Today, ‘Clerihew’ is generally associated with short comic or nonsensical verses about famous individuals, usually in two rhyming couplets with unequal lines, named by the creator of the form, Edmund Clerihew Bentley. However, 150 years ago, it stood for something else entirely. The following lines appear in the 1861 comic poetic epic, Coffee Planting in Ceylon by ‘Aliquis’ (Stewart Jolly):
In places where the weather’s wet all through, Perhaps you’d better have a ‘Clerihew’.
The term, short for ‘Clerihew Store’ referred to a forced-air crop drier, used for preventing rot in coffee beans. The apparatus, at the time in almost universal use in the plantations of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), then Britain’s major supplier of coffee, later found use in drying cinchona and tea, thus engendering modern tea, coffee and…
