A brief break in Australia recently was an opportunity to catch up with a couple of Madras connections there. Joe Bailey, a senior Government official in Canberra but once a part of the MAC Group in Madras, is the unofficial leader of the Anglo-Indian community to Australia having helped to found the federation of Anglo-Indian associations in there.
He was my host at a get-together of Anglo-Indians in Sydney gathered to help a Madras cause. And as usual when Anglo-Indians get together for a cause it was a dinner-dance that went on well past the closing time of the golf club facilities it was held in.
The organisers were an NGO called Anglo-Indian Dream-Makers, a group a few years old and founded by Max and Noel French with Madras connections, and Henry Marriott and Jeune Walmsley who went to St. George's, Ketti. Noel played hockey for Tamil Nadu in the Baskaran era, went on to play for New South Wales and was in the running for an Australian jersey. Jeune had been an outstanding athlete in the Nilgiris in her day. And Marriott's roots were in a plantation in Ceylon.
The first project of the Dreamers was to modernise the primitive, unhygienic kitchen of St. George's School in Madras as well as to make more hygienic its washing area, storage facilities and dining room. This effort was kicked off with an A$5000 contribution by a philanthropic Australian businessman who regularly supports rural ventures in the Tenkasi area. As much was collected by the Dreamers and the project was completed — but at too slow a pace for those now thinking the Australian way.
But while it has made the Dreamers go slow on the second phase of the project — namely improving living conditions in the dormitories by providing modern toilets, better beds and introducing cutlery — its latest fund-raiser was to generate full support (with about A$3000 a year) for an Anglo-Indian girl from St.George's who wants to get a nursing degree. The target for the year was raised at the dinner-dance itself, thanks to the persuasion of a brilliant emcee, Melford — one of the only two old students of the school present and, despite his age, the liveliest, slickest talking person around — and a responsive Hector Soans from Hubli, then a senior government servant in Bombay and now an Australian multi-millionaire businessman. No doubt, next year will see another such lively get-together to raise the requirements for another year of college.
In my brief address, I rather pleasantly surprised the gathering with the information that St. George's is the oldest Western-style school in Asia, that its once head, the Rev. Andrew Bell, introduced the Madras System of education in Britain and the rest of Western Europe, and the first Anglo-Indian immigrants to Australia (in 1853-54) included 24 boys from the Orphanage that became St. George's and they went out to work as compositors in the printing press that published the Empire , the newspaper owned by Harry Parkes, who founded the Commonwealth of Australia (the federation of the individual colonies).
They, however, were rather taken aback when I mentioned that one group in the management of the School wanted to pull down its first home and now hostel block, Conway House, and put up a multi-storied building. Isn't there respect for heritage in even such an institution in India, they wondered. All I could do was to urge them to send their views to the management.
Air mail centenary
Another person I met during that break was Dr. Srilal Fernando of Colombo and Melbourne, a magpie collector on a large scale but rather focused on his collection of rather unique air mail covers from Ceylon and India. Do you know, he asked me, that this is the centenary year of the world's first air mail delivery? And that it happened in India. I had to admit that that was a first that I'd missed. Whereon he enlightened me that Sir Walter Windham, R.N., who had been invited by the Government of India to exhibit aircraft in India — he brought down eight airplanes — was in Allahabad when a request was made to him to fly some mail to Aligarh and he, after getting the Post Master General's permission, got a French pilot of his, Henri Pequet, to carry, on February 20, 1911, the first mail by air.
Windham, on his return to Britain, then launched there the first formal airmail service in the world on September 9, 1911.
On my return to Madras, my first visitor was Steve Borgia of Indeco Hotels, another magpie collector. But what I didn't know was that his collection included a cornucopia of Indian postal memorabilia.
That it does I discovered when he presented a splendidly colourful, exuberantly laid-out and well-produced coffee table book that he has brought out, titled Pigeons to Posts .
A book dominated by its pictorial content, it nevertheless contains a host of interesting anecdotes to highlight the broad look at Indian postal history he has taken. Here he adds to Srilal's story of that first airmail delivery, but also differs with it a bit.
It was apparently the chaplain of the Holy Trinity Church, Allahabad, who hit upon the idea of air delivery of mail as a means of raising funds for a hostel he was building for Indian students. He invited the public to send with their stamped and franked letters a six annas surcharge which would go to the hostel fund. He received 6500 pieces of mail and they were flown by Pequet to Naini, just six miles from Allahabad.
And there the postal department took over their further travel to their destinations. A special postmark was used for this delivery featuring Pequet's biplane flying over mountain peaks (the Himalaya?).
International air mail service came to India in 1929 when Imperial Airways (now British Airways) established a London-Karachi service.
In 1932, Tata Sons received a license to carry the mail from Karachi to Madras via Bombay. This service was extended to Colombo in 1936, but that is a story I have told in these columns before.
When the postman knocked...
There's been a heap of mail awaiting me. Some of it with loads of information will have to wait.
But some of the briefer ones include a couple that set me straight and a few with queries. Here they are:
* K.V.S. Krishna says that coffee on the Bangalore-Madras highway (Miscellany, January 31) was forty kilometres from Bangalore and not 40 km from Madras as I had stated.
* It was Nawab Ghulam Ghouse Khan who established the Madarasa-I-Azam (Miscellany, February 21), says S. Anvar, and not Azim Jah, his uncle, who was regent till he came of age. With the school being established in 1849, this was after Ghulam Ghouse Khan attained majority.
* A. Raman from New South Wales writes that he has been in correspondence with a David Egmore in England and neither can explain how a British contraction for the Tamil `Elambore' has found its way into the name of someone whose family has never had connections with India, leave alone Madras. Coincidence? Or does anyone have an explanation?
* Seeking information about Hadley, 24 Kilpauk Garden Road, Kilpauk, is Simeon Mascarenhas of Melbourne who once lived in it. The house was rented by Hooghly Ink Co. Ltd., Calcutta, from the 1940s to 1966 and Stanisfield, a Director of Parry's; lived there before that.
The house, Mascarenhas tells me, was demolished in 2008 or 2009 to make way for a block of flats after most of the surrounding land, about 45 grounds, was disposed of by the descendants of the owner, a leading High Court figure.
Working on a book of family history, Mascarenhas — whose father headed Hooghly in Madras in the 1960s and 70s — would like to know the complete story of the house and its ownership from the time its foundation was laid as well as any history before that.
* The first Indian Secretary of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry, C.S. Krishnaswami (Miscellany, February 14), says readers of this column should also note that organising the 175th year celebrations of the Chamber is its first woman Secretary-General, K. Saraswathi. Krishnaswami says he retired soon after he had organised the 150th year celebrations in 1986.
* S.A. Govindaraju writes that he was with the Amalgamations Group's Bimetal Bearings when it was shifted from Madras to Coimbatore and he remembers ‘The gentle gentleman' (Miscellany, January 24) telling him — he was then the Industrial Relations Officer — “The employees are irritated and despondent because of the move. Treat them with compassion and understanding and make the move easier for them.”
Sivasailam was indeed a corporate head who cared for his staff and workers, emphasises Govindaraju.
