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Where Capper House stood
A rare picture (1919/20) of Capper House, Pentland House and Stone House when they could be seen from the Marina
I’m delighted to hear that Queen Mary’s College, the first women’s college in the city and one of the oldest in the country, is to get much-needed space shortly. The space, for which groundbreaking was done recently, will be on the site of the College’s first home, alas, pulled down a few years ago without a word of warning or protest.
Old Capper House deserved better. It was the first private residence on the Marina. It was built by Col. Francis Capper, a soldier and a geographer. Aptly, Queen Mary’s College still considers Geography as one of its specialties, thanks to Dr. A.R. Irawathy, long its Professor of Geography and later its Principal.
Capper House, before it was pulled down
When the Colonel left India, he sold the property and Capper House was developed as the only hotel on the Marina. When the hotel ran into hard times, Government rented it in July 1914 to serve and house the 37 girls who had enrolled at that time as the first students of the Madras College for Women. The College was renamed Queen Mary’s in 1917. Capper House was to serve till a few years ago as QMC’s main block, but with little attention paid to its maintenance, a part of it collapsed some years ago. Instead of attending to the collapsed portion and restoring the historic building, Capper House was evacuated – and pulled down silently and swiftly behind the screen of trees that hides the campus from public gaze.
Get behind those trees and what you will find are three classical style buildings deriving from the original Capper House design. They are Pentland House, built in 1915, Stone House in 1918 and Jeypore House in 1921, all raised through the determined campaigning by Miss de lay Hey, Principal from the founding till 1936, with Governor Lord Pentland (1912-1919). In the 1920s, two garden houses, belonging to two High Court Justices and which had been built south of Capper House – one of them was Sir S. Subramania Iyer’s Beach House – were acquired, giving the College a campus that stretches from Edward Elliot’s Road, now Dr. S. Radhakrishnan Salai, to Lady Willingdon Teachers’ Training College established in 1922-23 and since 1988 known as the Lady Willingdon Institute of Advanced Study in Education.
During the recent groundbreaking ceremony it was promised that the new four-storey block would be in sympathy with the existing buildings. Replicating Capper House on the ground floor and developing the next three floors in Classical fashion might not be a bad idea to remember QMC’s first building. My only concern is that the last time I heard a promise of this kind was by a senior PWD engineer charged with pulling down Bentinck’s Building and raising a new building in its place. It would echo Bentinck’s Building, he had promised. The monstrosity that came up was what is now the Collectorate. I hope that won’t happen on the QMC campus.
S. MUTHIAH
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