"[1] His father owned a gentleman's outfitter in the City of London and a warehouse business on the Thames estuary, with the family living at Gravesend.

[2] In 1860, J. T. Arundel travelled on a Houlder Brothers & Co ship into the Pacific, calling at the Chincha Islands, on which guano was mined for refining into superphosphate.

[4] John T. Arundel & Co went on to engage in mining guano on other Pacific islands and also established coconut plantations and traded in copra and other commodities.

[6] In 1897 John T. Arundel & Co., merged its business with that of the trading and plantation firm of Henderson and Macfarlane to form the Pacific Islands Company Ltd ('PIC').

The Chairman of the PIC was Lord Stanmore, formerly Sir Arthur Gordon, Governor of Fiji and first High Commissioner for the Western Pacific.

Albert Ellis and other company employees travelled to Banaba to confirm that the soil of that island was largely phosphate rock.

Albert Ellis went on to Nauru, at that time a German territory, and confirmed it also consisted of large deposits of phosphate rock.

[11] J. T. Arundel and Lord Stanmore were responsible for financing the new opportunities and negotiating with the German company that controlled the licences to mine in Nauru.

[2][6] In 1913 an anonymous correspondent to the New Age journal criticised the operation of the PPC under the title "Modern buccaneers in the West Pacific".

[2][6] From 1919 the responsibility for the welfare of the people of Nauru and Banaba, the restoring of land and water resources lost by mining operations and compensation for environmental damage to the islands was under the control of the governments of United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia.