With the Rugby World Cup tournament well underway in Britain, it was most appropriate the other day that K.R.N. (Ravi) Menon began his recollection of his first visit to the Madras Gymkhana Club with a reference to rugby — the sport that, together with soccer (football), the Club had formally introduced to Madras, as Sriram V. in his introduction to their chat show at the Club had mentioned. Menon recalled that he first came to the Club in 1953 at the invitation of fellow-cricketer N. Kannaiyiram, who was turning out for the Club in a rugby game. Kannaiyiram had schooled at Trinity College, Kandy, the heart of Ceylon rugby — and the Gym had immediately roped him in. St. Thomas’ in Colombo, where Menon had gone to school, did not play rugby; cricket was its game, and the Gym did not play cricket. Menon joined it for tennis.
Menon’s cricket was played at the Madras Cricket Club, which had been founded in 1848, with Alexander Arbuthnot (Miscellany, January 1, 2007) giving the lead. Arbuthnot had arrived in Madras in 1842 as a 21-year-old Civilian and was to remain in the Presidency till 1874. So he had left Madras well before the founding of the Gymkhana Club in 1885 and cannot be credited with introducing either of the two footballs to the city. But in his memoir he writes, “I played football now and then, but it was rather too hot for that sort of fun, though I remember playing in a football match at Madras and kicking two goals, when I was a Member of Council.” He was a Member of the Madras Council from 1867 to 1872. And having gone to school at Rugby, where the game is said to have been born in the 1820s, Arbuthnot would undoubtedly have kicked a Rugby ball too in Madras around that time, a period when all who went to British public schools compulsorily participated in at least three sports.
But with the Gym not in existence in Arbuthnot’s day, the two footballs were just pastimes on the main sports ground in Madras at the time, The Island Grounds, and had to wait another day to be formally introduced to Madras. In the case of rugby, its revival in Madras is claimed by E.H.D. Sewell, another Civilian, who went on to become a well-known cricket and rugby correspondent in England. Writing in An Outdoor Wallah , one of his many books, Sewell says, “One of the liveliest matches I ever played in was after a monsoon day in Madras. It happened this way. Somebody wondered one evening in the long bar of the Madras Club why the devil nobody ever played Rugger in Madras. ‘Rugger?!’ cried the Man of Gloom…. “You’ll never again see Rugby in Madras; why, how the heck are you going to raise two teams, not to mention those necessary nuisances, an oval ball and a referee?’
“That did it.
“Next to me was ‘Beefy’ H.N.C. Campbell, who was in the Bedford side just before me. ‘We’re not standing for that, Fatty, are we? I know Frank Orman’s about somewhere, so….’ was the burden of his song in my ear.
“Where there are O.Bs. there’s Rugger, is an old maxim. So, in less than a fortnight from the non possumus {Author: If you went to a British public school you knew your Latin — and Greek too!}, we lined out on the Island, a full fifteen a side on a pitch which you could hardly see for puddles.”
This would have been in the 1890s; Sewell served in Madras from 1892 to 1898. In the event, the first trophy for football in Madras was instituted by the Club in 1895 and the first for rugby in 1900. The Madras Gymkhana Rugby Football Challenge Cup was competed for every October in the past. Indeed, Madras Rugger Week this month in times gone by was one of the highlights of the Madras social and sports calendar till the early 1960s. The trophy was competed for by two teams from the Gym, regimental teams, planters’ teams from the Anamallais and the High Range and occasionally from the Nilgiris and Wayanad. That was an era that was not talked about that evening.
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Indo-Saracenic poser?
Most of us who speak about Madras’s lead role in Indo-Saracenic architecture tend to say that while it is generally acknowledged that it was Major Charles (‘Mad’) Mant of the Bombay Engineers who pioneered the Indo-Saracenic style, it was Paul Benfield who had shown the way a hundred years earlier in Madras. To me, Benfield, who, it is surmised, designed and built Chepauk Palace in the late 18th Century, has long been the pioneer. And if it was not Benfield — as there is no record available — the Palace complex in Madras was certainly the first in this hybrid style that reached its culmination in Lutyens’ and Baker’s New Delhi.
I mention this today because recent reading, while not changing my mind on Benfield, has made me wonder whether Robert Chisholm should not be given greater credit than Mant for ‘creating’ the Indo-Saracenic form. Recent reading has made me re-look at the contribution of these pioneer architect-builders.
Mant, it would appear, did not build just one building in Kohlapur, the New Palace, as generally thought. He also built the market, the main hospital and a school, all inspired by the Old Palace, at the request of the maharajah. He also went on to design and build Mayo College in Ajmer. And was commissioned to design the palace in Baroda — the Laxmi Vilas Palace that Chisholm completed when Mant fell ill.
Now all that only adds to our knowledge of Mant; what makes a difference is the dates. Mant’s building spree in Kohlapur appears to have been between 1879 and 1889 and he had designed Mayo College’s magnificent main building in 1877, work on it being completed in 1888. Chisholm, on the other hand, had won that competition to design Presidency College, Madras, and the main building of the University of Madras, what became later known as Senate House , in 1864, more than a decade before Mant’s Mayo College and Kohlapur work! With his drawings not available today, it is not known whether he had introduced Indo-Saracenic elements in the design at the drawing stage itself or added the embellishments later; the main Presidency College building was built between 1867 and 1870 and Senate House between 1869 and 1873. And between 1865 and 1867 he had designed and built the PWD building and the additions to Chepauk Palace. Quite a decade of building several years before Mant. So, if we choose to ignore Benfield’s solitary effort – which we shouldn’t – do we call Chisholm the ‘Father of Indo-Saracenic’?
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Keeping the trains running
I’m not sure whether I missed it or the Railways did not have any major celebration marking the 160th year of what was known as the Central Workshop in Perambur. All the attention seems to have been on the 60th year of the Integral Coach Factory.
The Workshop was established by the Madras Railway Company around the same time as its first line was started from Royapuram to Wallajah Road. The biggest railway workshop in the South, it passed into the hands of the successor institution, the Madras & South Mahratta Railway in due course.
In 1932, the Central Workshop was divided in two. What became known as the Carriage Works remained in situ and what became the Loco Works was moved two kilometres down the road. The 22 acres of covered space of the Carriage Works is set in 129 acres and the four acres of covered area of the Loco Works is set midst 22 acres. The Carriage Works employs about 6,000 persons and the Loco Works about 2,500 persons. Another Central Workshop is the one in Golden Rock, Tiruchirappalli, which was established by the then South Indian Railway 90 years ago. It employs about 7,000 persons in its shops spread over 200 acres.
Carriage construction has passed on to a neighbour of the two Perambur workshops, the Integral Coach Factory, which today supplies the better part of the coaches needed by the Railway all India. ICF was established in 1953 as a collaboration with the Swiss Car & Elevator Manufacturing Corporation. Production started in 1955 and the first indigenous coach rolled out the next year. The first fully-finished coach was produced in 1961.
With the Buckingham & Carnatic Mills also in Perambur, the city’s northern suburb had, before the Mills closed down, the largest concentration of skilled labour in South India and was the birthplace of trade unionism in the country (Miscellany, September 28). This northern corner of Madras, together with the Amalgamations Group factories in neighbouring Sembiam, once contributed significantly to the economic growth of Madras. Today, few recognise the importance of ‘North Madras’ in the history of the city.
