There’s been a heap of mail after my item on the Swedish connection appeared in this column on October 3. Pointers in them lead to two items today.
The pointer from Ramineni Bhaskarendra Rao had Sweden having an Honorary Consul in Madras as early as at least 1888. In a listing of all the Consuls in Madras, the Asylum Press Almanac of that year shows them to have been mostly the pillars of the Madras mercantile establishment. And, Sweden was represented by Patrick Macfadyen, the chief executive of the A in the ABP of the Madras Presidency commercial world, Arbuthnot & Co. No prizes for guessing the B and P of that world, the Numbers 2 and 3.
Macfadyen, I’ve known well for years through all the reading I’ve done on that illustrious firm that came to a tragic end. But what I had not remembered was that date later this week, October 20, when 110 years ago he committed suicide in London, triggering the Arbuthnot Crash that, if it needs to be dated, was on October 22, when both the firm and its London representatives, P Macfadyen & Co — set up after Macfadyen’s retirement and return to England — declared insolvency.
Speculation with the money of thousands of small investors in the Arbuthnot Bank had led to this dire state of affairs. Those investments had been made in searching for gold in the Nilgiris and the Anamallais, in railway projects in South America, new gold fields in South Africa and plantation crops in the West Indies. Approving all Macfadyen’s investments in these ventures was Sir George Gough Arbuthnot, Chairman of the Company and second only to the Governor in esteem in the Presidency.
Of the crash I’ve written many times before (starting from Miscellany, January 19, 2004), but worthy of remembrance is that Sir George was the first Briton of stature to be sent to jail in the era of the Raj, the post-1857 period. Even if it was only for 18 months R.I. for “maintaining false accounts and diverting his credits to his personal accounts”.
… & the Swedish priest
The second pointer came from M. Solomon who wrote that in my account I had forgotten a Swedish missionary called Kiernander. Indeed I had forgotten the Rev. Dr. Johann Zachariah Kiernander (1711-1799), but that was because I associated him with Calcutta, his years in Cuddalore and association with Robert Clive having slipped my mind.
Kiernander was the first Swedish missionary to come to India and arrived in Cuddalore in August 1740, representing the London Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. It was there that he met Robert Clive and the others who had fled Fort St. George after the French occupation in 1746. After the French quit the Madras settlement of the English in 1749, and while Fort St. David in Cuddalore, the English bolthole from 1746 to 1749, remained the chief English settlement in India, Kiernander was handed possession of the Portuguese Roman Catholic Church there. On November 26, 1749, he solemnly dedicated the church as a Protestant place of worship and named it Christ Church.
In mid-1758, when the Comte de Lally took Cuddalore and Fort St. David, he ousted Kiernander and his wife with only the clothes on their backs. They took refuge in Danish Tranquebar till they could sail for Calcutta. With them went their infant son named Robert William, named after the two old Madras hands who welcomed them there, Governor Robert Clive and Councillor William Watts.
December 1758 saw the opening of Kiernander’s Mission School in Calcutta. In 1767, the foundation stone for the Mission Church of Calcutta was laid, and in December 1770 it was consecrated by Kiernander, the first English Church to have been built after the settlement’s churches had been razed in 1756 — one of those milestones on the road to Plassey.
Kiernander is my second bankruptcy story today. He was forced into this state in 1786 when the creditors came calling for money Robert Kiernander had borrowed and for which his father had signed as surety while he was going blind. Even the Church was sealed.
A well-wisher saved him and the church, but Kiernander’s days were nearly over. He wandered between Dutch Chinsurah and Danish Serampore in a state of near destitution but always preaching till he passed away in Calcutta. His memorials are Christ Church in Cuddalore and Mission Church in Calcutta.
Footnote: Several readers have written to tell me they were old students of the Church of Sweden Mission School in Pudukkottai. C.S. Rajan recalls a Swedish Principal there in the 1940s, Rev. Fr. An(k?)er, who was fluent in Tamil.
When the postman knocked …
* A reader called to say that the alleged double agent Graf I had referred to in this column on September 26, had lived off Harrington Road, on Gilchrist Avenue she thought. Any more information?
* Dharmalingam Venugopal of the Nilgiris Documentation Centre, whose eternal hero is John Sullivan, ‘The Father of the Nilgiris’, tells me that Sullivan’s son Henry Edward Sullivan was a third generation Collector of Coimbatore. That’s something I knew. But ,what I hadn’t heard of before was Venugopal’s claims that Henry Sullivan was responsible for alleviating conditions after the Madras Famine of 1840, and was the “originator” of what are now the Forest Department, Fisheries Department and Cooperative Department. I wonder whether he could shed more light on this, because I had always thought that the Forest Department was Hugh Cleghorn’s legacy, the Fisheries Department owed its origin to F.A. Nicholson, and the Cooperative Department was J.C. Ryan’s baby.
* My item on Subbiah Pillai last week had N.S. Parthasarathy recalling the time his uncle C.R. Srinivasan introduced new technology at the Swadesamitran around 1950 and the letters on the Linotype machines were different from those used for hand-composition in Tamil. I’m no expert on this, whether the consonant-vowel formations were different in mechanical and hand composing, and would be glad to hear from that printing doyen R. Narayanan about this, but it has been recorded that the type-style used in the Linotype machines were based on the style developed by P.R. Hunt of the American Mission Press in Madras when it printed Winslow’s dictionary in 1862.
* Railwayman G. Lewis writes to remind me that the first indigenous railway coach rolled out of the Integral Coach Factory, Perambur, 60 years ago this year. The factory, set up in business with the Swiss Car & Elevator Manufacturing Corporation in 1953, began production in 1955. The first fully furnished coach was produced in 1961.
