There’s been a whole heap of responses that the postman has brought and, as I type these lines, I’m not sure whether I’ll get around to anything beyond them. But then it’s always great to hear from readers. And the first of them is Bharath Yeshwanth who has for long been a helping hand, trying to find answers to questions I raise.
This time he has produced more than an answer: he’s found a picture of the Western and Eastern Castlets (Miscellany, August 10) and that is reproduced here today. A few days later, while researching for a talk on the old photographers of Madras, I found that both Nicholas Brothers and Gantz and Son were occupants of Western Castlet in the 1860s, which would make the building some sort of office complex of the time. The Gantz-Nicholas neighbourliness eventually had an unhappy twist in the tale. Gantz, booksellers and publishers, sold, among other items, photographic prints from many photographers from India and abroad. And that included pictures from the Nicholas Brothers. But when James married Ellen, the daughter of Abel Joshua Higginbotham, the founder of Higginbotham’s, also booksellers and publishers, James wanted to supply pictures only to Higginbotham’s. John, the elder brother and the person who had negotiated the arrangement with the Gantzes when he had started Nicholas Brothers, objected and the brothers parted ways. In fact, John Nicholas withdrew from the business side of photography and kept his links with the firm only as a freelance photographer. Ellen Nicholas took his place and could well have been Madras’s first woman professional photographer. But to get back to the picture, it is thought to be a water colour by John Gantz dating to the 1850s and shows a huge expanse of empty space between the two buildings. That space, Sriram V. told me when I showed him the picture, was once used for a major experiment by Major Thomas de Havilland, who had built the twin castlets as his home. As usual, Sriram wondered with a sly smile why the good Major needed to build two castlets as homes. Be that as it may, Sriram added that de Havilland was at the time building St. Andrew’s Kirk on Poonamallee High Road and had planned a dome resting on 16 Corinthian pillars to shelter its nave. Though domes had been built on buildings all over North India and, in the past, in a few places in South India, the skill seemed to have vanished in the South. de Havilland therefore wondered whether it could be done for St. Andrew’s. And it was in that empty expanse between his homes that he built a dome for St. Andrew’s as an experiment. And when he showed that it could be done, he redid it all over again in situ .
* That picture of the three path-breaking child widows who went on to graduate from Queen Mary’s College and become teachers (Miscellany, August 17) brought a response from T.S. Gopalkrishnan. He tell us that his elder sister S. Mangalam worked as a teacher at the N.K. Tirumalachari School in Salem when Parvathy (“indeed, the middle woman in the picture you published”) was Headmistress there. A strict disciplinarian, according to Mangalam, Parvathy insisted on the students studying well and she would admonish the girls if they wore expensive or flashy clothes to school. At the function to mark her retirement, Mangalam, in farewell, quoted a naladiyar : Kunchi azhagum, Kondunthanai kottazhagum azhagall, Nenjathil nallan yan, Ennum nadu ni amail kalviazhagey azhagu . Adds Gopalakrishnan: “An apt description of a person whose beauty was in her achievements in the field of education.”
* She was not Helen or Hannah Angelo (Miscellany, August 17) Sriram V. told me after a talk he was giving on what we are doing to our area and street names. She was Hennen or Hannen, with possibly one ‘n’, he told me, and when I pointed out that it did not sound like any Western name I had heard, he told me that he had checked and found a few Europeans with the name. Sriram, who has written a book on the 300-year-and-more-old Corporation of Madras that still awaits publication, provides me with the additional information I had sought about this pioneering woman. She was a nurse who had founded the Nurses Club and was Secretary and then Treasurer of the Nurses’ Association from which she resigned under a cloud after World War II. A resident of Mada Church Road, Royapuram, Angelo thrice contested elections for the Corporation of Madras and was elected every time. She was an active councillor who would arrive at work sites and chivvy the men doing road works, clearing rubbish and cleaning drains with a “ Jaldi, jaldi , men”, according to her friend, the late Lakshmi Krishnamoorthy, the daughter of S. Satyamurti.
* Out of the blue there arrived a stream of communication from Brian Stoddart in New Zealand who had somehow come to hear about my item on ‘A Madras Miasma’ in this column (Miscellany, July 27). And the information he provides is just in time for my talk at the Madras Book Club this evening on Supdt. Christian Le Fanu, IPS, Madras Police. Responding to my wondering whether the name was a figment of Stoddart’s imagination, this frequent visitor to Madras from 1972 to spend time in the Archives for research on his scholarly work, tells me that during that research he did indeed come across the name Henry Le Fanu, a Madras Civilian from 1865. Le Fanu wrote the Salem District Manual and then, after he retired in 1900, practised in Hyderabad as a barrister. Henry Le Fanu was the nephew of Sheridan Le Fanu, “the great horror writer”, he adds. As for Stoddart, he, I’ve found, is a distinguished Australian academic who was once Vice Chancellor of La Trobe University, Melbourne. He now appears to be concentrating on the Le Fanu series, but his other interest is sport in the Australian cultural scene, particularly cricket, so don’t be surprised if there is a Le Fanu mystery in a cricket setting — perhaps murder in a match-fixing scenario — one of these days.
*****
Enthusiasm unlimited
By holding over a letter or two for a later date, I have a little space to say how happy I have been to see Madras Week celebrated in the most unexpected of spaces. I never thought I’d see Madras Week celebrated on the Marina, but there was Sushila Natraj leading Inner Wheel members on a banner display on the sands of the Marina, focusing on heritage buildings, and there was Sujatha Shankar of INTACH-Chennai teaming with the Corporation to screen twice of an evening a film narrating the history of the city and welcoming the Prince of Arcot who dropped in to see it. Elsewhere, cyclists, motor-bikers and vintage car owners took to the roads to celebrate the city. Schools from Tiruvanmiyur, Tambaram, Gerugambakkam, Koyambedu, Perambur and Tondiarpet, among a host of others, organised celebratory events. And walkers followed the trail of the Justice Party as well as of textiles in T. Nagar, where owners of shops with a long history were only too eager to narrate them. But what I was most pleased to hear about was United Way of Chennai, an NGO, organising a ‘Dream Madras’ event for children at Valluvar Kottam in which over 1,000 children from 85 private and 50 Corporation Schools participated, showcasing their dreams for a Chennai of tomorrow. The Corporation Schools also staged a cultural show on the occasion. Another event of special note was a management college in Siruseri getting the whole SIPCOT complex involved in a celebration. Even publications that in the past had ignored the celebrations or turned their noses up over them, this year began to pay attention to them. That’s the spirit — and may it grow as more and more take pride in Madras, their home.
