He’d passed out of Montfort (Yercaud) the year before me and I had forgotten all about him. I didn’t even remember this German Jew when writing a few paras on the Germans interned in Yercaud during World War II for a book on the hill station I worked on earlier this year.
Herbert Claus Friedmann was brought to mind the other day only by an item sent to me by Ullattil Manmadhan (Maddy to friends and the blogging fraternity), an electrical engineer settled in Raleigh, North Carolina, US. Maddy does historical research as a hobby and posts a wealth of little recalled Indian historical information on his blog site, often briefing me for this column before he puts up a long and detailed story on the site. This time, in his search for German nationals interned in India during World War II, he found Herbert Friedmann and 97 others in Yercaud.
Martin Friedmann, a medical doctor, his wife Lilli, and sons Herbert and Gerhart were German Jews from Mannheim who were allowed to flee Germany if they surrendered all their property to the Third Reich and had a visa for another country. As it happened, a friend of his, a Dr Gantz of Bombay University, had invited Dr. Martin to do some research with him on leprosy and had got a visa for him. Martin Friedmann arrived in Madras in December 1938 and decided to wait there for the rest of the family who arrived a month later. When they decided to stay on in Madras, the boys joined St Bede’s and Dr Martin set up practice. Then, in September 1939, war broke out and the Government of India decided to intern all German citizens. One of those internment destinations was Yercaud where 23 houses were taken over by the Government for the internees, who were allowed to live a family life and work during the day, if they could find employment. The internees were taken to Yercaud in August 1940, Dr. Martin set up practice and his sons joined Montfort. The family stayed on in Yercaud after the War where its head continued with research in tropical medicine. And the family became Indian citizens after Independence.
Herbert Friedmann went off to college in Madras — Christian and Madras Medical — where he got his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Madras in biochemistry. He then got a Fellowship to the University of Chicago to do his Ph.D. and there he remained for the rest of his life gaining a reputation for his “exceptional undergraduate teaching abilities”.
He also became a world authority on bacterial enzymes, the biosynthesis of vitamin B12 and the history of biology. And he wrote a book on ‘Herbert Friedmann’s 56 laws of teaching.’
Meanwhile, brother Gerhart, after bachelor’s and master’s degrees, also from the University of Madras, worked briefly at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in Bombay and then went on to get his Ph.D. and teach Physics in Canada, to where he had migrated with his mother.
All the Friedmanns have passed on, but I wonder how many in Madras and Yercaud remember this exceptional family that, after suffering in the Nazi pogroms in Germany, found the way to a new life in Madras Province.
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The South Indian typist
I’ve got (or am getting) honourable mention in a book by Siddharth Bhatia on typewriting in India, which seems to be a collection of articles on a near-extinct machine and its users. Vikram Doctor’s is ‘South India’s Relationship with Typing’ and in it he refers to me as “a great typewriting loyalist, using an Olivetti, only his third since he came to be faithful to the brand in 1954.” Also receiving honourable mention is T’Nagar’s Stenographers’ Guild (Miscellany, November 3, 2003), still going strong after its founding 80 years ago.
Talking of South Indian typists, Doctor quotes from the recollections of Prakash Tandon, the first Indian to be recruited as a manager by Unilever and later its first Indian Chairman. Describing his first day in office, Tandon recalls that “the clerks were all men: South Indians if they were stenographers, Christians and Parsis if they did general work.” Years later, when Tandon became Chairman and had to visit Delhi regularly during the Licence Raj days, that was the time, he recalls, that his resident manager, briefing him on arrival on the status of this file or that, would say, “Ramachandran, my personal assistant, has learned from Ramaswamy, the personal assistant of the Ministry’s Secretary, that according to the information he had received from Ramadurai, the personal assistant of the Secretary in another Ministry, that that was where the file was now taking rest.”
Doctor describes these steno-typists as “the early educated South Indians...(who) knew arcane scripts like shorthand, took down oracular statements as dictation, and used special tools of trade, with their typewriters as lovingly cleaned and tended as a shrine.” He then relates that the poet Nissim Ezekiel “painted a rather grim picture” of one of these typists in a poem titled “Occasion’: “A South Indian middle aged balding man / without a face or figure/ His name Ramanathan or Krishnaswamy”/ (who) “Works all day in a bank / then comes to me, / for another hundred rupees a month. / Three children, a mother to support/ invalid wife...” Ezekiel then describes this man’s daily routine: “Half an hour in a queue, / fifteen minutes in a bus, / forty minutes in a train, / a long walk from the station to a slum./ Poor fellow, what a life!/ He ought to be a smuggler / but doesn’t have the guts.”
That era of fifty years ago is now virtually forgotten except in some lawyers’ offices and midst gatherings of petition writers, but I know a number of former journalists now in their sunset years remembering being asked, when they were being interviewed for recruitment, whether they knew shorthand and typing. It was a vital qualification in many a newspaper office once upon a time. There must also be a number of now retired heads of large corporates who must be remembering their beginnings as steno-typists in those organisations. It was a fine training school for management.
The search for ancestors
Almost every week, I hear from someone with British roots and living in Britain or the White dominions asking for help in tracing 17th -19th Century ancestors.
And given the state of our records, there’s little I, or anyone else, can do to help. But occasionally there’s an answer out of the blue — even though the latest answer is to a query from someone searching for 20th Century information.
Remember the Stephen Spaulding who was searching for 14 Casa Major Road (Miscellany, December 5) where he had lived as an infant? Well, he did arrive in Madras and he did find the location. But though I’ve still to hear the details from him, he headed to look for it after I received a mail from Elizabeth Abraham. She wrote “14 Casa Major Road looked very familiar as my parents and siblings and I lived in 15 Casa Major Road from about 1954 to 1966. These two buildings looked the same and were at the corner of Pantheon Road and Casa Major Road. I think they were built by Mr Namberumal Chetty, but I don’t think they are there still.”
Will Russell Jones from New Zealand be as lucky with his query about someone from the past? He’s coming here to trace his great-great-great-grandmother who he believes is an Indian. On an earlier visit he had found the 1818 marriage certificate in St Mary’s in The Fort of his great- great-grandfather Theophilus Bolton Jones and his bride Anne Frances Swain.
Theophilus Bolton Jones retired as a Major in the Madras Army and went back to be a man of some local importance in Ireland and his line is well documented. It is his wife’s parents about whom Russell Jones wants to know more. She was the daughter of Captain Stephen Swain of the Madras Army and Frances Gommtie “who is thought to be of Indian birth”.
If she was Indian, Gommtie could have been Gomathi. Or was she a Komiti (Chetty)? Whatever be the case, if she was Indian and was even baptised (as ‘Frances’), would indicate the old church marriage registers did not record Indian surnames, so trying to find her ancestry would be well nigh impossible. As for Swain, he would at least be listed in the East India Company’s 18th Century records in the British Library or the Tamil Nadu Archives, wherever his particular records found a resting place.
And another person searching for a bit of his Madras past is the British High Commissioner to India, Sir Dominic Asquith, who was in Madras recently to take in the Test match. When I met him he told me his brother would be coming out to Madras, and he would join him, to trace an ancestor, an 18th Century East India Company employee in Madras. I wish them luck. Meanwhile, I wonder who’s going to be next.
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Here’s wishing all my reader a very happy New Year during which I look forward to them keeping the postman busier.
