Madras Miscellany: The Sister from Madras

November 24, 2014 09:32 am | Updated November 25, 2014 01:47 am IST

Sister Eucharia nee Julia Gunnigan

Sister Eucharia nee Julia Gunnigan

This week, it’s the New Yorker that’s noticed Madras, I’m told by reader Kiran Rao. And it’s the journal’s food columnist, John Lanchester, who has been responsible.

His article ‘Shut up and eat’ begins with his remembering the first recipe his mother, Julia Gunnigan Lanchester, wrote for him, the one for spaghetti Bolognese, ‘spag bol’ as he calls it. And that takes him to his mother and she leads to this item today.

Born in a rural home in County Mayo, West Ireland, in 1920, Julia Gunnigan was the eldest of seven girls and a boy. The church was a haven for many a girl from a large, poor Irish family at the time and Julia became a nun as did three of her sisters. She joined the Union of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, better known as the Presentation Order founded by Nano Nagle in 1771 in County Cork, Ireland. Nano Nagle, from a well-to-do family, had also sought the Church – but with a mission: To provide a good Catholic education to the poor children of Ireland. From these beginnings, the Order established schools around the world, arriving in Madras in January 1842 to establish the first Presentation Convent and School in India.

Over the next 75 years, the Order established half a dozen schools in Madras. One of them, which opened its doors in 1909, was the Sacred Heart School, better known as Church Park, near the Horticultural Society gardens. It was to this school that Julia Gunnigan came after her ordination when she took the name Sister Eucharia. She was to serve the School from 1943 to 1957 when, while heading its teacher-training college after she had done her London University B.A. and M.A. by correspondence, she suddenly resigned and sought to leave the Order. It was a step that quite scandalised Madras at the time.

Sister Eucharia, says the New Yorker writer, “left (Madras) wearing her nun’s habit, with no possessions apart from a plane ticket to London, a city she had never visited, and ten pounds in cash.” It was to be October 1958 before she could formally shed her robes. She was nearly forty when she met her husband-to-be, William Lanchester, in London, where she was a teacher. He was with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, and she moved with him to his various postings, to Hamburg, Calcutta, Borneo, Burma and Hong Kong. And over all those years, she became a mother, learnt cooking and began to enjoy it. Writes her son, “She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after working in a convent school in Madras.”

Julia Lanchester might have learnt to make beef Stroganoff, but her son will always remember her for her spag bol. He writes, “I’m making spag bol for the zillionth time. Through the years I’ve experimented with all sorts of variations… (But) the one I always come back to is the simplest and best of all, my mother’s: onion, ground beef, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, wine, thyme, salt, a minimum of three hours’ cooking. My kids love it. Cooking it reminds me of my mother: it always does…. And she knew that …. was part of the process by which she saved herself.”

About why she needed to save herself was in a book John Lanchester wrote, Family Romance , that came out some years ago (Miscellany, April 7, 2008). I read it, but have forgotten what it said about why she felt she had to give up the robes while at Church Park. I don’t think jogging memories is necessary in this case.

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Remembering the Co-operator

The invitation I received recently read, “On account of 61st All India Co-operative Week Celebrations conducted from November 4, 2014 to November 20, 2014 in commemoration of the architect of the Co-operative Movement in India Sir Frederick Nicholson and the Co-operative Pioneers in Nilgiris such as Thiru H B Ari Gowder, we have programmed a seminar on 15.11.2014 at Nilgiris District Plantation Workers’ Co-operative Society, Coonoor …”

I hadn’t heard of any celebrations in Madras recalling Nicholson, but I can understand the Nilgiris interest in him. After retirement in 1904, Nicholson and his wife Catherine settled in Coonoor, where he played an active role in helping found the Coonoor Urban Co-operative Bank in 1916 and remained associated with it till his death in 1936. He and his wife and their son Major T B Nicholson are buried in the Tiger Hill Cemetery in Coonoor. On November 15, wreaths were placed on their graves and a portrait of Sir Frederick was unveiled in the Nilgiri History Museum. Frederick Augustus Nicholson arrived in Madras as a 23-year-old member of the Indian Civil Service in 1869. He was, in time, to serve as Collector of Tinnevelly, Madras and Coimbatore. It was while serving in the last-named post that he fell in love with the Nilgiris.

In the aftermath of the great Madras Famine of 1876 – which killed an estimated ten million people and virtually wiped out farming in the Presidency — the Government in 1892 set up a Famine Commission to study how such a disaster could be prevented in the future. Nicholson’s report was published in 1895 and the Indian National Congress, then in its first flush, insisted on its implementation, but it was to be 1904 before the co-operative movement began getting under way, with such recommendations as the establishing in the districts of co-operative agricultural credit societies and co-operative banks being implemented.

Nicholson, following in the footsteps of Dr. Francis Day of the Madras Medical Service, who is considered the father of India’s fishing industry, now turned his attention to fisheries in the Presidency. In July 1905, he presented the Government a report on the need to not only increase fish production in a Presidency that had the longest coastline in India, but also improve fish curing methods (helping inland areas get a hygienically better quality of cured fish) as well as those of making fish manure badly needed by the plantations whose constant complaint at the time was the poor quality of fish guano. Requested to investigate how these improvements could be made, Nicholson visited Japanese and European fishery centres and on his return was made the Honorary Director of the Bureau of Fisheries, Madras Presidency, which was established in 1907 on his recommendation. The Bureau, the first in the country, was the nucleus of today’s Departments of Fisheries in all the Southern States. One of the first things the Bureau did was to establish in 1908 an experimentation centre, the first in the country, in Ennore. The techniques of fish curing it developed became standard practice not only in India but in all Britain’s tropical territories.

Oxford-educated Nicholson became the First Member of the Board of Revenue in 1889. In 1902, he was appointed to the Madras Legislative Council and was knighted that year. In between, in 1897, he was made a Member of the Imperial Legislative Council. Some years later, in 1905, he was to make yet another significant contribution to Madras. Teaming with the Rev. Canon Sell and Sir S Subramania Aiyar, all members of the Syndicate of the University of Madras, they recommended to Government “that there should be for so ancient and important a language, with a classical literature of so unique a character, a dictionary worthy of its subject.” The seed was sown for the University of Madras’s Tamil Lexicon (Miscellany, March 28, 2011). Even that is a forgotten contribution of a man who dedicated himself to making life better and people more knowledgeable in the Madras Presidency.

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Builders of bowstring bridges

Keeping on the trail of Napier Bridge (Miscellany, November 3) has been reader V.Viswanathan and he has come up with the fact that work on the first bowstring bridge began during the governorship of Lord Erskine and that the bridge was declared open by Governor Sir Arthur Hope. The bridge was constructed by Gannon Dunkerley & Co, a major construction company at the time, and the work was supervised by the Madras Port Trust. Who built its clone, inaugurated in 2000, reader Viswanathan is still trying to find out.

Henry Gannon and J H Dunkerley had separate trading establishments in India from 1895. Whether these were in Bombay or Delhi is not very clear, but they were merged in 1918 to become Gannon Dunkerley & Co. (GDC). The firm was incorporated as a private limited company in 1924. It passed into Indian hands in 1946 and two years later become a public limited company headquartered in Bombay.

It was in the early 1930s that GDC moved from trading into civil engineering and was particularly active in the South. There it became known for the RCC bowstring bridges it built to its in-house design. It also built several other bridges, aqueducts, and civil requirements for irrigation and hydroelectric projects, besides numerous factory buildings. One of the firm’s best known projects was the first ghat road from Tirupati to Tirumalai. During World War II it built several airstrips and runways. Then, in the 1950s, it constructed numerous bridges for the Western and Central Railways.

Today, its branch offices in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Calcutta handle assignments in their respective regions. But there was in the 1950s a Gannon Dunkerley (Madras).

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