One thing I’ve found in all the years I’ve been writing this column is that the leads for an item turn up in the most unexpected of places. As in this instance.
A former colleague, now settled in Australia and who knew my one-time habit of taking my lunch break to coincide with the closing for the day of Royal Primary School in Colombo, so that I could drive home two godsons of mine in a ‘sing for my lunch’ routine, sent me an article the other day on the history of Thurstan Road where the School had then been. The road is still one of the more heritage-rich roads in Colombo, many a mansion of long lineage still maintained so well that I keep wondering why can’t we be doing the same thing. One of these grand houses, incidentally, is the home of the Indian High Commissioner in Sri Lanka — and, if I remember right, Gopalkrishna Gandhi wrote a picture-rich history of it when he was HC there.
The history I recently received tells me that Thurstan Road was once the eastern boundary of a garden house known as the Bagatelle Estate and was later renamed as Alfred House , a stately home that still shines bright midst all the building that has come up around it. And therein lies my story for today, the lead being that Bagatelle Estate was owned in the 1840s by Arbuthnot and Co, who were the agents for the Government of Ceylon in India and who were the sole exporters of cinnamon from Ceylon, this ‘brown gold’ being a government monopoly at the time and the reason this area where it grew is still called Cinnamon Gardens.
As many a reader will recall, Arbuthnot’s was the A in the APB of South Indian commerce. Parry’s and Binny’s might have been many years older, but Arbuthnot’s overtook them to become the biggest business house in South India and one of the biggest in the country till it crashed in 1906.
Arbuthnot’s had its beginnings when George Arbuthnot, a Scot, arrived in Madras in 1800 and joined Francis Latour & Co that had been founded c.1780. When Latour decided to step down in 1810, John de Monte, who could justifiably have been called the ‘Laird of (undeveloped) Adyar’, teamed with Arbuthnot to establish Arbuthnot, de Monte & Co. When de Monte died in 1821 without an heir to succeed him, Arbuthnot found himself with a business on his hands and Arbuthnot & Co was born, going on to become the leading business house in South India. It pioneered some of the earliest industry in India, like the Madras Portland Cement Works, the Bangalore Bricks & Tiles Works, the Reliance Engineering Works, the Chittalvasal Jute Mills and several other manufacturing units.
Besides setting up these establishments, Arbuthnot’s played a significant role in the founding of Gillanders, Arbuthnot & Co in Calcutta, Ewart, Latham & Co in Bombay, Arbuthnot, Latham & Co of London (the Alfred Latham of these companies being Governor of the Bank of England!), Ogilvy, Gillanders & Co and Arbuthnot, Ewart & Co of Liverpool, and Gladstone, Latham & Co of Manchester (in the last three companies named, several members of the Gladstone family were partners). With that kind of spread and influential links, Arbuthnot’s was big . No wonder its crash shocked everyone in the Indian financial world of the early 20th Century (Miscellany, December 23 and 30, 2013).
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The Penang connection
A heartening feature of this year’s Madras Week is the participation of several overseas players. The Australians are commemorating the Emden-Sydney finale that brought to an end a legend that gifted Tamil a new word on September 22, 1914. The Germans are hosting a discussion on how the Great War had an impact on Literature and the Arts in Madras. The French are having readings from literature of the same period while the British have a blogging contest about Madras and the Great War underway. Meanwhile, two Armenian scholars living in Paris have put together a week-long programme in the Armenian Church in Madras on Armenian Street, the highlight of which is a splendid exhibition commemorating the Armenian contribution to Madras and to their homeland as well, the first Armenian Constitution having been drafted here and the first Armenian printing press and newspaper being established here.
But to me at the top of this heap is the celebration of Madras Day in Penang, Malaysia, with an exhibition of Madras photographs. Perhaps this will set an example for ‘Madrasis’/‘Chennaivasis’ in other cities round the world to get together and organise events to remember where they came from. But, that Penang will be first off the mark is not surprising, considering the nearly 230-year connection the island has with Madras.
It was a Capt. Francis Light, a trader associated with the firm of Jourdain, Sullivan and de Souza, in Madras, who in 1785-86 negotiated with the Sultan of Kedah to grant the East India Company the island in exchange for protection against Siamese and Burmese intrusions. Light later arrived in Penang on August 11, 1786 to take possession of the grant and at the place where he landed Fort Cornwallis was subsequently raised. He also renamed what was to be the nucleus of Britain’s East Asian empire as Prince of Wales Island, but the name never stuck; Penang or Pulau Pinang it has remained. It was to this island that the first Indian traders and workers went from Negapatam, mainly Tamils, and in time became an integral part of the island’s cosmopolitan population.
What Madras has been to modern India, Penang has been to modern Malaysia, recording a heap of ‘firsts’. One of them is St. George’s Church, work on which was completed in 1816. It is the oldest Anglican church in Southeast Asia and is the only building in Penang to be declared one of the fifty National Treasures by the Government of Malaysia. Not unlike St. George’s Cathedral in Madras in appearance, it is no surprise to learn that it was built by Capt. Robert Smith of the Madras Engineers. It was formally consecrated in May 1819 by the Bishop of Calcutta, the Rt. Rev. Thomas F. Middleton. Three years earlier, Middleton, the first Anglican Bishop of India, had consecrated St. George’s in Madras which became a Cathedral church in 1835. In front of the church in Penang, gracing its immaculate lawn is the ‘cupola-ed’ memorial to Francis Light. The first recorded service in the Church was for the marriage of Light’s widow, Martina Rosella, to John Timmer. The Church was restored over a period of a year between 2010 and 2011. Our own St. George’s meanwhile, awaits its promised restoration. But a Government heritage grant made things easier in Penang.
Unlike Francis Day, Andrew Cogan and Beri Thimmappa in Madras, Francis Light is well remembered in George Town, Penang, with several sites still bearing his name.
