Celebrating the Fort
I was delighted to hear that a few individuals decided to celebrate the 375th birthday of Fort St George in the last week of April. D. H. Rao, engineer turned heritage enthusiast, teamed with the Archaeological Survey of India, Chennai Circle, to release a special cover at the Fort Museum on April 23, St George’s Day, the day in 1640 when the rudimentary construction was completed and named Fort St George. Sriram V, another engineer turned heritage buff, created an App which will enable users to explore the heritage of the Fort on their own. Your columnist, a third engineer turned heritage recorder, had a new column going in Madras Musings on the landmarks of the Fort. And Vincent D’Souza, not an engineer but a heritage festivals organiser, proved the most physical of the lot, leading a group of nearly 150 persons on a walk around the Fort on a Sunday morning, with permission to see many a part of the Fort not normally accessible. Vincent also had a shorter walk with children on the previous Saturday evening as well as a quiz and drawing competition for them.
“It was a great experience,” said one of those on the Sunday Walk. “I never knew there was so much to see in the Fort.” And that’s a fact; there is so much to the Fort, so much to see and so many stories to hear. The pity is Government and its Tourism Department are doing nothing about it. Regular Walks should include a walk through the Assembly building. That’s the one thing Vincent’s group could not do, but surely if visits to places like the White House are allowed, the Assembly could also be opened for conducted tours on non-working days?
A particularly happy feature of these low-key individual celebrations was the active role the ASI played in them by offering its support. It’s nice to see a Government department cooperating with the public in such events. Taking a cue from that, perhaps the Tourism Department should be thinking of organising regular Walks in the Fort, teaming with the ASI, and having its guides trained by the quartet mentioned above and others like a few with the INTACH Chennai Chapter. The Fort could, thus, be made the single most important tourist attraction in the city. I remember a time not so long ago when there was discussion of a plan to have a sound ’n’ light show on its ramparts. It’s time that thought was revived.
******
Panorama of Madras beach from the pier, 1866, in three parts. (From Christopher Penn)
The early photographers
Over the years I have featured pictures of Olde Madras c.1900 in this column. And almost all of them, a part of the city-based Vintage Vignettes collection, have been the work of Wiele, Klein or Peyerl. The earliest mention of the work of the first two is found in 1890: Peyerl succeeded Wiele. But from time to time, I have come across pictures from a firm called Nicholas that seems to have had different corporate avatars. There have also been others with no acknowledgement at all. Most of the latter, I now find, are from the Nicholas stable, predating by at least a couple of decades the work of Klein and company. I also find there were other early photographers of the Madras scene, some pre-dating the Nicholas name.
These findings are thanks to the trail Christopher Penn blazed in trying to trace the story of his great-grandfather, Albert Thomas Watson Penn, the photographer of the Nilgiris (Miscellany, December 4, 2006) who began his career with the Nicholas brothers in Madras. That trail has resulted in a book containing much information about some of the early photographers of Madras. Unfortunately, The Nicholas brothers & A T W Penn – Photographers of South India 1855-1885 is not available in India but can be got from the publishers, Bernard Quaritch, London (rarebooks@quaritch.com)
While the scores of pictures of 19th Century South India in the book make for fascinating viewing, I was disappointed to find only half a dozen pictures of Madras among the 100 plates and another half a dozen or so in the text. But the text made up for me the lack of pictures of the city, for it told me a considerable part of the story of early Madras photography.
Panorama of Fort St. George from the top of the lighthouse, 1866 (Christopher Penn)
Within a few years of the invention of the wet collodion glass plate photographic process, four names are mentioned in connection with photography in Madras. Dr. Alexander Hunter of the Madras School of Art, and Linnaeus Tripe, Capt. E Lyon and W W Hooper, all of the Army but commissioned by the Government to capture the temples, antiquities and people of South India for a permanent historical and ethnological record. Were these the earliest photographers in Madras and if so who among them was first? Certainly there could have been many contemporary with them, what with Hunter founding the Madras School of Arts in 1850 and introducing Photography as a course in it. There’s a book in this and what follows waiting to be written.
*****
Catching up with the Nicholases
Meanwhile, back to Christopher Penn’s second book to arrive with the postman. John Parting, the brother-in-law of John and James Perrat Nicholas (J.P.), was the first in the family to come East and in the early 1850s set up a studio in Colombo. He was joined by his wife’s brothers, John and James, a couple of years later. John Nicholas then decided to move to Madras in 1857 where he was soon making his mark. At a meeting of the Photographic Society in 1858, Nicholas was commended for three pictures he had taken using a special “iodising mixture for collodion suited to the climate of Madras”. That same year, the Trade List in The Madras Almanac included ‘Photographers’ as a trade category for the first time and listed four names, “J. Nicholls”, Maselamoney, Pearson & Co, and Davasigawmoney. The first was Nicholas mis-spelt, but does any reader know anything about the other three?
James came from Colombo in 1858 to join his brother and they established the firm Nicholas Brothers that was in business till 1868, though, for a year, 1864-65, it was Nicholas Brothers & Co, Parting having joined them, replacing J.P who had decided to return to London where he set up Nicholas Brothers before deciding to return to Madras where the firm was doing better.
When James decided to return in 1868 he came back with a new helper, Herman Ralph Curths, a photographer but more importantly an expert colourist (one who delicately colour-tints monochrome photographs) and when John quit, the firm became Nicholas and Curths. The break-up may have had not a little to do with John having had business dealings with Gantz & Co., booksellers, and J.P. having married the daughter of rival bookseller, Abel Higginbotham.
With Nicholas and Curths a success, Curths seems to have felt that he had had a lot to do with it. JP thought otherwise and the partnership came to an end with Nicholas and Company being born on January 1, 1873, still in the premises where the Nicholas name had first come up, Western Castlet , Mount Road. For long, I’ve been trying to locate where exactly Western and Eastern Castlets were but have still not got an answer. Help! As for Nicholas and Company, it was to flourish till around 1900 when its name faded from the Madras scene. Much of its success during that period had to do with Albert Penn, who joined its service in 1864 and left amicably in 1875 to run on his own what had been Nicholas & Company’s Ooty branch, and George Higginbotham, Abel Higginbotham’s grandson. That the J P-Penn parting was friendly was reflected in what happened over the next thirty years; they not only did not compete with each other in their respective territories for assignments, but they also did not advertise in the newspapers of each other’s territories; in fact, they served as each other’s agents.
By the mid-1880s, however, Nicholas and Company had begun to face challenge from Wiele and Klein and had begun slowing down. It had much to do with JP and his wife Ellen, inseparable in work and business (could she have been the first woman photographer in Madras?) aging. She passed away in May 1895 and two months later he followed her to St. Andrew’s Cemetery. He died of a broken heart, it was said. And their favourite nephew George Higginbotham, who had in 1891 become a partner, took over the business.
Among the 1000 or so `Photographic Views’ of South India the firm offered for sale towards the end of the 19th Century were 68 on Madras, particularly noteworthy being the three-piece panoramas of `Madras from the Pier’, `Fort St George (and Esplanade) from the Lighthouse’, and `Black Town from the Lighthouse’. There are no better pictures of the Madras scene in the 1860s than these. One of them and a part of another are reproduced here.
****
