange, the form in which it remained until the Swire Group took it over in 2000.
http://www.stepneyrobarts.co.uk/names66.htm gives the Ancestry of one Sir John Muir who ownd Jute Mills in Bombay up to the first Worl War: but, I have proved that there is certainly no link of this family to that of our Muirs as far back as the 1730s at least
The Maneckji Petit Mills- where he worked in 1902 when he wrote his Will - were Spinning & Weaving mills and could well have used Jute