A MORNING STAR:

Remembering “Small of Richmond”

Some recollections of Walter Joseph Tombleson Small (1883-1978), Principal of Richmond College, Galle, Sri Lanka from 1906 to 1922 (with historical endnotes)

by

Thomas Joseph Simpson, M.A. (Cantab.), LL.B., Member of the Bar of British Columbia, Canada, and formerly Voluntary Service Overseas (V.S.O.) teacher at Richmond College, Galle, 1973-4

Duncan, Vancouver Island, B.C., September 2001

_______________________________________________

This monograph is dedicated to my long-time friend, N. K. Rubasinghe of Galle Fort, Sri Lanka, and to the affectionate memory of another friend who is much missed, the late Albert Panditharatne, formerly of H.M. Customs, Ceylon and Government Agent, Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka. Richmondites both.

Contents

Introduction

A Morning Star: Remembering “Small of Richmond”

Epilogue (1): “Hunger is Agony” (D. T. Devendra).

Epilogue (2): Richmond in 1916 (D. T. Devendra)

Some Notes on Sources

Endnotes

Introduction

Just over a year ago, acting on a sudden impulse, I began the task of editing and transferring the contents of my twenty-seven year old hand-written Sri Lanka journal onto my computer hard drive. I intended then (and still intend) to annotate the journal, thus transcribed, with historical and anecdotal material culled from my desultory reading of various books and articles relating to Sri Lanka. In the course of these part-time labours, I became distracted by another project – to put together a monograph about my own and other people’s personal recollections of a remarkable human being who had presided over Richmond College, Galle as Principal from 1906 until 1922. Like Topsy, this project grew and grew as the original work became supplemented by a miscellany of background annotations. What was supposed to be a ten page essay has ended up as a more than one hundred page book! Hopefully, the quality of the end product has not declined in inverse proportion to the quantity.

Walter Joseph Tombleson Small (who often signed his name as Joe Small) died in 1978, but for myself and many others who knew him in varying degrees and at various stages of his long and productive life, his memory remains ever fresh. Not only was he a person of outstanding intellect, compassion and humanity, but he lived through almost a century of probably the most profound change that human society, both East and West, has ever experienced. He was a child when the British Empire began its final expansionist phase into Africa, and he outlived by many years the final eclipse of that Empire. When he was born, old men still living could recall fighting in the Napoleonic Wars; when he died in the 96^th year of his life, the world had endured two global conflicts of unparalleled destructiveness.

At the time of writing, ethnic and religious conflict has become an ever-increasing scourge for many parts of the world, not least Joseph Small’s beloved Sri Lanka and my own homeland of Northern Ireland. Over 60,000 lives have been lost in almost two decades of civil war in Sri Lanka. As I type these words, a horrendous terrorist attack has just destroyed the World Trade Center and unknown thousands of lives in New York City. Now more than ever, the world needs individuals like Joseph Small, of whom it was written soon after his passing that as a result of his influence on his young pupils, “Buddhists became better Buddhists and Christians awoke to the full glory of [his] example and precepts”. Whatever the shortcomings and deficiencies of the imperial system that brought him to colonial-era Ceylon – and they were many – I hope that readers will find it in their hearts to agree with the great Sri Lankan educator and nationalist, Patrick de Silva Kuleratne, who was himself a pupil under Small of Richmond, that to be in touch for some time with such a good person, is indeed an education in itself.

Joe Simpson,

Vancouver Island,

B.C., Canada.

September 14, 2001.

A Morning Star: Remembering “Small of Richmond”

“…the effect of [his] being on those around [him] was incalculably diffusive, for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

- George Eliot, Middlemarch

“[H]e had that quality which the Arabs describe as baraka. In the most improbable circumstances he had the power of enhancing life and making it appear better than it was before. His mere presence seems to have conferred a blessing on everyone who met him…”

- Alan Moorehead, writing in The White Nile about the Scottish missionary explorer, David Livingstone (1813-1873)

In Those Long Afternoons, his hauntingly evocative reminiscences of his childhood in colonial Ceylon during the early years of the 20^th Century, Professor E.F.C. (“Lyn”) Ludowyk[i] gives us this lyrical description of his high school alma mater, Richmond College: “Richmond was an expanse of billowing trees, a hillside strewn with rocks and coconut palms. Paths ran down to villages set among groves and houses overlooking the railway line and roads leading to the hinterland of Galle…From the well in the hollow beside the drive to the playground on top of the hill, with the glitter of the sea on sunny days and northward the hills of Hiniduma, the scene recalled a set piece from a pastoral.”

It was in this beautiful setting in September 1973 that I had my first encounter with the man, the living legend whom almost 120 years after his birth even those who never met him still refer to as “Small of Richmond”. I remember the moment so clearly. It was a fairly typical morning for the south coast at that time of year, already hot and rather humid. I was a newly-arrived Cambridge University graduate, a neophyte teacher from a British-based non-government organization called Voluntary Service Overseas (VSO) that still sends teachers, engineers and the like to work in Sri Lanka. I had heard about Reverend Small from my VSO predecessor, another Northern Irishman who had served at Richmond a few years before. I remember feeling wonderment on learning that not only he had been Principal far back in 1906, but also because at the age of 90 he still resided at the School.

Back to the moment: I was chatting with some students outside my hostel room, I can even remember the view that morning looking across the tops of the coconut trees towards the hazy blue of the Indian Ocean, when a tall, fairly erect but obviously venerable European gentleman dressed immaculately in white canvas hat, white long-sleeved shirt and white trousers[ii] appeared in the distance, striding towards us across the playing field from the direction of the Principal’s bungalow. “Reverend Small, I presume?” I queried with a nervous attempt at humour as he drew near. “Indeed it is I, and you must be Mr. Simpson?” he replied with a faint glimmer of a smile. He then went on to explain that he was just on his way down to the post office to buy some stamps, and would I like him to bring some back for me? His kindliness and innate modesty were immediately obvious, and the impression left on me by that brief moment in time was such that the passing years have not dimmed in the slightest my memory of that first meeting on Richmond Hill.

Walter Joseph Tombleson Small was born into a Methodist family in late Victorian Boston, Lincolnshire[iii] on July 4, 1883. An outstanding student, at the age of 16 he came top in the United Kingdom in the Senior Oxford Local Examination. In October 1901 at the age of 18 he went up to Gonville & Caius College, Cambridge on an Open Scholarship and in due course took First Class Honours in the Mathematics Tripos, being bracketed 7^th Wrangler[iv]. Not content to rest on his Cambridge laurels, Small went on to achieve First Class Honours in Theology, winning the University’s Mason Prize for Hebrew, and then in short order earned a London University Bachelor of Science degree – all by the age of 23!

With this kind of academic record, Joseph Small would have been a “natural” for the “heaven-born” [1] – the Indian Civil Service (ICS). But Small had determined to enter the Methodist Ministry. Then Fate intervened while he was visiting Germany with his sister in 1906, his last year at Cambridge, during the same Edwardian summer that he became engaged to a young woman named Thekla Hermine Guenther: he received a surprise “call” from the Wesleyan Missionary Society[v] to come out to Ceylon to replace Principal J. H. Darrell at Richmond College, who tragically had just died in an outbreak of typhoid[vi] at the school’s boarding hostel. Thus began Small’s career as an educational missionary, one that led to him being described by a distinguished former pupil long afterwards as “one of the outstanding figures in the field of education in Sri Lanka in the early years of this century…[who]…came out as a simple missionary…[and]…devoted himself to the teaching and training of boys in Sri Lanka, whom he learned to love, and to whom he gave of his best”.

Rev. Arthur Stanley Beaty taught at Richmond for a few months in 1906, when the School was still in a state of shock after Principal Darrell’s death in July of that year.[vii] He acted as temporary Headmaster during September and October of that year, at a time of hiatus when Rev. A. S. Bishop was acting Principal and five of the College’s teaching staff were on sick leave. Looking back as Chairman of the Methodist Church in South Ceylon thirty years later, however, Rev. Beaty recalled one humorous episode at the School that preceded the new Principal’s arrival. Having just taken up his new posting, Beaty spotted on a notice board two illustrated press clippings about the impending arrivals of himself and Small. The contents were genuine enough, but in the place of photographs of two men still in their twenties, some jokester had substituted two portraits of venerable grandfathers: Joseph Small appeared as an ancient greybeard, and Stanley Beaty as a bald-headed veteran!

Seventy years on, P. de S. Kuleratne still remembered vividly the day in November 1906 that Reverend Small made his first public appearance at the School. The boys were all gathered expectantly in the Hall, looking up the Hill for their first sight of the new Principal. Suddenly a hush fell on the assembly: “[There appeared a] tall young man in cap and gown, bending down every now and then picking up something from the road as he came down the hill. Great was our amusement when we found out that he had been picking up the pieces of paper which we had probably thrown away as we came down to school from the Boarding House. No less was our surprise when we found out how young he was…” (Perhaps the unknown notice board jokester had succeeded too well)! Kuleratne remembered not only that his new Principal was “tall” and “well built”, but also that he was “not so awe-inspiring as Principal Darrell”![viii]

In later years Lyn Ludowyk fondly recalled Reverend Small as being “tall with a height which gave him a commanding presence”, an “Olympian personage” about whom “many legends clung”, a man of “distinction in maths and prowess in cricket”. And yet what Ludowyk seemed to remember above all 70 years after their first meeting as new pupil and Principal, was his new Principal’s “essential kindliness”. Another Old Boy remembered Small as kindly but a “strict disciplinarian”. A College incident in 1916 reveals this aspect of his character. Though the Richmond Cricket Team was a strong one, Rev. Small cancelled all the matches for the term, owing to factions in the Games Club election. He never shrank from unpopular decisions that he knew were right. Small also stuck to the principle that no boy should receive a scholarship to Richmond unless he was both poor and bright, for to make a dull boy a free pupil was no kindness.[ix]

S. F. de Silva, who later became Director of Education for Ceylon, had this to say about his very first day at Richmond in 1911: “[Rev. Small said] ‘Come up here, I want to have a good look at you.’ As I stood before him, his kindly face banished all my fears, and I saw the face of a friend, and a good friend he has been to me all of my days.” A contemporary at Richmond recalled with awe that Rev. Small, who often rode a push bicycle, one day fell and cut his knees badly while in town collecting the teachers’ salary monies from the bank, but insisted nonetheless on coming to work the next morning in a half bullock cart[x]. With the clear eye of a child, he noticed how the Principal kept knots in his pocket watch chain as reminders and made notes of “things to do” on letters from his German fiancée.

I have a photograph taken of Reverend Small, in his 91^st year, seated beside the Richmond College Principal and other local dignitaries at the Galle Esplanade cricket ground in March 1974. Small looks thin and somewhat frail, a far cry from the vigorous young man of almost seventy years earlier who was described by one of his pupils as able to “run and jump with the best of our athletes”. This annual event had a special significance for Joseph Small, for together with Principal F. L. Woodward[xi] at Mahinda College, Galle he had long before ensured the survival of the tradition of the “Big Match” between the two premier educational institutions in southern Ceylon, a tradition begun by Woodward and Darrell in 1905.

An old photograph survives of the two teams together at the time of the third “Big Match” in 1907, with Woodward and Small as joint umpires[xii]. The Methodist Joseph Small had recently arrived in Ceylon, while the Theosophist Frank Woodward was already well on his way to becoming a legendary figure in the South. By all reports, it was a most exciting match that year. Reverend Small evidently took his umpiring duties seriously, even racing after the bowler (Mahinda’s skipper, George Weeratunga), when the latter ran towards the boundary line to try to save the situation after the Richmond batsman had sent the ball past him, as the two Mahinda outfielders were quite far apart. Roar after delighted roar surely must have gone up from the excited crowd of onlookers![xiii] How fitting then that in Richmond’s centennial year of 1976, at the suggestion of Dr. W. Dahanayake, the Richmond O.B.A. donated the “Woodward-Small Shield” for a 50-over tournament between cricketing schools throughout the Southern Province. No mean cricketer himself, Small made a century the following year (1908) when he played for the newly-formed Richmond Masters’ Club[xiv] against the Galle C.C., at the time a first class fixture. In 1910 Small scored 46 in the match where the Masters’ Club lowered the colours of the Colombo Club, at the time the premier club in Ceylon. And yet this is the same man who wrote to me in 1975 modestly to deny a rumour that he had once gained a Cambridge cricketing “Blue”: not only was this “far from the truth” but he went out of his way in his letter to point out that he did not even get his College colours, although he confessed to having played “occasionally” for the Gonville & Gaius College First Eleven cricket team.

The 1974 “Big Match” had its moments, too. As I recall, the match itself was a fairly so-so affair, apart from a pulse-quickening finale when Richmond snatched a draw from the jaws of defeat. The sheer liveliness of the Galle crowd, however, more than compensated for the dearth of exciting play. The second day of the Big Match was heralded by a display of drunken rowdiness from sections of the crowd, notably some of the younger “Old Boys” on both sides. At one stage the police gave chase to a cheerfully intoxicated mob that had invaded the pitch, meantime another equally inebriated group tagging along behind the officers mimicked their every movement, to the raucous amusement of the appreciative spectators! While this pantomime played itself out, I noticed Rev. Small calmly surveying the scene, his serene features betraying nothing of his thoughts. Doubtless he had seen it all before![xv]

Of course, life at Richmond was not all sporting activities. Apart from carrying on with the work of Darrell in taking the School to new academic heights, assisted by an extremely able teaching staff consisting of the like of E. F. C. Ludowyk Snr., father of the more famous “Lyn”, Joseph Small successfully steered the School through some extremely difficult and indeed hazardous times in the second decade of the 20^th century. During those highly eventful years Richmond experienced rigours such as the Great War, the upsurge of nascent Ceylonese nationalism, the trauma of the 1915 Riots and the notorious “One Hundred Days” period of martial law, the more intimate tragedy of the drownings at Closenberg Bay in September 1915, and the global influenza epidemic of 1918.[xvi]

In 1910, Joseph Small’s personal life took on new meaning, for that was the happy year that saw the arrival in Ceylon of his German fiancée, Miss Thekla Guenther, a Lutheran pastor’s daughter and friend of his sister whom he had become engaged to during the very same summer of 1906 that he had received the call from Richmond. I still have a clear memory from 1974 of Rev. Small describing to me that golden summer of his life: “It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life,” he reflected, “to be a young man falling in love.” The marriage that took place in August 1910 would last for forty years until Thekla Small died in 1950.

Thekla Small was a trained teacher who started the Richmond kindergarten and acted as matron of the recently rebuilt school hostel until a full-time matron was appointed in 1916. Hanover House at Richmond Hostel was named in her honour. Many a Richmondite from that era had cause long after to remember with gratitude her unceasing care of sick hostel boarders, particularly during the dreadful 1918 influenza epidemic, to the extent of moving the worst cases into the Principal’s bungalow so as to be under her personal care. I heard reports that the Smalls (who had no children of their own) either adopted or fostered a Sinhalese boy, whom they named John Brown and who died in Kandy some time in the 1960s, but I have no direct knowledge of this. Reverend Small once told me that he had travelled to Colombo to vouch in person to the Colonial Governor[xvii] for the “good behaviour” of his German-national wife after their return to Ceylon from a year’s furlough in 1915. Due no doubt in large part to their combined standing in the local community, Thekla Small was perhaps the only “enemy alien” in Ceylon not to be interned for the duration of the conflict. Great must have been the anxiety of the Smalls throughout the war years in Ceylon, particularly in light of the 1914 “Emden scare” when wild rumours about enemy “secret agents” being in league with that legendary German battleship resulted in the unwarranted arrest and imprisonment of Engelbrecht, the one-time Boer POW who by then was a game warden at Yala.[xviii] The strain of those war years may well have taken their toll on Thekla Small, and indeed concern about her health was cited by Reverend Small as the reason for his reluctantly-made decision to leave Galle in 1922.[xix]

The “1915 Riots” and the subsequent “One Hundred Days” of martial law, coinciding with the nascent nationalism that was making its presence felt at the College as elsewhere in the island colony, presented yet another challenge to the young Principal at Richmond. It was well said of Small, that he knew “no barrier of race or colour – even the simple-minded could make a friend of him”.[xx] Long afterwards, it was remembered how he had secretly aided people financially in the dark days of the communal riots and their harsh aftermath, the wartime imported rice shortages, and the 1918 global influenza epidemic. The 1915 crisis began with street confrontations between Moslems (mainly recently-arrived “Indian” Moors as distinct from the long-established “Ceylon” Moors) and Sinhalese Buddhists around Kurunegala and Kandy, and escalated due in large part to the prevailing official paranoia about German intrigue – even to the extent of believing that enemy spies disguised as Buddhist monks were conspiring to weaken the British Raj! (This was a foretaste of equally wild rumours during the Second World War about Nazi paratroopers invading England cunningly disguised as Roman Catholic nuns)! Even in the British Parliament a senior Government Minister declared that “it was quite possible that German intrigue was at the bottom of the rising in Ceylon”. In the confusion the Colonial government panicked and declared Martial Law over all of central and south-western Ceylon in late May 1915. Over sixty Ceylonese, many of them nationalists, were found guilty of “treason” during the next three months and sentenced to death. Punjabi regiments newly-arrived from India cracked down harshly on the local populace – in 1974, I met an old fisherman in Matara who spoke with obvious emotion about having witnessed the brutal crowd-control tactics of the Punjabi soldiers in that town. Many British planters joined the local militia, were given uniforms and military titles, and let loose on the civilian populace. Buddhist clergy and nationalist leaders were imprisoned for no good reason. Such knee-jerk repression of course begat more communal conflict: Ludowyk’s memoirs describe Moorish shops broken into around Galle, a mosque at Hirumbura burnt to the ground, Punjabi soldiers camped on the Galle Fort ramparts, and “a good deal of defiant talk”.[xxi] As the Richmond College 1994 Souvenir put it: “Rev. Small’s calm nature and balanced temperament were of much value in those troubled times”.

In the aftermath of the 1915 upheavals, nationalism in Ceylon received a severe, albeit temporary, setback. The “ruling caste” of British administrators blocked further reforms, and native Ceylonese appointments to the higher government posts failed to materialize. In this atmosphere of combined jingoism and paranoia, and recognizing full well the sensitive issue of his wife’s German birth, Small’s moral courage was such that he quietly but positively supported the nationalist movement at Richmond College during the war years and beyond. One of his great spiritual heroes was the young Ceylonese, Lionel Mendis. Mendis, a brilliantly-gifted former Richmond pupil and Hostel Master born only three years after Small, tragically had been forced to abandon his career as a Methodist minister when he was diagnosed with leprosy in 1910. In the ensuing years until his death from the disease in 1919, Mendis wrote extensively on the twin themes of Christianity and Nationalism. Writing about Lionel Mendis many years later, in the early 1950s, Joseph Small made a touchingly revealing comment: “It was during Lionel’s illness that our friendship ripened, and I came to look up to him as one who had outgrown me in spiritual stature…I count his friendship one of the greatest privileges of my life, and it has been one of the strongest bonds that has bound me to Ceylon and her people.”[xxii]

In 1914, the year before the Riots, the National Association was revived at Richmond, a tribute to the liberality in thinking of Joseph Small, who accepted the Association’s Presidency. (The Smalls were away in England on furlough for a year from April 1914, during which time Rev. P. T. Cash of Wesley College, Colombo took over as Acting Principal and presided over the National Association). This was a significant deviation from the political conservatism of Small’s predecessors at Richmond. Unlike many, if not most, Europeans in Ceylon at this time, Joseph Small actually gave a place to indigenous culture, religion and nationalism. The nationalist spirit had always found fertile ground at Richmond. In fact, an earlier National Association had been formed with Rev. Small’s blessing in 1908, but after an energetic first two years had become inactive as the key members had completed their time at Richmond and had left Galle. Among the revived Association’s stated objectives were: “to foster patriotism, to develop national ideals and to influence thought in every direction for the uplifting of the Ceylonese as a nation.” At the time Richmond College was the only school in Ceylon, of any denomination, with a National Association to provide a forum for pupils, staff and old boys to debate political issues. Little wonder then that future pioneer Buddhist educationists and nationalists like P. de. S. Kuleratne, L. H. Mettananda, S. F. de Silva and T. U. de Silva had their initial grounding in the Richmond National Association. This was a time of growing nationalism in both Ceylon and India, in the wake of the Liberal Party victory in the 1906 elections in Britain, the Morley-Minto reforms in India, and local resentment of the proconsular style and arch-conservatism of Governor McCallum[xxiii] who presided over the Crown Colony from 1907-13. McCallum’s archaic 19^th century paternalistic view was that only “senior and experienced [i.e. British!] civil servants” could represent the interests of Ceylon’s people in the strictly-advisory Legislative Council. * Nevertheless in 1910 the Colonial Office in London conceded a modicum of elective representation to the educated, English-speaking Ceylonese elite. This gathering momentum towards some form of democracy received a serious setback due to the 1915 Riots. It is not difficult therefore, even at this distance in time, to imagine the excitement and interest that the Association must have generated throughout much of the island. Eminent Ceylonese figures addressed the public at Association meetings held in Galle, such as Arthur Alwis (who spoke on “Political Agitation”) and Armand de Souza, Editor of the “Ceylon Morning Leader”, established in 1907 by a group of Sinhalese merchants to challenge the dominance of Sir Hector van Cuylenburg’s “Ceylon Independent”, the Burgher-owned newspaper established in the later1880s.[xxiv]

As part of the movement to “uplift the Ceylonese as a nation”, Richmond staff and pupils had formed in 1914 a “Servants of Lanka” League along the lines of Gokhale’s “Servants of India”. In 1915, members spent a week in a remote village called Uyangoda, some 12 miles inland from Matara, educating and serving the local people in furtherance of their mission to provide “practical service for the uplift of backward communities”.[xxv] The crowning achievement of the Richmond National Association, however, was the widely-publicized “Legislative Council of 1918”. Its purpose was to demonstrate in a practical way to the powers-that-be the sort of future Legislative Council ideally envisaged for 1918 by the organizers – one that had elected representatives, not merely one elected member with the rest being government appointees. The “Council”, which met before a capacity crowd in the Richmond College Hall on November 21, 1915, soon after the end of Martial Law, consisted of 31 members, 18 being elected “unofficials”, representing all nine provinces, planting and commercial interests, while nominated members safeguarded the interests of various unrepresented interests. A faded old black and white photograph from that time evocatively shows these young men, among them Sinhalese, Moslem and Burghers, standing together in two rows, radiating youthful optimism and idealism. Patrons for the 1915 event included Principal F. L. Woodward of Mahinda College and the well-known Galle Burgher lawyer, C. E. de Vos. Diplomatically, but also in keeping with the spirit of the times, proceeds went to the Prince of Wales’ War Fund. This most exciting event, which by popular demand had to be re-staged in Galle Fort with the Government Agent and the District Judge as additional Patrons, attracted wide interest in Ceylon and - as the original founder of the National Association and one of the leading participants, the young Richmond teacher (and former student at the school) J. Vincent Mendis, wrote many years later – it “stirred the political conscience of the country”. The constitution of the “1918 Legislative Council” actually foreshadowed the reforms to the real-life Legislative Council that followed soon afterwards in 1920.

One of the abiding intellectual interests of Joseph Small’s life, no doubt deriving partly from his outstanding mathematical ability, was astronomy. I well remember those clear, star-lit nights on Richmond Hill when he took me on tours of the galaxy with the aid of his impressive, German-made brass telescope on its tall tripod. On one such occasion he remarked rather wistfully that he wondered if he would make it past his 100^th birthday to see Halley’s Comet return in the mid-1980s. He told me once of his memory of standing with his new bride in 1910 on the very spot that we stood on that night, watching Halley’s Comet brighten up the night sky so that even a newspaper could be read. After the disappointing performance in the early 1970s of the much-heralded Comet Kohoutek, Small is said to have commented with deliciously ironic understatement that there had been “some disintegration between the promise and the fulfillment”! In his letters to me written in the few years between my leaving Richmond and his death, he frequently remarks on his astronomical observations, such as the time in January, 1975 that he wrote (in his 92^nd year): “I have had my telescope out this evening, and had a look at the rings of Saturn, the moons of Jupiter, and the great nebulae of Orion and Andromeda.”[xxvi]

Some years after Joseph Small passed away in 1978, my wife and I went up over London with a group of others in a specially chartered plane to view Halley’s Comet on its next visit to Earth’s skies in 1985. On that occasion unfortunately the comet was barely visible, nothing like as dramatic as in 1910. The airline company provided us each with a glass of champagne to celebrate the occasion, and I recall raising my glass to the distant stars beyond the fuselage porthole, in silent but heartfelt tribute to Joseph Small.[xxvii] After I left Sri Lanka in 1974, I heard that Small had donated his brass telescope to the Galle Astronomical Association, a small group of friends who used to meet in Cyril Abeyawardene’s house in Galle Fort under the patronage of Reverend Small. On one occasion, members viewed slides loaned to Mr. Small by the famous Arthur C. Clarke. Few of the Association members still survive, and I have no idea of what became of the German brass telescope, although I like to think that from time to time some curious souls still watch the night skies above Galle through that mighty instrument.*

(Many years after my 1974 conversation with Reverend Small about Halley’s Comet in 1910, I came across two other accounts by people who saw it in southern Ceylon at about the same time. In one account, Leonard Woolf[xxviii], in his autobiography, tells vividly of how he and a local Muhandiram (headman) witnessed it from a sandy headland further along the south coast at Hambantota: “The head of the comet was just above the horizon, the tail flamed up the sky until the end of it was almost above our heads. The stars blazed with a brilliance which they have only on a clear, still, black night in the southern hemisphere. And at our feet the comet and the stars blazed reflected in the smooth, velvety, black sea.” In the other account, “Lyn” Ludowyk recalled being taken as a child by his grandmother to view the comet from the verandah of a house on Pedlar Street, in Galle Fort. Ludowyk remembered the crowds in the streets and that the comet “blazed like a torch in a dark vault”. But the youngster’s main recollection of that evening was of an elderly, bald-headed man who sat on the verandah arguing continuously with a foul-mouthed parrot)! [2]

In September 1915, just after the dark period of martial law following the Moslem-Sinhalese riots, a different kind of tragedy occurred at Closenberg Bay, Galle harbour that through no fault of his own was to leave its mark on Joseph Small for the rest of his life. Along with some other masters, the Principal for some time had been taking groups of older Richmond boys for Saturday morning swimming sessions at Closenberg, in a part of the harbour that is now built-up but was then secluded and natural, and considered safe for bathing. On the day in question, September 18, 1915, an abnormal current carried some of the non-swimmers out of their depth, and one master (F.R.A.S. Amarasekara, also the new Richmond Scoutmaster) and two boys drowned.[xxix] The swimming entry in the 1976 Richmond Souvenir, which I have reason to believe was written largely by Small himself, refers to the tragedy but modestly makes no mention of his own heroism that day, recalled long afterwards by local people, in swimming out into the bay to rescue several of the drowning bathers. I have a 1975 letter from the late Albert Panditharatne[xxx], then the Government Agent in Nuwara Eliya and later (after his 1977 retirement) an active member of the Galle Astronomical Association. In that letter, Albert makes the following comment: “In going through the [Richmond centenary] magazine, you will find one S.L.B. Herath donating a page in memory of his father P.B. Herath. Now, this S.L.B. Herath is the M.P. for Hiriyala – one of the few U.N.P. members of parliament – and it is Rev. Small who rescued his father from drowning at Closenberg.” Almost sixty years later Joseph Small told me the story of Closenberg, adding quietly that the incident had come as “a terrible blow”. It was apparent that the pain had remained with him for life. What a contrast this experience must have been, compared with the happy day in 1889 during the Richmond College swimming gala at Mahamodera, when another youthful Principal (Rev. A. Triggs) quietly slipped away to get married at the Church on Richmond Hill!

On a much happier note, Principal Small played a significant role in the founding of the Richmond Scout Troop, after F. G. Stevens, the initiator of Ceylon Scouting, gave a rousing talk at the School. I mentioned earlier the sad fate of F.R.A.S. Amarasekara, the young Richmond teacher who was the School’s first Scoutmaster. In October 1915 the Richmond Troop was registered at London HQ as the 2^nd Galle Troop (Mahinda Troop was the 1^st). In December 1915 Lord Baden-Powell wrote a personal congratulatory letter to Richmond, and by the end of the following year the School had 7 King’s Scouts. In 1917, “Lyn” Ludowyk at age 11 became the youngest King’s Scout in the British Empire. Richmond Scout leaders helped to set up scouting in Jaffna, and in 1917 the Richmond Scoutmaster left for India to help establish the movement there, at the invitation of the Madras Government, and was replaced by Ludowyk senior. By then, Richmond had no less than 37 King’s Scouts! In 1918, the Richmond Scouts came a close second in the Empire Troop Competition for the King’s Flag. Years later, in 1947, the Richmond Troop would win the coveted Merit Flag for the best troop in Ceylon.

By the time that Joseph Small left for Peradeniya in 1922, Richmond College’s place in the social and economic life of the country was assured. In his time the School provided the island nation with many of her finest leaders as the century progressed. For instance, C. W. W. Kannangara became independent Ceylon’s first Minister of Education and introduced the Free Education Scheme, and E. F. C. Ludowyk (Jnr.), whose contribution to literary scholarship and drama was unsurpassed in his time, became the first Ceylonese Dean of the University Arts Faculty. Reverend Small had introduced commerce as a subject in 1912, preparing boys for the Chamber of Commerce Examinations, and by the time he left Richmond was one of the foremost commerce teaching institutions on the Island. Inspired no doubt by the brilliance of his teacher, P. de S. Kuleratne won the University Mathematics Scholarship and went on to become a distinguished mathematician and for twenty five years Principal of Ananda College. J. H. F. Jayasuriya won the Jeeju-Boy Scholarship to the Medical College. In 1918 under the leadership of “Major” F. H. de S. Adhihetty, the Richmond Senior Cadets carried off the All-Ceylon Shooting Cup at Diyatalawa. The list of achievements runs on and on. Aptly was it said by a former pupil long afterwards that the Principal “walked among us, radiating an influence for good on all who came to him”.

After leaving Richmond in 1922, Joseph Small spent the next four years at the Methodist Church’s Peradeniya Training Colony as Vice Principal, and then returned briefly to Britain where he was a circuit minister for two years in Cardiff, Wales. The East called him back in 1928, this time for three years as a member of the teaching staff at the United Theological College in Bangalore, India[xxxi]. From 1931 to 1942 he was a circuit minister in England, and then in retirement a supernumerary minister at Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire until 1950, the year that his beloved Thekla died. After three years as Chaplain of the Methodist International House in London Joseph Small, by now in his 70^th year, returned to Ceylon permanently in 1953, initially as Warden of the Peradeniya Training Colony until it became a government-controlled institution, and then as minister at Nuwara Eliya’s Union Church. Victor Melder, well known to many “Lankaphiles” for his outstanding private library of Sri Lankan books in Melbourne, Australia, was a student at Peradeniya at the time, and remembers Reverend Small from those days as a dignified and courteous figure who never failed to return a greeting from a passing stranger. It was around this time that Small applied his outstanding scholarly and linguistic gifts to compile the Topical Sinhalese Concordance of the Bible and to act as chief editor of The History of Methodism in Ceylon.

Finally, by now in his early 80s, Joseph Small “came home” to Richmond Hill in 1965 as a permanent guest of the College. His residence for most of the final years of his life consisted of a simple, sparsely furnished single-room annex of the same bungalow atop Richmond Hill where as Principal he had resided with his dear wife so many years before. From there he continued quietly to minister to the sick and needy among his former pupils and their families, to whom he would unostentatiously provide both spiritual and practical help as the need arose, to visit and correspond tirelessly with friends both old and new, to study German, Hebrew and Sinhalese literature, to keep up with global events by means of his venerable wood-encased “wireless” that seemed permanently to be tuned to the BBC’s World Service, and on clear nights to view the star-filled skies through his treasured pre-1914 German-made brass telescope. Such was the individual whom I had the privilege to meet for the first time on Richmond Hill on that balmy September morning in 1973.

Reading through my journals from that year in 1973-4, many personal impressions of Reverend Small resurface. He remembered Engelbrecht the Boer, recalling the strong resentment that the local people felt towards him for his blatantly voortrekker attitudes towards “natives”, so much so that one day his two magnificent cart bulls were found decapitated. (Leonard Woolf, a contemporary of Small’s in Ceylon, wrote in his autobiography that Engelbrecht – while an excellent game warden – was extremely stupid)[xxxii]. In contrast to Engelbrecht, Small endeared himself to the Sinhalese people, and spoke their language fluently – although not the colloquial or “demotic” version. An old Richmondite from Small’s era once told me that his former Principal spoke “classical” Sinhala, perfectly enunciated, just as if someone were to speak Shakespearean English, and that it was a most beautiful thing to listen to.[xxxiii]

I believe that Reverend Small’s visits in his later years to certain of the local Buddhist temples, where he would discuss theology and philosophy in Sinhala with the senior bhikkus, were much appreciated and anticipated by his hosts. On one occasion he arranged for me to visit a temple near Richmond Hill to help the monks practise their spoken English, at the chief priest’s request. Not for Joseph Small the militantly triumphalist attitude of the early 19^th century American pioneer Wesleyan missionary, Rev. William Martin Harvard, who in 1816 encountered on the road to Galle an elderly Buddhist priest accompanied by several young lay followers. Harvard proceeded to pepper the unfortunate bhikkhu with questions about Buddhism, and when the poor man was unable to answer to his satisfaction, the eager proselytiser pointed out the “ignorance” of their instructor to his young followers, with the result that one of them soon converted to Christianity.[xxxiv] A contrasting example of Joseph Small’s respect for all religions appears in a letter that he wrote to me in August 1976, the summer that Richmond celebrated its 100^th year. After commenting generally on the celebrations, he added: “To me the most inspiring part was the Christian service on Sunday morning, when the [Richmond Hill] church was full of old boys and their families, including a number of Buddhists.” Small was no mean philosopher, and told me a little of his published responses to the writings of (for example) the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell and Col. Olcott’s successor at the helm of the Theosophical Society, Annie Besant.[xxxv] (Coincidentally, Olcott’s last visit to Ceylon before his death in early 1907 took place only a few weeks after Joseph Small’s November 1906 arrival in Galle). While a zealous Methodist, he was on very friendly terms with F. L. Woodward, the Theosophist Principal of Mahinda College, Galle. After Small’s death one obituarist wrote with feeling that he was revered by Buddhists, Hindus and Moslems alike.[xxxvi]

An extremely modest but (in the best sense of the word) a proud man, Small often turned down the offer of a seat on a crowded Ceylon Transport bus even into his 90s, and ironically it was an accident while boarding a bus in Colombo that caused his death in 1978. I once asked him half-humorously the “secret” of his longevity. He replied in all seriousness that he believed two life-long habits had helped in this regard: (a) masticating (or chewing) every morsel of food at least a dozen times before swallowing, to assist the digestion, and (b) sleeping with his feet at a slightly higher level than his head, to encourage the flow of blood to the brain. When an article about my memories of Reverend Small that included this anecdote appeared in a Colombo newspaper early in 2001, a retired Sri Lankan naval officer, Lt.-Cmdr. Somasiri Devendra, wrote to inform me that when he was a small boy his late father, a pupil at Richmond in the early 1900s, had often admonished him to chew his food “in the Small way”![xxxvii]

My last memory of Joseph Small is of him visiting me in the Joseph Fraser Nursing Home in Colombo, where I was admitted with hepatitis in the summer of 1974. The impression of his kindly consideration and concern remains fresh in my mind to this day, over a quarter century later. Neither of us could know that in a few short years he too would be hospitalized in the same facility. And that whereas, still in my early 20s, I would recover to return home to Britain and the rest of my life, Joseph Small on the other hand would finally reach the end of his long and eventful journey on earth in the care of the kindly Joseph Fraser medical staff.

While researching this article, I had the pleasure of re-discovering an almost-forgotten series of about 15 aerogramme letters that Joseph Small hand-wrote to me over the four years between my leaving Sri Lanka in September 1974 and his death in December 1978. These letters range over a wide variety of topics, including the political troubles of Ireland and South Africa, the global economic crisis, the food crisis in Sri Lanka, preparations for the 1976 Richmond centenary celebrations, meetings of the Galle Astronomical Association, and his observations of the night skies through his telescope. The eclectic mind of their writer is everywhere evident. I would like to offer readers some samplings from these letters that offer some idea of how eclectic Joseph Small’s interests were, and how his concern for his fellow human beings remained lively right to the end of his long life:

In December 1974 Small writes to say that he has just mailed off 400 Christmas greetings around the world. He had just returned from visiting relatives and old friends in the U.K. and Germany, and had suffered a bad attack of shingles in the former country that had affected his vision in one eye. But his main concern is for the effect of the food crisis on the people of his adopted home, Sri Lanka: “The really poor are suffering badly due to the high prices.” A few months later, in April 1975, he writes to tell me about the start of the preparations for the Richmond Centenary in 1976, and to ask me for a contribution to the souvenir magazine. Ever the cricket follower, he comments on the disappointing performance of the Richmond team in the “Big Match” against Mahinda that year, in which a win by Mahinda was narrowly averted by the Richmond wicket keeper who made 51 not out in the second innings, the top score of the match; with typical charitableness, he adds that the sun had been vertically overhead at Galle on April 6, and the intense heat had not helped play. Then he returns to his continuing concern for the poorer classes in the current crisis: “There is a lot of malnutrition.”

In July 1975 he mentions that the Centenary preparations, particularly the Souvenir Magazine he is co-editing with the Principal and Dr. W. Dahanayake[xxxviii], are taking up much of his time. In passing he comments that he has just celebrated his 92^nd birthday on July 4, about which an article had appeared in one of the newspapers, and that he has already replied to all of the 70 or so well-wishers who had sent him letters and telegrams! He writes that the recently-founded Galle Astronomical Association (of which he was patron and to which he had recently donated his brass telescope) is flourishing, meeting monthly in Cyril Abeywardene’s home in Fort, although “the monsoon weather has not allowed much observation”. A few weeks later, after mentioning an imminent Richmond O. B. A. meeting in Colombo, he informs me: “There is plenty of malnutrition, and even in the [Richmond] hostel shortages of milk.” A third letter that summer comments on the Irish troubles, news of which he has followed on the BBC World Service, and adds that he plans to attend the annual Methodist Conference in Colombo and then visit Kandy and Badulla. By October he is becoming anxious about the school hostel boarders: “Food is still scarce, and many boys are obviously undernourished, and glad of anything they can get to supplement their diet.” He is writing to Old Boys and their families to ask for memorial donations to the centenary magazine, for each page will cost Rs. 100/= to print. (Not until many years later did I notice that my brief contribution to the Souvenir Magazine had been printed on a page donated in memory of Thekla Small). There is a paragraph on the troubles in Cyprus, East Timor, Angola and Lebanon. A plain brown, specially printed greetings card that accompanied this letter ends with the simple message, “In the Joy of Advent and Christmas let us not cease to wonder – Rev. W. J. T. Small, Richmond College, Galle, Sri Lanka.”

In March, 1976 – Richmond’s Centenary Year and his own 93^rd - he writes to say how very busy he has been with the souvenir magazine, but adds thankfully that “most of the problems are solved now, and printing has begun”. After commiserating on the tragically sudden death of a young Sri Lankan woman whom I had met in England – the niece of his Galle Astronomical Association friend, Cyril Abeyawardene – he ends his letter with a detailed description of the latest “Big Match”, remarking how Richmond, although beaten by Mahinda by 5 wickets, were “not disgraced” and that the match “before a bigger crowd than ever” offered “plenty of sensation…[but]…no ill feeling at all to spoil a good game”. In July he writes again, mentioning the “hard work” with the souvenir magazine preparations that has kept him so busy, and commenting on the water shortages brought on by the failure of the S.W. Monsoon, together with the shortage of margarine and cooking fat caused by the Lever Bros. strike! Undaunted, he is off to visit a Methodist missionary and his wife in Tangalle before they leave for home. A few weeks later he is writing again to let me know that Galle has enough rain despite the monsoon failure, and that the centenary weekend of celebrations had just passed without a hitch. It is in this letter that he comments on the inspiration he felt at seeing so many Old Boys and their families gathered at the church service on the Hill, including a number of Buddhists. With an almost audible sigh of relief, he ends by announcing that the souvenir magazine committee has just had its final meeting with the printer, and that it should be ready by the end of August!

In October 1976, he writes to say that all 970 copies of the souvenir magazine are well on the way to being sold out, the printer (a Richmond Old Boy) having done “an excellent job”, and adds (again it seems with palpable relief!), “I am very thankful things have gone so well.” I then read that Baddegama has had its first flood of the year, and that Cyril Abeyawardene’s estate received 9 inches of rain in 24 hours! He then refers to the ongoing controversy over Bishop Heber’s famous hymn about Ceylon that contains the words “Where every prospect pleases, and only man is vile”. Small once told me that Heber was commenting not on the nature of the Ceylonese, but rather making a theological observation about humankind in general. Here he says: “There is a great deal of truth in it, though in no way confined to Ceylon or Java”. He adds that it reminds him of a Robert Louis Stevenson fable, “The Distinguished Stranger”, about a creature from another planet who visits Earth “but prefers the people with green heads (trees) to the greatest nation on the earth”.[xxxix]

In April 1977, there are the first warning signs of significant deterioration: “I keep fit but have been finding the hill-climbing arduous.” The School cricket season has been “pretty disappointing…the team never seemed to get to be a real team”. He ventures another comment on the “Bishop Heber” controversy: “What a lot of discussion that verse of Heber’s hymn has caused! There is a good deal of truth in any country that, compared with Nature, ‘only man is vile’, but ‘every prospect pleases’ is certainly truer of Ceylon than of most lands.” Evidently in response to some newspaper clippings that I had sent him, he writes: “Bishop Lakdasa de Mel was a delightful person with a keen sense of humour.”[xl] In August 1977 he writes: “I finally moved down to the Manse [at the foot of Richmond Hill] on May 14 – just in time, as my sciatica started without warning”. After a month’s rest at the Fraser Nursing Home (“a very nice place”) he had returned home to Richmond in time for his 94^th birthday in early July, enjoyed three weeks without pain, then the sciatica hit again and he was unable to walk far from the house. Dr. Anthonisz, his orthopaedic surgeon in Colombo, has been “very kind” and prescribed Vitamin E as additional treatment, but there has been “little change”. Cyril Abeyawardene has been driving him around, and “I am very comfortable here”. (A letter from another friend received that same month mentions that Rev. Small had been seriously ill at the Fraser Nursing Home, but had returned to Richmond looking “hale and hearty” and that he had shown some slides to the Galle Astronomical Association on July 22^nd that had been lent to him by Arthur C. Clarke[xli]). The letter ends with a short comment on the 1977 election campaign resulting in victory a landslide victory for the UNP, and the prophetic remark, “it will be long before wounds are healed”.

The last letter I have from Joseph Small is dated August 2, 1978. Although by then he was in his 96^th year, and had only a few months left to live, his handwriting is as steady and clear as ever. I had written to tell him of my marriage to Penny in Vancouver, Canada earlier that summer, and so he begins by sending us both “my best wishes for a long and happy union”. He goes on to say that he has been well since his last letter of a year before, and has just celebrated his birthday in three places – Galle, Peradeniya and Colombo! The Galle Astronomical Association has been meeting regularly, and all three of my old friends Rubasinghe, Panditharatne and Abeyawardene attended last evening to watch slides of Jupiter on Cyril’s projector: “Clear skies have been rare, but Venus is generally to be well seen in the evening in the West.” (Other correspondence I have from one of the Association members refers to some stunning slides that Rev. Small had borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke for an Association meeting in July 1977). The final sentence of this last letter reads: “Now I am going to listen to the ‘Brain of Britain’ quiz on the BBC. Last week it was from Scotland, and there was a brilliant lady who got nearly double anyone else’s score. Yours ever, W.J.T. Small.”

When the end finally came, it came swiftly. Complications arose after a fall while boarding a Ceylon Transport bus in Colombo, and Joseph Small passed away peacefully in his 95^th year at the Fraser Nursing Home on December 27^th, 1978.[xlii] He was laid to rest at the old cemetery at Dadalla near Galle, next to the graves of his predecessor, James Darrell, and Barbara, the young daughter of his successor, Alec Sneath. I received the news a few weeks later in a letter from my friend N. K. Rubasinghe, a former Richmond master and dedicated member of the Galle Astronomical Association: “I am writing this to convey to you very sorrowful news. Rev. Small died on the 27^th and was buried on the 30^th afternoon. There was a big gathering in spite of the school vacation. There were students, teachers and past pupils. The burial was done very well. The body was taken in procession to Dadalla. It was almost a two hour walk from Richmond Hill…There was a service in Colombo, one in the College Hall and one in the [Richmond Hill] church…I don’t think we will get the like here again.”

Some ten years later, while on an all-too-brief return visit to Sri Lanka, I went with N. K. Rubasinghe to visit Joseph Small’s grave at Dadalla[xliii]. It was an early February afternoon, and soft sea breezes carried the sound of the ocean surf across the fields, providing a soothing background as cattle grazed peacefully around the unmarked grave. As we stood silently for a few minutes to pay our respects, I thought back to something that Joseph Small had once said to me - that he wished for nothing more than that his bones should rest in the soil of Sri Lanka, for that was his spiritual home.

With the benefit of hindsight, it is easily arguable that the colonial educational model based on the Cambridge Examination curriculum that prevailed in the mission schools during Joseph Small’s time as Principal of Richmond, was far more suited to England that to Ceylon. Western classical and modern European languages were emphasized often at the expense of vernacular culture. Even in the post-Olcott era when Buddhist revivalist schools such as Mahinda College in Galle sprang up around the island, the growing Ceylonese middle class seeking access to positions of influence in government, law, trade and commerce eagerly followed the English educational model[xliv]. Small – like the rest of us – lived within the context of his time and place, but in his case closer study reveals an educationist who gave greater recognition to “native” culture and aspirations then many of his more conservative contemporaries. And surely in the final analysis, after educational fashions have come and gone, the personal example set by the educator is what really matters most. The Buddhist mathematician P. de S. Kuleratne[xlv] may have put it best when with the perspective of advanced years he paid this telling tribute to his former Principal, Joseph Small: “The best education we can give to a child is the opportunity to associate with good people. To be in touch for some time with one of them is an education in itself.”

Finally, perhaps the most poetic tribute of all paid to this extraordinary man comes from the pen of N. K. Rubasinghe, when he wrote these deeply-felt words in his letter telling me of Reverend Small’s death: “He valued human qualities more than anything else…he was such an unassuming saintly figure…a morning star.” [xlvi]

Epilogue (1)

In February 2001, when I completed the initial draft of this article, I e-mailed it to a correspondent in Colombo, Somasiri Devendra, currently the Vice-President of the Royal Asiatic Society of Sri Lanka (RASSL). Somasiri is a retired Sri Lankan naval officer, author and true polymath. A member of the ICOMOS International Committee on the Underwater Cultural Heritage and leading participant in the Galle Harbour Project, Somasiri is a self-taught and internationally known expert on marine archaeology, and is actively involved in the campaign to find and preserve evidence of Galle’s extraordinarily-rich maritime history. His father, D. T. Devendra, was a contemporary of W. Dahanayake, P. de S. Kuleratne and S. F. de Silva, some of the distinguished public figures in 20^th century Ceylonese/Sri Lankan history who were greatly influenced by their early contact with W. J. T. Small at Richmond. Devendra Senior had a highly distinguished literary and educational career, beginning with his leaving Richmond at age 17 to become a teacher, and culminating with his appointment as Assistant (and Acting) Commissioner of Archaeology and Deputy Editor of the Encyclopedia of Buddhism before his death in 1972. He was also at various times Secretary, Editor and (like his son) Vice-President of the Ceylon Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society.

Now as it turns out, Somasiri is in the process of editing for publication his father’s written account of his village childhood. D.T. Devendra was born in 1901 in the village of Kalegana, Galle, in a modest house, to modest parents who believed in education as the great liberating influence in their country. The parents toiled to send their sons and daughters to the best available English schools, even though (Micawber-like!) they always had to hope that something would turn up to enable them to pay the fees! And so it came to pass that the schoolboy D.T. Devendra attended Richmond College in the time of Rev. Small.

Somasiri has sent me the following poignant passage from his father’s account, and has graciously given me permission to include it in this article. It provides a wonderful insight into the private (but highly principled and practical) encouragement that Joseph Small gave his pupils. The passage is from a chapter that Somasiri has headed, from a sentence used by his father, “Hunger is Agony”:

"When we had nothing to eat - sometimes father was dead tired, too tired to roam the world every day and must rest his weary limbs; sometimes he was physically unwell; sometimes it was raining, - then I remember telling that living saint of my school principal, the Rev. W. J. T. Small, of all our unhappiness. I had no indication as to whether he thought it was the usual Sinhalese trick to cadge money or whether he did, in fact, believe my story. For I got nothing for my recital, except perhaps, some relief in the telling. One thing, however, he did for me. When the time came, in 1916, to send up my fees to Cambridge for the Junior Local (I was under age to be awarded Honours and Distinctions) my father could only give me half the fee. With it, I explained my plight to the Principal. Very graciously, he undertook to advance the balance from the school funds on the condition that I would meet it if I failed. Luckily I happened to pass, being one success in about 8 out of some 20 or more - a great achievement for a carpenter's grandson whose home language was not English. Prouder still was I two years later, when I sat for the Cambridge Senior Certificate and passed it in 1918, scoring the only Distinction in English in the Southern Province and also the first ever Senior Distinction in that language in the annals of Richmond College, among whose alumni were folks of the brilliance of C.W.W. Kannangara, P. de S. Kuleratne, etc. etc. There, again, was what a village-bred, Sinhalese-speaking boy could do. Up on the Honours Boards of my school - unless they have since been removed under a new dispensation - you will find my name first (under the relevant subject) as well as the fact that I had been awarded the coveted "Old Boys' Essay Prize". English, it must be remembered, was then the most honoured subject in school!"

A few weeks later, I received another message from Somasiri. He had just finished editing his father’s book and had asked his brother, Tissa, to contribute a chapter on their father. This is part of what Tissa Devendra wrote:

“One final anecdote illustrates the man he was. At his funeral a rather shabbily dressed, elderly, well-spoken man quietly came up to me and asked to have a word. This is what he said: “I was taught by Mr. Devendra, long ago when he was a young man. I came from a poor home and no longer could afford to buy my school books to continue in school. I had no alternative but to leave school and I told Mr. Devendra the reason. He thought for a while, and said ‘Don’t leave school. I will buy you your books. But do not tell this to anybody. He bought me the books and I stayed in school. I have not been a success in my life – but that has nothing to do with my teachers. As soon as I read your father’s obituary I knew I had to come and tell you this story – that only he and I knew. He was a great man.’

There is no doubt that, in the mirror of his mind, Father saw a poor schoolboy who did not have the money to sit the Cambridge Senior Exam, telling his own sad story to his Principal, Rev. Small, whose personal generosity led him from the village to the world. The rest is history.”

Epilogue (2)

(The following account of life at Richmond College, Galle in the year 1916 is taken verbatim from an as-yet-unpublished memoir penned by the late D. T. Devendra, then a pupil at the school, that he wrote some twenty years later when he was himself a schoolmaster in his thirties. This account that, even though it was authored so long ago, has a distinctly “modern” feeling to it and consequently retains its freshness and directness for the early 21^st Century reader. It is included here by kind permission of Somasiri Devendra, of Colombo, Sri Lanka, one of D. T. Devendra’s sons, already mentioned in this essay, who like his late father is a scholar and writer of distinction).

______________________________________

A motley crowd had assembled in the classroom. The great bronze bell would boom at the beginning of the school hour, 10.30 a.m., from the stone belfry at the top of the hill. But most of the boys had already filled the classrooms, not so much because they believed in the virtues of early work, but because the early bird got the worm, viz., “cribbing” from the homework exercise of the cleverest boy.

The youthful population had rapidly darkening faces; it would not be long ere they set up homes and reared families! The habiliments of an outstation schoolboy would have tickled a Colombo boy to death; for the minority who were not in their native cloth and coat, would be in trousers that that travelled beyond and below the knee but, as if losing heart, stopped halfway down the calf. Hats of queer shape and sizes crowned the heads of the wearers, very few of whom ever “trod on neat’s leather!” A mature dandy or two in toga virilis would sport very narrow long trousers of the latest fashion and four-buttoned open necked coats, introducing into the light of the garish day the knot of a flaming red or emerald neck-tie. The tie cascaded from the starchy eminence of a suffocatingly high stiff collar. These great personages were, however, rare.

The sonorous notes of the bell soon made the master “copyists” put hasty finishing touches to their unholy labour. The prefects, those ghouls, would soon be out for blood, and had to be avoided at any cost. To “cheek” one of them was to court certain disaster. The mildest of the lot was a sinewy Burman; the Ceylon schools had only just begun to be visited by migratory batches of Burmans. Maung Tin looked a peaceful follower of the Buddha, but who scratched him caught a veritable Tartar. Out would come a spate of blood-curdling oaths in his outlandish tongue, soon to be followed up by a smack of his redoubtable fist. An enterprising and seasoned “assembly cutter” would wedge himself between the cupboard and the wall. Only to be ferreted out by the guardian of the law, well versed in all the wiles of truants.

At assembly. While the religious-minded were in ecstatic contemplation of divine blessedness, a worldling stole on soft feet to insert his knee into the crook of the leg of another, who, thus taken unawares, would flop weakly down. Sometimes the victim would grasp, after the proverbial manner of a drowning man clutching at a straw, the coat-tails of a neighbour, in a frantic effort to save himself. But the commotion was in variably averted: it entailed unnecessary interviews with authority, interviews which were often one-sided.

“Dick had a duck with fur on its back,” murmured one almost in defiance of another who memorised the ports of pre-war Germany, Hamburg-Bremen-Stettin-Kiel-Lubeck-Konigsberg-Memel……“Humbugging boys steal king….”etc., etc. Another hissed raspingly in your ear the sanguinary stanzas from Bishop Hatto describing, with obvious relish, how the rats had gnawed the bones of the cruel priest. Excerpts from textbooks from many a subject of the class-room rose and fell in vocal undulations. Not a syllable however was permitted to reach the year of the Head, who was engrossed in thoughts spiritual. Nula dies sine linea was some happy scholar's contribution to the scheme of mural decorations, but the luckless boy saw in this exhortation the ominous and glaring reminder of his fate at close of school.

The egress from the hall is not marked with any anxiety to enter our class-rooms. In walks our form-master, a scraggy giant, whose fierce moustaches ended in two fine needle points; these reminded us of the similar labial adornments of the Gallic Alphonse, in Allan Quartermain, whom Umslopogas, the savage Zulu, nearly cried with fright once, as the latter, in warlike frenzy, tried the edge of his battle-axe on them. Depositing his “pig-sticker” topee on top of the magisterial table, he would begin proceedings for the day, by trying to pierce us with the awful glare of his eyes; this would be accompanied by gurgling guttural noises which issued between his clenched teeth. Woe betide the boy who brought not his homework in Drawing! For our form-master considered himself a teacher of Art and forgave no affront offered his pet subject.

I remember another good old teacher, a Netherlander by ancestry but a passionate Anglophile, whose eccentricity was sharply demonstrated to us on the very day of our admission to his form. A timid boy was deputed to approach him with a request for the list of books set for the class. Much to everyone’s consternation came the startling reply to our deputy “On the form! Up! AT ONCE! I’m not going to do your dirty work!” Taken aback by this strange reception, our representative beat a slow retreat and, as he was collecting what few wits he had, it was with a certain hesitation that he proceeded to carry out the order. Displaying a fist like a leg of mutton, the irate master took a few steps towards the apparently recalcitrant boy and barked out, “Will you get up?” when the alarmed victim shot up the bench with the agility of a monkey, and said I apologetic protest, “I’m get-upping. Sir!” But he was a good man for all that, as we found out later. Fully half our time was spent in discussing appetising dishes and similar subjects of gastronomic interest.

A short, dapper man was S….., who, ever a devotee of Bacchus, presented a shirt front splashed with betel-juice. He was a man of many talents, wasted, alas, by excessive zeal for the cult of the classical god. His ready gift of humour appealed to us and we were very considerate to him in consequence.

On one occasion, during the craze for colour-washing classrooms, he suddenly ceased in his (latterly favourite) preoccupation of using a matchstick as tooth-pick and enquired, “Now, boys, let’s do something for our old room. What shall we do to make it the most charming place in College?”

“Tar it, sir!” naively suggested the smallest brat.

It was one for you, poor S…., whose ready tongue tagged odious nicknames on each boy.

None of us coveted the honour of passing a text-book to our master for temporary use, for if it did ever come back to the rightful owner, it was beyond recognition.

One day, when my Virgil came back to me, I saw, sketched on the back of it, a masterpiece of a golden sunset.

Our interval of half an hour was spent in sampling the dainties of a neighbouring pastry-woman. She was quite an institution, her predecessors having had the exclusive privilege of catering to the palates of the sweet-toothed scholars. Not even the dignified Sixth Formers could withstand the lure of her sweetmeats.

The richer fellows, who boated weekly allowances from home, ran up regular accounts with her. Not a few became so extravagantly hospitable to their less fortunate brethren that brand new books or articles of personal attire often went under the hammer to discharge their debts! One luckless fellow, a regular reprobate with a chronic inability to pay his dues, had attempted to hoodwink the good lady on so many occasions that, one day, she laid in wait for him and, pouncing upon him, divested him of his coat, retaining it triumphantly as ransom! Neither attendance at school nor return home was possible. His tears, however, moved the harridan to pity and when she returned the coat to him it was to the accompaniment of his warmest protestations that he would settle his account. A week later, I found him taking a circuitous cut to school, a route that took him at least a mile away from his usual track. Thus had he outwitted his creditress! I wonder if the Judgement Debtors’ Bill of a later era found an ardent advocate in him! Latin, ever the bogey of all boys, was not a subject we were in love with, and when the Headmaster himself was the tutor, you can understand our plight. Even the pastries failed to draw us out during the interval. None of our tutors were optimistic concerning our future, but I cannot guess why the Headmaster yearned to minister to our classical needs. “Blithering idiots”, “Blasted fools”, “Limbs of Satan”, “Spawn of Beezlebub,” were the picturesque labels attached to us by the Netherlander [3] who, by the way, was of a literary and Biblical turn of mind. However, Latin and Headmasters have been the pet aversions of schoolboys through the ages, and this thought consoles us at this distance of time.

Those were days when passions ran high, and punishments were of the third degree. A three-foot cane was no rarity, and every teacher knew how to lay it thick. Educational theories would have been contemptuously tossed aside by an age that bred generations of Sir Roger de Coverleys who reverently said, “Dr. Busby! A great man! He whipped my grandfather.”

Some Notes on Sources

In his epic three-volume Life of Winston S. Churchill, The Last Lion, the American historian William Manchester makes this distinction between history and biography: history is a chronological account of prior events, while biography focuses on one figure, exploring the significance of his life by examining “the earthly pilgrimage of a man” (Thomas Carlyle) or by presenting “the faithful portrait of a soul in adventure by life” (Sir Edmund Gosse). As Manchester views it, there can be no enlightening life which does not include an account of the times, the wider context in which that life was led. With this dictum in mind, I have tried to provide readers with some contextual background, mainly by way of extensive endnotes culled from my reading about Small, colonial Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) and the England of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries. The knowledgeable reader will doubtless spot many gaps in this material, due largely no doubt to the limitations of the writer, but also at least partly to what has been aptly called “the tyranny of distance” since he is so far removed by geography from the source materials. Nevertheless, I have plunged ahead with this monograph in part as a tribute to one whose memory continues to stir me deeply, and in part as a modest contribution to whatever larger history might eventually be written (one hopes) by others vastly more well informed, of the hugely important contribution of Richmond College, Galle and the other leading “mission” schools to the development of modern Sri Lanka. Hopefully it will be seen as more than merely a case of what someone unsympathetic to historical enquiry has termed “the distinctly dull in pursuit of the dusty dead”!

(a)                 Personal recollections:

Foremost in this category are my own personal recollections of my conversations with Joseph Small, and with others about him, during the year that I lived on Richmond Hill barely a cricket ball’s throw away from the Principal’s bungalow where he lived in the annex at one end. Some of these exchanges are recorded in my two dog-eared notebooks of journals that I kept that year; while others have remained embedded in the memory and are committed here to paper for the first time. (It is a curious fact that these journals lay undisturbed for years at home in a Victorian pine military kit-box, found in a junk store many moons ago in eastern England, that is lined with old newspaper dating from 1885, not long after Small’s birth. I have a letter somewhere from the Chelmsford, Essex county librarian that speculates that the kit-box may have accompanied its owner in one of the redcoat regiments on Garnet Wolseley’s Nile expedition to relieve Khartoum, which arrived too late that year to save General Charles “Chinese” Gordon, thereby generating yet another Imperial Victorian military hero whose name would have been familiar to every British schoolboy when Joseph Small was growing up). Other recollections that I treasure include the encounter with the old fisherman of Matara who bemoaned the ferocity of the Punjabi soldiers in 1915, exchanges with the redoubtable Dr. Dahanayake, and the Richmond-Mahinda “Big Match” of 1974, all of which emerge from the murky depths here and there in this monograph. As Prof. “Lyn” Ludowyk once wrote, memories tend to gather like so much bric-a-brac on dusty shelves, and in truth memory is the most fallacious of human powers, transforming and distorting as it re-enacts the past. At best, as Ludowyk so felicitously observed, the most one can hope to do is “to confront the past with the unsteady torch of memory, hoping to catch something in its wavering rays”.

Other personal recollections that I am indebted for include: Somasiri Devendra’s account of the farewell speech by Lyn Ludowyk before he left for retirement in England, and his vivid account of a chance meeting with Dr. W. Dahanayake on a Colombo ‘bus; Victor Melder’s memory of Rev. Small at Peradeniya in the 1950s; Father Mervyn Fernando’s vivid recollections of Colombo astronomical society meetings chaired by Small in the 1970s, mentioned in his review of E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe’s collected press articles; and an e-mailed anecdote about Small from the son of an old friend of mine who knew him during his last years, Albert Panditharatne. Hopefully this monograph will elicit further such contributions from those who remember Small, although sadly none of those who were associated with him during his heyday at Richmond in the earlier part of the last century, of whom there were a small number still around when I taught at Richmond over 25 years ago, now survive.

(b) Letters and Autobiographical Memoirs:

I have mentioned elsewhere in this monograph the happy re-discovery of a collection of correspondence I received from Joseph Small between 1974 and 1978. These aerogramme letters are by their very nature not long, yet are packed with interesting commentary by someone who retained his acute powers of observation (and firmness of hand) until the very end. The writer’s humanity, and the genuine interest and concern he felt for his fellow human beings in his adopted country, shine through in all these letters. Besides these treasures, I have a bulging folder packed with old letters from former colleagues and pupils at Richmond, mainly of course from the years immediately following my stint at the school. Of particular relevance to this monograph are the series of letters I have from N. K. (”Rubey”) Rubasinghe, a one-time teaching colleague at Richmond who has become a lifelong friend and now lives in busy retirement in Galle Fort, and from my late friend Albert Panditharatne, a Richmondite who was Government Agent, Nuwara Eliya during my time in Sri Lanka. Both these men came to know Rev. Small quite well in his last few years, when they both became active in the Galle Astronomical Association of which Joseph Small and the late Cyril Abeywardene of Galle Fort were leading lights. (Thanks to Cyril’s daughter Nalini, who prefers to be called Nalin, I have a digital copy of a photograph of beatifically-smiling Rev. Small standing by his telescope, surrounded by local friends, taken at the All Saints’ Anglican Church in Galle Fort some time around the mid-1970s). It was Rubey incidentally who gave me the wonderfully evocative description of Small’s funeral in late 1978, and Albert who (among countless other epistolary treasures) many years ago sent me the touching story behind a page in the Richmond Centenary Souvenir donated in memory of P.B. Herath.

Other memoirs that made a great impression on me during the preparation of this monograph, include the soon-to-be-published excerpts from the writings of the late D.T. Devendra, for many years an ornament on the Sri Lankan cultural scene, sent to me by one of his sons, the writer and marine archaeology buff, Somasiri Devendra. These vivid and often moving excerpts are (with permission from Somasiri) quoted in full in the two Epilogues to the main narrative. The Richmond Centenary Souvenir (1976) is filled with rich material by various Old Boys of Richmond in the time of Small and his successors, including “Lyn” Ludowyk, Herbert Keuneman, P. de S. Kuleratne, J.V. Mendis, S.F. de Silva and others. Colourful anecdotes abound, and the quality overall is superb. The Librarian of the Methodist Library in Colombo wrote to tell me that he lacked a single copy of the 1976 Souvenir; fortunately I had two, so one now rests on the shelves of the library, along with photocopies of all my letters from Joseph Small.

Another autobiographical memoir that has made a huge impression on me is Those Long Afternoons: Childhood in Colonial Ceylon by E.F.C. (“Lyn”) Ludowyk, who died in 1985 not long after completing it. The memoir is devoted almost entirely to the author’s childhood in early 20^th century Galle Fort and at Richmond College during the First World War era, and is a unique collection of highly personal anecdotes that evoke the sights, sounds, social divisions and even the smells of life in the intimately-interconnected multi-cultural community that peopled the ancient Dutch Fort of Galle and its environs in that long-ago era. The effect on the reader with any direct knowledge of the place and some of the characters mentioned in the book, is one of at times almost overwhelming resonance and nostalgia. Published finally in 1989 by Lake House Bookshop, Colombo, this slim paperback volume is a lifetime treasure. Well worth reading also are the Preface by H.A.I. Goonetileke and the introductory “Memoir” by Percy Colin-Thomé – both long-time bosom friends of Ludowyk – which are filled with loving detail and acute analysis, a most stimulating combination.

Yet another set of personal memoirs that I have made much use of, comes from the prolific pen of Leonard Woolf, husband of the very famous Bloomsbury author, Virginia Woolf. As many in Sri Lanka well know, Woolf (who died in 1969) was a member of the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS) from 1904 until 1912, when he resigned from the Service while on a year’s furlough in England. His last 3 years or so as a CCS member were spent in the (then) very remote posting of Hambantota, S.E. Ceylon, where he was Assistant Government Agent. When Woolf revisited Ceylon in 1960, aged 80, then-P.M. Dr. Dahanayake (of Galle) ordered that his official diaries from the Hambantota years be rescued from oblivion and published in book form. Filled with mundane matters as well as vivid details of daily life in a rural society that has long since changed irrevocably, these diaries provide a unique insight into the highly-demanding life of a conscientious and immensely hard-working young colonial civil servant at the height of the imperial era. The copy that I have is a 1963 hardback edition entitled Leonard Woolf: Diaries in Ceylon 1908-1911 published by Woolf’s own Hogarth Press, London. The separate introductions by S.D. Saparamadu of the CCS (as it was then still known) and Mervyn de Silva are both excellent; the former is particularly useful for its incisive historical detail about the inner workings of the colonial governing system in Ceylon. Equally fascinating are the two volumes of Woolf’s 5-volume autobiography published by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich during the 1960s that deal with his years in Ceylon and the years immediately following his return to England, including the political aftermath of the 1915 Riots. The title of the first is Growing: An Autobiography of the Years 1904 to 1911 and of the second, Beginning Again: An Autobiography of the Years 1911 to 1918. Also well worth reading is Woolf’s remarkable 1912 semi-autobiographical novel set in the area of Hambantota District, The Village In The Jungle. Lastly, I have selectively dipped into Letters of Leonard Woolf, edited by Frederic Spotts, and published in 1989 also by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The Ceylon letters are interesting, although in many ways less revealing of his true thoughts than the Autobiography and even the official Hambantota Diaries, but for the purposes of this monograph the scholarly introductions by Spotts to the two opening chapters Cambridge and Ceylon, are well worth the price of the book in themselves.

Although not strictly in itself a memoir of life in colonial-era Ceylon, I feel that I must mention here Christopher Ondaatje’s The Man-Eater of Punanai (HarperCollins, 1992). Re-reading this book in 2000 after first acquiring it in 1992, impelled me to start editing my long-neglected 1973-4 journals of Sri Lanka and from there I stumbled into writing this monograph on Joseph Small and his times. Ondaatje’s book is about a deeply personal odyssey as well as being an entertaining and beautifully lively account of some wildlife adventures involving the legendary Boer of Yala (and contemporary of Small), H. E. Engelbrecht.

I am indebted to a most interesting article in the Colombo Daily News of October 22, 2001 by Hilary Rajakarunanayake, about the life of W. Dahanayake, under the arresting title: Star of Galle that twinkled for the oppressed classes.

(c) Other sources:

(i) Richmond, Mahinda & Wesley Colleges:

A foremost primary information source for this monograph has been the Richmond Centennial Souvenir (1976), edited by a small team of volunteers including Rev. Small and Dr. W. Dahanayake, M.P. for Galle and a former Prime Minister. The hard grind of compiling this record, particularly as so many of the old school “log books” had disappeared, emerges in Small’s letters at the time. Considering that Small was in his 93^rd year, and Dahanayake was no spring chicken either, the end product is a triumph of effort and inspiration. Between its covers it is choc-a-bloc with fascinating photographs, vivid accounts of long-ago and current sporting highlights, and first hand recollections by often-prominent Richmondites of outstanding College personalities and events from before, during and after Small’s principalship. Without it, writing this monograph would have been well nigh impossible. It is indeed a treasure!

Thanks to the kindness of Mr. Christopher Fonseka, the Librarian of the Methodist Church of Sri Lanka, I have been able to tap into a variety of other Richmond College publications from over the years, including photocopied extracts from the Richmond College Souvenir (1876-1994) which contains valuable information about the School’s early days, Joseph Small, and the Richmond National Association ‘s activities during the 1910s. Other invaluable extracts supplied to me by Mr. Fonseka include the Richmond College Diamond Jubilee Souvenir (September, 1951) containing yet more material on the above. It was in this collection of photocopies that I discovered the photograph of the 1918 All-Ceylon Drill Shield winning team, featuring Rev. Small with Kitchener-style moustache and the Dahanayake twins as teenagers! The 1951 Souvenir contains more detail than the others, with over 4 pages of highly informative profile of Joseph Small starting with his most difficult early days at the School in the wake of Darrell’s untimely death. Another 1951 Souvenir extract sent by Mr. Fonseka contains a comprehensive list of teachers at Richmond College ab initio, beginning with the Rev. Samuel Langdon in 1876.

Other much-appreciated primary material that Mr. Fonseka has provided me include copies of the following: an Appreciation of Mrs. W.J.T. Small by P.C.R. Perera, Galle, published in the Ceylon Methodist Church Record (Vol. 64, No. 14, May 1950); the death notice for Thekla Hermine Small printed in Vol. 12, March 1950 of the same magazine; a typed obituary on Rev. Walter J. T. Small published as an Appendix to the Methodist Church, Sri Lanka Conference Minutes, 1979; a brief tribute to the late Reverend W.J.T. Small that appeared in the Ceylon Churchman (Vol. 76, No. 7, Jan/Feb 1979); and a list of articles published by and about Rev. Joseph Small appearing in the Methodist Church Record, from an index compiled by Mr. Fonseka of articles 1892-1993.

In June, 2001 The Island newspaper in Colombo, Sri Lanka, published a three-page celebratory supplement of articles by various writers about Richmond College, headed Richmond College Galle: 125^th anniversary. Edited and compiled by Mr. James H. Lanerolle, another helpful correspondent with a surname long associated with Richmond, who also contributes the leading article in the supplement headed Richmond Hill: A Unique Ambience, that vies in terms of poetic descriptiveness with Prof. Ludowyk’s descriptions of the Hill, this supplement contains much of interest including a number of old photographs. I thank my old friend, N.K. Rubasinghe for sending me this collector’s piece.

The life of Lionel Mendis, Small’s one-time teaching colleague, close friend and spiritual companion until the former’s death in 1919 from leprosy, is commemorated in a 23-page monograph entitled A Christian Nationalist of Ceylon: The Life and Letters of Lionel Mendis by W.J.T. Small, M.A., B.Sc., with a foreword by Rev. W.E. Sangster, M.A. Ph.D. (printed in England by Lawrence Bros., circa 1954). Again, I have Mr. Fonseka to thank for bringing this work to my attention. As I have mentioned in the endnotes to this monograph, this heartfelt tribute by Small is revealing of its author’s life-long spiritual and emotional ties to Ceylon/Sri Lanka. At the time of writing it Small, a recent widower, had just “come home” for good to the Resplendent Isle. More of Small’s philosophy and values (including his thoughts on the 1915 crisis) is revealed in the vivid Biographical Sketch of Rev. Henry Highfield, Principal of Wesley College, Colombo from 1895 to 1925 published by the Old Boys’ Union of Wesley College and edited by Rev. W.J.T. Small, M.A., B.Sc. of the Training College Peradeniya, 1956. Christopher Fonseka provided me with this, along with a gem of a c. 1905 article from the Methodist Mission magazine Foreign Field, in which Highfield describes with engaging good humour his 1903-4 epic “Big Beg” bicycle ride around Ceylon to raise funds for Wesley College, appropriately entitled Three Hundred Days of Begging In The Tropics!

The Webpage of the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka (which can be accessed through http://www.crosssearch.com/Churches_and_Denominations/Churches/Churches_by_Location/Sri_Lanka/) and besides offering useful background on the 18^th Century Wesley brothers and the emergence of Methodism in Britain, has interesting material on the early history of Methodism in Sri Lanka that provided me with valuable material for the endnote describing the arrival of the first Methodist missionaries in Galle.

No account of Joseph Small’s time at Richmond is really complete without featuring the extraordinary Frank Woodward, his opposite number at Mahinda College, Richmond’s great Buddhist rival in Galle. The Mahinda College 1967 Diamond Jubilee Souvenir Magazine has a long article by W.K. Samarpala on the history of the school, based partly on the recollections of former pupils of F.L. Woodward. It can be found on the Mahinda College Webpage at http://www.mahinda.org. The article is somewhat slanted, being heavily critical of the (Christian) missionary schools – in contrast with Mahinda College - as being the agents of unmitigated imperialism; hopefully this monograph will help in a minor way to counterbalance this (I feel) overly-simplistic view and bring out the “grey areas” by drawing attention to the sympathetic attitude of Small and some of his early 20^th Century missionary school colleagues for Ceylonese incipient nationalism, as well as some degree of “imperialist” traditionalism and inherent eurocentrism inevitably present even in Woodward’s régime at Buddhist Mahinda. After Woodward passed away in northern Tasmania in May 1952, Nigel Heyward, whose family lived nearby and who had grown up with “FLW” as a close friend and neighbour, gave a short but informative talk on Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) radio on Woodward’s life. Thanks to Victor Melder in Melbourne, Australia, I have a the 2 page published transcript, entitled F.L. Woodward, A Buddhist Scholar, by N.J. Heyward. (It turns out that Nigel Heyward is still living in Tasmania and is a friend of the daughter and son-in-law of my late friend, Albert Panditharatne, who features in this monograph. Small world indeed)! Victor also supplied me with a undated 10 page essay titled Frank Lee Woodward (1871-1952) by someone who appears to have known Woodward but unfortunately does not give his/her name. Possibly the writer here is also Nigel Heyward; at any rate Victor recalls receiving it for his Sri Lanka Library some time in the early 1980s. Woodward himself wrote several books on Buddhism as well as contributing massively to Pali scholarship in his later “Tasmania” years especially, but the only one that I have read is his Pictures of Buddhist Ceylon and Other Papers, reprinted by Asian Educational Services of New Delhi and Madras in 1999, but first published by the Theosophical Publishing House, Adyar, Madras in 1914. Written while “FLW” was still at Mahinda, it is an enchanting little book, revealing much of the author’s gentleness of spirit; my two favourite chapters are Olcott Day at Galle (about celebration of a national holiday at Mahinda College) and At the Foot of a Tree (a delightful account of his quiet moments beneath a wild mango tree, leading “life according to nature”). The tour de force on Woodward, however, must be the Tasmania-based academic Dr. Michael Powell’s Manual of a Mystic: F.L. Woodward, a Buddhist Scholar in Ceylon and Tasmania, published by Karuda Press, Canberra in 2001. Powell’s insights into Woodward and the growth of Sinhala Buddhist nationalism in early 20^th century Ceylon are often breathtaking, although (as already suggested above) I take issue with what I feel to be his implicit dismissal of the notion that the “mission” schools had any significant role in the development of Ceylonese nationalism. Nowhere is it mentioned in his book, for example, that one of the invited “patrons” of the Richmond National Association’s “Legislative Council of 1918” event in late 1915, right on the heels of the Martial Law period and at a time when the official attitude towards the Theosophical Society’s Buddhist schools was at best highly sceptical, was – Frank Woodward. Nonetheless, there can be no doubt that Powell’s book is a major contribution to the understanding of the role of educational foundations like Mahinda College in the growth of Sri Lanka’s national consciousness in the early part of the 20^th century. It is also filled with colourful descriptions of leading characters of the time in Galle and further afield, individuals with whom Joseph Small would have had at least a passing acquaintance.

(ii) Colonial Galle and colonial Ceylon generally:

Obviously the range of writing on this topic is considerable, and I have only skimmed the surface of the literature available as my “learning curve” begins to steeply ascend. The many items by various contributors in The Ceylankan, the quarterly organ of the Ceylon Society of Australia (CSA), from 1998 onwards are a constant source of diversion and information. I urge anyone interested in joining this non-partisan group at a very modest cost to contact the Treasurer, Vama Vamadevan, at 3 Collie Court, Wattle Grove, NSW 2173, Australia (email address: vamadevan@aol.com). The CSA magazine is packed with fascinating historical and up-to-date information about Sri Lanka, ranging from the profound to the delightfully trivial: where else, I wonder, can one easily find out about topics like Independence Day at the Passara Gun Club, Boer War prisoners in Ceylon, early Ceylonese motoring, and the turn-of-the-century Galle “Uplands Tortoise”?

Norah Roberts (who at 93 is still among us) was librarian at the venerable Fort Library, Church Street, Fort during my year in Galle. Ms. Roberts has written a uniquely intimate self-published book on the people and past history of Galle entitled GALLE: As Quiet As Asleep (printed by Aitken Spence, Colombo, 1993). It is impossible fully to describe how extremely informative and colourful this delightfully idiosyncratic book is, and what a flavour it gives of times long gone in Galle. Time and again I encountered old acquaintances, such as W. Dahanayake and of course Small himself, or family of old acquaintances, in this book. The overall effect is somewhat similar to that of reading the Ludowyk memoir mentioned earlier. Another book that has a very immediate impact is Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes: Travellers in Ceylon in the 19^th and 20^th Centuries (first published by the USIS, Colombo, 1975) edited by H.A.I. (Ian) Goonetileke, formerly Librarian at the Peradeniya campus, near Kandy. Apart from the travellers’ accounts themselves, Goonetileke’s Introduction to the book and his short introductory essays ushering in each of the accounts, are gems. I found the Olcott diary extracts from his visits to Ceylon 1880-1906 both informative, all-too-human and delightfully, at times even iconoclastically humorous. Along with the excerpts from journals of the “pioneer” missionaries to Ceylon that appear earlier in the book, they provide some penetrating insights into the religio-nationalist history of the island in colonial times.

R.L. Brohier’s Seeing Ceylon (Lake House, Colombo, 1965) has some interesting and colourfully-written material on Galle and the Southern Province generally, by a master historian and antiquarian, including a vivid chapter on H.E. Engelbrecht of Yala and the disgraceful business of the Emden red herring. A delightful discovery during the writing of this monograph has been The Good At Their Best: Selected Writings of E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe, Actor and Journalist edited by F.A. Ranasinghe and published in 2001 by Arjuna Hulugalle Dictionaries, Colombo. Anecdotes taken from this compilation pepper the endnotes, including borrowings from ECB’s writings on Joseph Small (“Great Man With A Small Name”), school cricket matches, Archbishop de Mel, Small’s exact contemporary Brother James of St. Benedict’s, Father le Goc at St. Joseph’s, incidents during the 1915 riots, and a host of other subjects. I am indeed grateful to Arjuna and Sally Hulugalle for sending me this book as a gift.

The anecdote in one of the endnotes about the speech given at Trinity College, Kandy around the turn of the century by the Colonial Secretary, Sir Alexander Ashmore, explaining why “locals” could not aspire to certain key government positions, can be found at page 331 of the encyclopaedic The Supreme Court of Sri Lanka: The First 185 Years by A.R.B. Amerasinghe (Sarvodaya Vishva Lekha, Colombo, 1986).

Vama Vamadevan’s self-published (1999) The Story of the Sri Lanka Muslims contains much interesting material on the ethnic multiplicity of colonial Ceylon and modern Sri Lanka. I found his chapter on the 1915 communal crisis most enlightening. Vama was a senior police officer (Dep. Inspector General) in Sri Lanka before retiring to Australia, and has also written a delightful, thoughtful and at times nostalgic book called The Ceylon We Knew (A Journey Into The Recent Past) published in 1995 by Navrang, New Delhi. While much of the book relates to the post-1940s, for the purposes of this monograph I found useful material on (for example) the Boers imprisoned in Ceylon during the early 1900s, including of course Engelbrecht. A moving, profoundly impressionistic account of Burgher society in inter-war colonial Ceylon can be found in Michael Ondaatje’s semi-fictional Running In The Family, first published in 1982. This book has always had an especial impact on me as some of the people and sources referred to in his book were known to me personally, or were the parents or close relatives of people known to me in 1973-4. Michael is the younger brother of Christopher Ondaatje, whose book is mentioned earlier in this section.

Another interesting book that has just come into print is Great Days: Memoirs of a Ceylon Medical Officer of 1918 (Social Scientists’ Association, Colombo), containing the vivid oral reminiscences of Dr. P. R. C. Peterson (1889-1983) as told to Manel Fonseka. Ms. Fonseka recorded them when Dr. Peterson, a former government medical officer, was in his early 90s. Many years later with the encouragement of the author Michael Ondaatje, she has edited and published them in the form of this lovely book. Dr. Peterson spent some years in Galle as Port Surgeon, starting just about the time that the Smalls left Richmond College and moved to Joseph Small’s new posting in the hill country.

The information in one of the end-notes about the remarkable Burgher trade unionist and Buddhist, A.E. Buultjens (1865-1916), is culled almost verbatim from a very comprehensive article by the late Justice Percy Colin-Thomé that appeared in the Journal of the Dutch Burgher Union (JDBU) vol. 62, nos. 1-4 (Jan.-Dec. 1985) under the title, The Portuguese Burghers of Ceylon and the Dutch Burghers of Ceylon.

The story of the early Methodist convert (and cleric) Zaccheus Nathanielsz that appears in the end-note dealing with the arrival of the first Methodist missionaries at Galle in 1814, is taken from an article by a retired Sri Lankan geologist / earth scientist named P. G. Cooray, that appeared in the November 10, 2001 Island Saturday Magazine. The octogenarian Mr. Cooray is the son of Una Nathanielsz, who was the granddaughter of Rev. Zaccheus Nathanielsz.

I have already referred to the book Leonard Woolf: Diaries in Ceylon 1908-1911 published by Hogarth Press, London, particularly the introduction by S.D. Saparamadu with its historical detail about the inner workings of the colonial governing system in Ceylon. This introduction offers a sharply-defined picture of how the colonial administration worked in the time of Joseph Small.

My shelves currently betray a severe dearth of books about the politics of 20^th Century Sri Lanka, but I do possess a copy of Men and Memories: Autobiographical Recollections and Reflections (Vikas Publishing, New Delhi, 1992) by the late President J.R. Jayawardene, with whom I once memorably shared a pot of tea on the front verandah of the New Oriental Hotel, Galle Fort in 1974. In those days “JR” was still in opposition, of course, and much water had yet to flow under many bridges both for him and for the country (in the country’s case, tragically, more blood than water). His book is informative if rather disappointingly prosaically written, given the interesting nature of both the subject matter and the chief protagonist.

Insights into the “downside” of British colonialism in Ceylon can be found in The Cocos Islands Mutiny by Noel Crusz (Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 2001) that deals with a hushed-up mutiny during WW2 involving Sinhala members of the Ceylon Armed Forces, but has penetrating comments on the shortcomings of colonial education in its early pages. A more systematic exposé of the alleged defects of the colonial system overall, including (critically) the educational structures, appears in the short but densely-argued Sri Lanka in Crisis: Road to Conflict published in 1989 during the height of the second JVP uprising by the Colombo journalist and one-time Sinhala revolutionary leader, Victor Ivan. I have given some space to Ivan’s complex analysis in my endnotes.

(iii) Early 20^th century British Empire and generally:

It is a remarkable fact that when Joseph Small was born in 1883, William Ewart Gladstone was Prime Minister of Great Britain, and that when he died in 1978, Margaret Thatcher held that office. His birth year followed not long after the defeat of British troops by Boer commandos in the Transvaal at the battle of Majuba Hill (1881), was followed soon after by the “glorious” death of General Gordon at Khartoum (1885), and thereafter his life encompassed not only the second Boer War (1899-1902), but two cataclysmic World Wars (1914-18 and 1939-45) and a series of lesser-scale conflicts including the Vietnam War which culminated a few years before his death. (The Falklands Campaign, arguably the last of Britain’s colonial wars, occurred not long after his death). Shortly after Small was born the Maxim gun was the ultimate in military technology; by the time he died the atom bomb had been invented, Americans had landed on the moon and mankind was exploring far into Outer Space.

It is of course impossible to list everything that one reads over time that helps to form one’s impressions of a past era, but I can offer the titles of a few books that have helped me most recently in attempting to “read into” the zeitgeist of the society that Joseph Small was born into in the early 1880’s. They are as follows:

Farewell The Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat 1897-1965, by James Morris (Penguin Books edition, 1979) takes an evocative look at the ethos of British imperialism with all its blemishes and strengths. The Last Lion: Winston Spencer Churchill, Visions of Glory, 1874-1932, by William Manchester (Little, Brown, 1983) offers a multitude of insights into the late Victorian mind-set. Likewise Kenneth Rose’s Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon and his Circle in Late Victorian England (Camelot Press, 1969). Jean Ware and Hugh Hunt’s The Several Lives of a Victorian Vet: Griffith Evans, 1835-1935 (Bachman & Turner, 1979) explores the life of a British Army doctor and pioneering veterinarian who spent some years in British India and left us with an enlivening description of an odd encounter there in the early 1880s with the leading Theosophists, Olcott and Blavatsky. Death Before Dishonour: The True Story of Fighting Mac, by Trevor Royle (St. Martin’s Press, New York, 1982) offers a fascinating glimpse into the intricacies of class-consciousness in the British Army in the later 1800s-early 1900s, as well as the life of the ill-fated hero who was for a brief time, commander of troops in Ceylon (1902-3). The White Nile by Alan Moorehead (Penguin Books, 1961) vividly describes the various “little wars” and explorations of Victoria’s reign that took place along the Nile River, along with the imperial ethos that drove the major and minor players on that dusty stage. The Strange Death of Liberal England, 1910-1914 by George Dangerfield (first published in 1935; also Capricorn Books, 1961) tells the story of how much of Victorian England irrevocably vanished in the immediate prelude to Armageddon in 1914. The endearing anecdote about the nonagenarian Rev. Harcourt, Archbishop of York that I have included in one of the endnotes, is taken from Christopher Hibbert’s latest book, Queen Victoria: A Personal History (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000). As mentioned in another endnote, Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia by Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac (Counterpoint, a subsidiary of Perseus Books Group, USA, 1999), is an invaluable and endlessly fascinating source of background information and colourful anecdotal material about the clandestine geopolitical intrigues involving Central and South Asia during the high Victorian era and into the later 20^th century, intrigues that – in Kashmir, Afghanistan, Tibet and elsewhere – reverberate down the years to this day.

And finally, I am indebted to the Internet edition of Encyclopedia Britannica for valuable background information on diverse subjects like the impact of Krakatoa and Halley’s Comet that somehow manage to pop up here and there in the narrative!

END NOTES

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[1] In his childhood memoirs, Prof. E. F. C. (Lyn) Ludowyk refers to “the mortal blessedness of a cadetship in the Ceylon Civil Service”.

* Governor McCallum’s atavistic views on even limited self-government for Ceylon rather resembled that of his rather more distinguished compatriot Lord Cromer, British pro-consul in Egypt until just a few years earlier. “Le Grand Ours”, as that consummate government mandarin was known among the British in Cairo, once said, “The Egyptians should be permitted to govern themselves after the fashion in which Europeans think they ought to be governed.” By 1907 Lord Cromer had finally retired to England and become – hardly surprisingly – a vocal campaigner against female suffrage. Such imperial civil servants treated their colonial domains as, to paraphrase Nehru’s memorable comparison, enormous country houses in which the (fair-skinned) gentry took the best rooms and consigned the (darker-skinned) lesser occupants to the servants’ hall where strict rules of precedence were observed among them.

* In May 2001, I received information from Nalini (Nalin) Abeywardene in Sri Lanka, relayed through Chanaka Panditharatne, son of my old friend Albert Panditharatne, that after her father’s death in the 1980s, the family had gifted Rev. Small’s telescope to Richmond College, where presumably it still is, along with the similarly-gifted telescope once owned by Cyril Abeywardene.

[2] Surely not the bald-headed sage purporting to be Rev. Stanley Beaty in that doctored newspaper report pinned to the Richmond College notice board in 1906!

[3] This must be a reference to the Burgher-descended E.F.C. Ludowyk Snr., father of the future Prof. E.F.C. (Lyn) Ludowyk. Ludowyk père was a long-serving Headmaster at Richmond College, having joined the staff in 1908 when Lyn was 2 years old. He was appointed to the key position of Headmaster by Principal W. J. T. Small in 1916, and served as such until his retirement in 1935.

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[i] Evelyn Frederick Charles (“Lyn”) Ludowyk was born in Galle on October 16, 1906 – about two weeks before Rev. Small arrived at his new post as Principal of Richmond College. He was the eldest of a large and very close family of seven brothers and sisters, children of Evelyn Frederick Christoffelsz Ludowyk and the former Ida May Andree, a member of the distinguished Burgher family of Lorenz. Lyn’s father joined the Richmond staff in 1908, was appointed Headmaster by Rev. Small in 1916, and held the post with great distinction until he retired in 1935. A brilliant scholar and dramatist, Lyn Ludowyk’s early education was at a Methodist Mission school in Galle Fort (later to become Southlands Girls’ School). In 1914, at the age of 8, he moved to Richmond College, located two miles from the Fort at a place called Kumbalwella. Long afterwards he retained fresh in his memory the startling contrast between the “hemmed-in” compound of his primary school in the old Dutch Fort, and the openness of Richmond Hill with its trees and commanding views. He remembered travelling to school from his home in the Fort, in a phaeton drawn by a white horse, with raised hood and oil-cloth side-flaps when it rained. When the Great War came, and horse-feed became expensive, he joined a stream of other boys winding their way on foot over the railway line, past the town refuse dumps that harboured large, grunting and hissing monitor lizards, and along the winding country roads that led to Richmond Hill. Later he graduated to a bicycle that he shared with his younger brother, Vyvil – a mode of transportation that I remember well from my days at Richmond. As mentioned later in this article, Lyn became a keen Scout at Richmond, making King’s Scout at an astonishingly young 11. He remembered how much admired was the German wife of his Principal, regardless of the War and the endless angry arguments between elderly neighbours that he fell asleep listening to, arguments mainly about what the Allies should have done and what the Germans might do. In his teens, Lyn was sent to Wesley College, Colombo, partly so that he could learn Greek under the Principal, Rev. Henry Highfield, an eminent classical scholar. In due course he took a First in English from the University of London, and then another First in his English Finals at Cambridge University. On his return to Ceylon he taught briefly at Richmond College, as he had done for a year before departing for Cambridge in 1929, where he made a significant impact on the school’s English and drama studies. In 1932 Richmond finally lost him for good (with reluctance on both sides), when he was appointed Lecturer in English at the Ceylon University College in Colombo. A few years later he gained his Cambridge doctorate for a thesis on English education in Ceylon, and at the tender age of 30 became Professor of English. He held this post until his premature retirement in 1956, when the University moved from Colombo to its new campus at Peradeniya in the Kandyan hills. Lyn Ludowyk was much loved and long remembered for his compelling teaching style and contributions to Ceylon’s drama. After leaving the University, he moved with his Hungarian-born wife to England, where he continued to lead an active intellectual and social life initially in London and later on in rural Suffolk, until in his 79^th year he passed away on June 1, 1985 at Colchester Hospital, Essex. At the time of his death my wife and I were still residing in Witham, Essex, only a few miles away down the A12 that follows the old Roman Road from London to Colchester, but sadly I was unaware of his existence at that time and so never had the opportunity to meet this wonderful man. His childhood memoirs, Those Long Afternoons: Childhood in Colonial Ceylon, were published in Colombo a few years after his death, and lovingly introduced by two of his closest and longest-standing friends, H.A.I. (Ian) Goonetileke, the noted bibliographer and formerly Librarian at Peradeniya campus, and Justice Percy Colin-Thomé, formerly of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka. At the time of writing this endnote (November 2001) regrettably Justice Colin-Thomé has just passed away. Somasiri Devendra recalls the farewell dinner hosted for Lyn Ludowyk by his many friends when he left Ceylon. Speaking selectively and wittily, mostly about Galle, Ludowyk recalled the words of wisdom uttered by an old Burgher gent when he (Lyn) was leaving for England to pursue higher studies in the late 1920s. “Remember,” said the old gent, determined to see that Lyn would not let the side down, “Remember, Galle boys don't backfire!”

[ii] When reading Michael Powell’s 2001 biography of F. L. Woodward, Principal of Mahinda College, Galle from 1903-1919 (Manual of a Mystic) I was reminded of this first sighting of Joseph Small by a passage where Powell refers to the memory of someone whom as a five-year-old child Woodward passed every morning in Galle Fort on his way to the “old” Mahinda College premises at the junction of Pedlar and Church Streets. Years later, the same child recalled a “very vivid memory” of Woodward dressed all in white – white shoes, white socks, white suit and a white panama hat. Likewise, old pupils of Henry Highfield, Principal of Wesley College from 1895-1925, recalled how he “was always in spotless white”, and Rev. P. T. Cash, who arrived in Ceylon at the end of 1906 as Highfield’s Vice-Principal, remembered his first impression of Highfield coming on board the steamer in Colombo Harbour “dressed in a white drill suit buttoned to the top”.

[iii] Coincidentally, another Lincolnshire man was John Wesley (1703-1791) the leading founder of Methodism, who was born into the large family of Samuel Wesley, Anglican Rector of Epworth in Lincolnshire. 'Methodists' was originally a nickname applied to the revival movement in 18th century Britain, based within the Church of England and led by, among others, John Wesley and his younger brother Charles Wesley (1707-1788). The original Epworth (near Doncaster) home of the Wesley family remains standing to this day, although it had to be rebuilt in 1709 after a fire from which the young John Wesley had to be rescued. Restored in 1956, it is now a facility run by the World Methodist Council, and is open to visitors, but with restricted access to the library.

[iv] Considerable kudos attached to a First Class degree from Cambridge University in either classics or mathematics in later Victorian times. J.E.C. Weldon, who later became Bishop of Calcutta and Metropolitan of India in the early 1900s, during the viceroyalty of his friend George Nathaniel Curzon, wrote in his autobiography that, as a boy, he was taught that anybody who won such academic distinction was a superior being, every bit as much as a judge or cabinet minister in later times. Edward Lyttelton, another Curzon familiar who later became Head Master of Eton College, recounted in his memoirs how an unmelodious cat under his window had cost him a “First” one evening while studying for his Cambridge classics exams; he seized a cudgel and spent ten minutes in fruitless chase, causing him to omit a passage in Thucydides that (needless to say) was set in the examination the following day. In practice however a Second Class degree carried no stigma whatever in the professions, yet the fact remains that in Mr. Gladstone’s first cabinet, seven out of fifteen members had taken First Class degrees from either Oxford or Cambridge. Certainly Joseph Small was in distinguished company!

[v] Rev. Dr. Thomas Coke, a wealthy Welshman born in 1747, was the Methodist chiefly responsible for the Mission to Ceylon in the early 1800s. Initially the English Methodist Conference was strongly opposed to the idea, some members indeed claiming that it would be “the ruin of Methodism”. Coke’s oratory and fervour won over the doubters after a heated debate, and in June 1813 the Irish Methodist Conference enthusiastically supported his plan, even offering three missionaries – Messrs. Lynch, Erskine and McKenny. Preparations in London included taking lessons in Portuguese from Portuguese Roman Catholic priests, no-one being available in Britain to teach Sinhala or Tamil! Coke wrote rather dramatically in 1813: “God Himself has said to me, ‘Go to Ceylon!’ I am as convinced of the will of God in this respect as that I breathe – so fully convinced that methinks I would rather be set naked on the coast of Ceylon without any clothes and without friends, than not go there.” Unfortunately for Coke and his fellow missionaries, especially since he was the “money man”, he died at sea en route to Ceylon, in 1814 aged 66. James Lynch, the Irish ex-Catholic, took over leadership of the now-despondent little band. Fortunately for them, their ship’s captain was a supportive friend, and in India they encountered the equally supportive (and in the circumstances peculiarly aptly named!) Thomas Money, an English merchant resident in Bombay. Money agreed to advance funds to the credit of the Wesleyan Mission Society in London, and the Governor of Bombay, Sir Evan Nepean, wrote favourably about them to his Ceylon counterpart, General Brownrigg.

Wednesday, June 29, 1814: it was a remarkably clear day on the south coast, and Mr. W. C. Gibson, the Master Attendant at Galle harbour, was keeping a sharp eye open for Earl Spencer, the China-bound ship out of Bombay that Mr. Money had warned him to expect. During the afternoon, he sighted it lying-to in strong winds about three miles off-shore. Two boats were sent out to meet the vessel, and one brought back Messrs. Lynch, Clough and Squance while Erskine and Ault remained on board ship, in order to follow later in the other boat with the luggage. As the evening twilight fell over Galle Fort, the three missionaries stepped ashore at the old jetty (the very same spot, presumably, where Frank Woodward was to land in 1903) to be greeted by Gibson and escorted to the “King’s House” in Fort, where the British Commandant, the Rt. Hon. Lord Molesworth, welcomed them warmly with what must have been rather encouraging words: “This is all in answer to prayer.” During the night, the remaining two on board Earl Spencer were carried by the wind and tides about 16 miles eastwards to Weligama Bay, where two palanquins picked them up the next day and brought them to Galle Fort.

On Sunday, July 3, 1814, an historic day in Sri Lankan Methodist Church history, the newly-arrived missionaries held their first-ever service on Ceylonese soil, at the 17^th century Dutch Church in Galle Fort. (Almost 160 years later I attended the same church for Sunday morning service in the company of Rev. Joseph Small, and I recall standing at the entrance gateway with Small, listening to one of his early pupils from Richmond, by then a septuagenarian, describing what a fine sight his Principal had presented in those far off days). On that July day in 1814, the garrison and almost the entire European resident population of Galle turned out. Lynch read the liturgy, and Thomas Squance gave such an energetic sermon (his voice is said to have resembled a cathedral bell!) that a young Burgher physician, William Alexander Lalmon, immediately offered himself for the Methodist Mission. Lalmon was to serve the Ceylonese Wesleyan Mission faithfully for the next half century. Lord Molesworth was less fortunate, drowning at sea a year later.

On Monday, July 11, 1814 the first “conference” by the missionaries was held in Galle. It was decided that Mr. Clough should remain in Galle while the others scattered in various directions, such as Jaffna, Batticaloa, Colombo and Matara. (In the later 1970s, not long before he died, Joseph Small mentioned in a letter to me that he was going to Matara to visit a Wesleyan missionary and his wife who were returning to Europe). In 1815 six more missionaries arrived, and evangelist efforts began in earnest, starting with the south with schools and mission stations. But it was in Galle, at a private home on Dickson Road, that Benjamin Clough set up the first Wesleyan mission school in all Asia. And in the church register in the vestry of the Methodist Church in Galle Fort there can still be seen the signature of one Zaccheus Nathanielsz, who was one of the earliest converts of the Methodist missionaries who landed at Weligama Bay on that late June day in 1814, and who became one of the first native Ceylonese Methodist ministers, also father of another Methodist Minister, and founder of a huge clan that today includes luminaries such as Dr. Peter Nathanielsz, Fellow of St. Catherine’s College, Cambridge and a world-famous medical researcher now at Cornell University, USA, and Desmond de Silva, the eminent Queen’s Counsel who lives and works in London.

Let us now "fast forward" to 1964, the 150^th Anniversary of the Methodist Church in Sri Lanka. The Church has just published a hefty tome entitled History of the Methodist Church in Ceylon 1814 – 1964, written by none other than the octogenarian Rev. W. J. T. Small. Victor Melder, whose privately-run Sri Lanka Library in Melbourne, Australia is a mecca for students of the island’s culture and history, was a Ceylon Government Railways (CGR) engine driver based in Galle at the time. Victor vividly remembers the anniversary celebrations. The CGR ran a special train from Colombo to Galle, comprising eleven carriages and hauled by a Canadian M2 locomotive (railwaymen ‘s memories are always very exact on such details!) with a large crest of the Methodist Church adorning the front. The delegates spent some two or three days in Galle before returning to Colombo on the same train. The shades of poor Lord Molesworth, and of the adventurous missionaries Lynch, Clough, Squance, Erskine and Ault who had gathered in Galle on that long-ago day in early July 1814 for their first service on Ceylonese soil, must have watched over these elebaorate celebrations with incredulous delight.

[vi] Typhoid was also commonly referred to as “enteric” fever due to the way it attacked with excruciating effect the gastro-intestinal systems of its victims. Typhoid fever and various other “tropical” diseases were an ever-present threat to local inhabitants and foreign residents alike in the time of Joseph Small and his contemporaries. (Typhoid could also be a scourge of both high and low-born in England – the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII, very nearly died of it at 30 years of age in 1871. He had contracted it at a country house where he was staying, from the same noisome drains that later caused the deaths of both his groom and the Earl of Chesterfield). In Christine Wilson’s biography of her father, the great “surgeon of the wilderness”, Richard L. (Dick) Spittel, the author makes mention of Dick’s elder brother, Fred, tragically dying of typhoid as a youngster in the early 1890s, apparently contracted from contaminated water when the two boys went for a swim in the sea just outside the Galle Fort ramparts. At the funeral Dick’s mother briefly blamed him for his brother’s death, as he had been the instigator of the light-hearted swimming expedition, and he never forgot the experience. It may well have been part of the motivating drive that led the future Dr. R. L. Spittel, FRCS to reach the pinnacle of the surgeon’s profession. Lyn Ludowyk’s childhood memoirs of early 20^th century Galle mention how “typhoid, called enteric, was common”. Another endemic health hazard described by Ludowyk was the so-called “Galle Leg”, or elephantiasis that was “familiar in the town”. Ludowyk’s book vividly pictures for readers how the juxtaposition of squalor and prosperity within its picturesque confines meant that the 17^th century Dutch Fort “with its open drains, its contaminated wells still in use, its odours of night soil taken through the living rooms of houses lacking a back door and collected in carts which trundled at nightfall through its streets, must have been a nursery of disease”. The Ludowyk family was fortunate enough to escape the dire effects of “enteric”, although he remembered many of his schoolfellows reappearing after long absence from school, with “nearly bald heads on which the suspicion of hair was to be detected”. He recalled smallpox and “plague” as being comparatively rare, unless a carrier got through the strict controls of the island’s ports; large posters gave warning of the dangers. Rabies was endemic: he recalled how a schoolmate had to be shipped off to Coonoor in South India for special treatment at the Pasteur Institute after being bitten in Fort by a rabid dog that had entered her classroom. Every so often the Municipal Council employed one “Cyrus” to seize and shoot stray dogs (I think I recall similar “sweeps” of stray dogs in Fort happening from time to time in the early 1970s).

In GALLE: As Quiet As Asleep, Norah Roberts (who was born further along the south-west coast at Panadura in 1907, exactly one year after Lyn Ludowyk’s birth, and came to live permanently in Galle when her father was appointed District Judge in 1927) provides us with some highly revealing information about the state of health care and various diseases endemic in Southern Province at this time. For instance, until 1899 burials of “native” inhabitants took place in their back gardens or elsewhere on public land inside the municipal limits, there being no regular cemeteries for non-Christians. In that year Council opened the new cemetery at Dadalla, where James Darrell was to be buried in 1906 and where I visited Joseph Small’s gravesite in 1988. Burials within municipal boundaries were generally banned from then on, what Norah Roberts calls an important sanitary measure. In 1902 however Galle was still being officially described as the “most insanitary” of municipal towns. It was only in the early 1900s that Galle got its own reservoir for drinking water, when Council bought land in a catchment area just outside the town. Initially potable water was sold from carts at so much a pot, until in about 1910 tap water became available to households. Yet in 1919 “enteric” (typhoid) fever prevailed once more, particularly in Colombo – Norah Roberts sadly informs us in her book that her “dear sister Bell” fatally succumbed to it that year, just after returning from England where she had spent the war years at school. Another victim that year was the 47-year-old Galle proctor (attorney), F. J. de Vos, brother of the eminent Burgher proctor C. E. de Vos who was a Patron of the Richmond National Association’s 1915 “Legislative Assembly” event. (His nephew, Charles de Vos, a proctor - and NOH bar habitué - lived at the YMCA in Galle Fort during my time there and died in the later 1970s, the last of the once-prominent, extended de Vos family to reside in Galle). Roberts speculates that even around 1920 “impure” water was the cause in Galle, where typhoid was known to be endemic: the disease was urban rather than rural. Back in 1887 typhoid fever had killed the female Principal of the Methodist-run Southlands College in Galle Fort, just as it was to kill Principal James Darrell at Richmond in 1906 and the wife of Principal Henry Highfield of Wesley College, Colombo in the following year. Roberts tells how in 1889 the family of the (as yet unborn) Lyn Ludowyk was responsible for a ban on pig-rearing inside Galle Fort, after a family member died of typhoid aged only 19. The medical authorities found that pig-rearing in a neighbour’s back yard had caused typhoid to dog adjacent homes for several years. The pong alone must have been fearsome!

In September 1922, around the time that the Smalls had left Richmond to move to Joseph Small’s new posting at Peradeniya, rat-borne bubonic plague broke out in the Galle bazaar, with about six cases diagnosed after dead rats started falling off the rooftops. The recently-appointed Port Surgeon in Galle at that time was Dr. P.R.C. Peterson, and in his collected reminiscences Great Days that I have referred to earlier, he recalls taking charge of arrangements after the Sanitary Department officers withdrew at the end of October. The Assistant Sanitary Commissioner set up a segregation camp at Dadalla, an infected area was declared, and among other fairly drastic measures part of the town’s bazaar (too riddled with rat holes to render sanitary) was burned down and a corrugated metal fence was erected from sea to sea across the south end of the Esplanade to prevent infected rats from getting into the Fort. Over 4,500 rodents were trapped and destroyed, including about 300 infected rats found inside the Fort. It was at this time that the little-known network of ancient Dutch-brick laid drains that honeycombed the Fort up to 12 feet underground, was discovered; by then these drains were no longer being tidally flushed as in previous centuries, so had become a perfect breeding ground for sewer rats. (The Dutch East India Company (VOC) merchants had actually “farmed” musk rats in the underground drainage system for the profits from their exported fur)!

Roberts tells us that yaws – Framboesia Tropica named parangi in Sinhala after the 16^th century invading Portuguese “foreigners” whose Mozambique slaves had brought it from eastern Africa to the Ceylonese villagers – was another common affliction. For instance, half the patients at the Matara hospital in around 1900 had been admitted due to parangi. (Somewhat ironically in this context, the Sinhala word for “hospital” is a direct borrowing from the Portuguese espirital). Fortunately, in 1910 the renowned London-trained Italian physician and tropical diseases expert Dr. Aldo Castellani, while treating parangi patients in the seriously afflicted north-central part of the island, discovered the dramatic beneficial effect of a newly available, injected drug called Salvasan. Consequently by the early 1920s, while parangi still existed among in rural villages, it was far less prevalent than before. (Castellani, after leaving Colombo and settling down in Harley Street, London, was later knighted by the British for his medical services. During the Italian Fascist period “Sir Aldo” served as Benito Mussolini’s medical supremo, combating malaria around the vast swamps that bordered on Rome and inflicted the anopheles mosquito on its suburban populace. This task successfully accomplished, Castellani next turned his attention to newly-conquered Abyssinia and other countries over-run by the Black Shirts, tackling yaws and other African diseases until the War ended and Mussolini was no more).

Other common earlier 20^th century diseases mentioned by Roberts include malaria, cholera and (of course) “Galle Leg”. Malaria spread by the anopheles mosquito bite, was endemic due to swamps and other larvae-breeding places like plumbago mining pits, particularly immediately after the monsoon rains. In 1887 there had been an extensive outbreak, apparently due to sod-breaking for the new railway extension from Colombo to Galle. Quinine was available at small dispensaries (originally set up under Governor Sir William Gregory along the lines of the 19^th century Irish Medical Relief System) and even local post offices in the early 1900s and beyond. Interestingly, in Jungle Tide John Still tells how when the explorer Sir Richard Burton wandered through Somaliland in the 1850s, he noted that the natives did not allow strangers to interfere with the bats that haunted their huts, for these were supposed to live on mosquitoes, whose bite (wrote Burton) “they erroneously believed”, to be the cause of (malarial) fever! (The British Army of the late 1800s did not even use mosquito nets. A peculiarly Victorian quinine-opium-sloes mixture called “Warburg’s Drops” was often mistakenly believed to be effective against malaria. The missionary-explorer Dr. David Livingstone concocted a pill that he claimed made malaria “not a whit more dangerous than the common cold”; it consisted of jalop, calomel, rhubarb and quinine, and proved just as useless as Warburg’s Drops when tried out by Her Majesty’s ships in tropical waters during the early 1860s. At the time everyone – apart from the Somali “savages” encountered by Burton – thought that malaria was borne by the foetid miasma produced by tropical swamps). In the mid-1940s DDT spraying had a remarkable effect on malaria prevalence in remoter areas, but nowadays (early 2000s) there are alarming reports of new, resistant strains of malaria-bearing mosquito that are causing the disease to recover lost ground.

Cholera was another recurrent hazard for urban inhabitants, and hence a threat to a school like Richmond College that, while situated in a comparatively “healthy” location away from the town, took pupils from Galle (like young Lyn Ludowyk) who travelled to and from Richmond Hill daily. There had been a serious cholera outbreak in 1871, brought under control largely due to the efforts of Dr. P. D. Anthonisz, in whose honour the famous Galle Fort clock tower was later erected. It was he who pointed out that in Galle the cholera outbreaks always occurred in Magalle and similarly damp, level areas beside the old Dutch canal system, where numerous small, closely-built homes and a mosque with a burial ground lacked proper drainage to carry away polluted water, and people often used the open ground as a latrine due to lack of public conveniences. In 1873 the 17^th century defensive ditch along the front of the Dutch Fort was finally filled in, and in 1875 a cholera hospital was opened at Unawatuna, a picturesque bay just around the corner from Galle; out of 179 cholera cases admitted that year, 129 died. Curiously, Leonard Woolf’s tropical wardrobe on his departure for Ceylon as an Eastern Cadet in 1903, included a colonial era standard-issue flannel “cholera belt” – the belief at that time being that, tightly wrapped around the waist, it kept – if not the actual disease – at least various unpleasant intestinal disorders at bay! Medically rather more effective must have been the preventive measure described by Dr. Peterson in Great Days, when he refers to a cholera outbreak in Badulla just after the end of the 1914-1918 War; he recalled dropping a teaspoon of potassium permanganate dissolved in a pint of water, into every well and pool of water. One seemingly-normally healthy man suddenly vomited and dropped dead from cholera as he was talking to him. According to Dr. Peterson, serum injections against the disease were usually a waste of time. (It is a sobering fact that of the approximately 22,000 British Army fatalities in the Boer War of 1899-1902, about two-thirds were due not to battle wounds, but to cholera and typhoid (enteric). The famed later Victorian Africa explorer Mary Kingsley died of enteric fever while nursing soldiers during the Boer War. The cholera belt was standard kit for the troops in South Africa, but it failed to protect another prominent victim of the disease, the 33-year-old Prince Christian Victor of Schleswig-Holstein, whose death in 1900 while serving with the British Army’s 16^th Rifles in the Boer War, brought much sorrow in the last year of her life to his adoring grandmother, Queen Victoria.).

The ankylostomiasis intestinal ova and worm (“Anky”) had been introduced to Ceylon in the later 19^th century by Malabar coolies brought over from South India as tea plantation workers, among whom it was extremely prevalent at this time. While the death rate was low, it was very debilitating, causing anaemia and low vitality; its spread was due to polluted soil and excreta mixing with drinking water. The cure involved segregation of infected patients while the ova and worm was destroyed, and improved sanitation. In 1919 there was an anti-“Anky” campaign among the estate workers, who by then were almost 100% infected; particular effort was expended to convince the Tamil workers to use estate latrines, with some but not total success according to Roberts. It seems however that this problem was far more rife among the tea estate workers than the general populace.

Norah Roberts, whose sister Marjorie was a hospital Matron in Galle, refers also in her book to what she terms the “scourge” of elephantiasis, “Galle Leg”. Apparently a “deplorable number of cases” of this disease came to light during an exemption from road tax survey in the early 1920s. Elephantiasis is a member of the infectious disease group collectively known as filariasis, and is spread by threadlike mosquito-borne nematodes invading subcutaneous tissues and lymphatics, causing acute inflammation and often chronic scarring. Because it inhabits lymph nodes and vessels, and can eventually harden and clog the lymph channels, in extreme, untreated cases the disease causes gross expansion of leg and scrotum tissue: hence the term “Galle Leg”. Roberts tells us that a Filaria Survey carried out in the 1930s recorded 645 cases, 80% of which were within a mile of coastline infested with the Pistia plant on which the filarial mosquito breeds. Control of Pistia plants and drug treatment by injection were the main methods used to combat the disease. Still, in the 1950s according to Roberts, despite years of eradication efforts bancroftian filariasis maintained its hold on urban areas thanks to the house mosquito. She tells us that Dr. Abdul Cader, head of the Filaria Campaign of 1939, believed that the Bancroftian type of Filaria common to Galle and Matara, was introduced to Ceylon by the Chinese delegation led by General Cheng-ho that came to Galle in 1409. The visit is commemorated by tri-lingual stone inscription that was discovered in a culvert in Galle in 1911, the Chinese portion of which was translated by Sir Edmund Backhouse (1873-1944), the WWI British secret agent, fraudster and brilliant sinologist known as The Hermit of Peking, who later notoriously sold vast quantities of non-existent rifles to the British Foreign Office and supplied worthless forgeries of “ancient” Chinese manuscripts to the Bodleian Library at Oxford. VOC (Dutch East India Company) records show that in the early 1640s Filaria was a major cause of sickness among the 400-odd Dutch garrison in Galle which was fending off the recently-ousted Portuguese forces still surrounding the town.

Another potentially if comparatively rarely fatal, but severely incapacitating mosquito-borne fever prevalent in the Galle area was – and is - dengue, also known as “breakbone” or “dandy” fever. Besides fever, the disease is characterized by stiffness and extreme pain in the joints and behind the eyes. Mosquitoes carrying this virus remain affected for life. There are four types of dengue, and while infection with one type guarantees a person immunity against that type in the future, it does not provide any protection against the other three varieties. This makes its spread particularly unpredictable. The only “cure” is rest and relief of symptoms. In late 2000, Windsor Morris, a Sri Lanka-born Burgher correspondent of mine now resident in the UK, had to cut short a visit to his ancestral home of Galle Fort due to an outbreak of dengue fever, and in June 2001 a Colombo newspaper reported 118 recent recorded cases of dengue fever in the Central Province. In July of the same year the Senior Epidemiologist for the Western Province warned of dengue reaching epidemic proportions in Colombo, and a month later 19 deaths were reported. Dengue has spread from Asia to Latin America and the Caribbean in the later 20^th century.

Elsewhere in this article I have mentioned the dreadful influenza epidemic that struck Ceylon like the rest of the world in 1918, probably brought to Colombo by ship in September 1918, just before the Armistice in November. Norah Roberts records that Galle suffered 21,700 cases with 796 deaths. Not a village escaped its impact. Dr. P.R.C. Peterson in Great Days recalled his stint in Galle as Port Surgeon from April 1922 (perhaps overlapping briefly with the Smalls) until March 1925. Part of his job was to go out - often at some risk due to heavy seas - and inspect newly-arrived ships in the roads for possible infection, a real concern since all of the quarantinable infectious diseases known in Ceylon were endemic, but rather originated outside the island. Little wonder that in his 1927 Presidential Address, the President of the Ceylon Medical Association commented that a Port Surgeon needed “consummate tact, the patience of Job, [to] be able to sense when a man is lying or saying the truth, and…[to] possess the saving grace of humour”! One might add here that such was the tenor of the times that Ceylonese-trained doctors in government service actually earned less than British nurses employed in the Colony.

In 1920, the death increase over previous years was mainly due to enteric (typhoid), pneumonia, dysentery, “Anky”, and infant mortality; in that year Ceylon had the highest death rate for ten years. Interestingly, relatively-populous Galle town was the only centre on the island apart from far-more-remote Mannar in the north west, that showed an actual decrease in immigration in the 1921 Census, compared with the previous Census in 1911. In 1901 the population of Southern Province was just over a half million souls, a fraction of today’s numbers.

Something that comes across clearly in Norah Robert’s detailed chapter on Galle’s medical past, is the severe shortage of trained nursing staff in early 20^th century Ceylon, notwithstanding the significant progress made in the availability of hospitals and local dispensaries. For instance, the Galle Hospital underwent considerable renovations in 1905, but a proper nurses’ training centre (initially under a European matron and two European nursing sisters) did not open in Galle until 1936. Like teachers, nurses in those days were undervalued and poorly-paid. Partly for this reason Principal Darrell personally had to nurse the sick hostel boarders during the 1906 typhoid outbreak, and Thekla Small tended night and day to the Hostel boys with influenza in 1918, in both cases to the point of exhaustion. Nursing resources were stretched at the best of times, and in serious outbreaks of disease they were simply unavailable for many of the sick. Even given the improved medical knowledge of the early 1900s compared with even a generation before, life in “the tropics” was fraught with danger for many, both local inhabitants and foreigners alike. Diseases like typhoid were no respecters of race, caste or social rank, and arguably missionaries like the Smalls, being much closer to the local people than many other Europeans in the colonies, were therefore significantly more at risk. Such factors may help better to explain the concern felt by Rev. Small for his wife’s health that led to their departure from Galle in 1922. Insomnia would have led to a run-down state of health in which a person could be more vulnerable to any one of a number of “tropical” diseases, and Joseph Small must have been mindful of the tragically unexpected death from “enteric” fever in April 1907 of Minnie Highfield, the kindly missionary lady who had been his hostess upon his first arriving in Ceylon early in November 1906, and who was the wife of his older mentor and friend, Principal Henry Highfield of Wesley College in Colombo.

[vii] James Horne Darrell assumed the principalship of Richmond College in September 1896, having been placed 24^th Wrangler (First Class) in the Cambridge University Mathematics Tripos examinations in 1893. The son of an English missionary who worked in the West Indies for nearly half a century, Darrell was partly Barbadian on his mother’s side. From his father he derived his sense of identification with indigenous people of the land, and an overriding sense of duty and service. Norah Roberts, whose father Judge T. W. Roberts had attended the same school in Barbados as Darrell, recounts that Darrell possessed a fine singing voice, and was fond of performing the Negro plantation songs at Richmond. Rev. Henry Highfield, the Methodist Principal of Wesley College, Colombo, was a fellow student of Darrell at Cambridge. Looking back in 1951, Highfield recalled that Darrell, who was by no means a natural recluse, forced himself to become one in order to concentrate on his work. In his first year he managed to study mathematics for 14 hours a day, which finally affected his health and caused almost-nightly fainting attacks. No wonder that some of the boys remembered him as being rather “awe-inspiring”! His manner was “sternly sparing of engaging in mere social courtesies” and yet once he left his work behind for a while, “he could unbend completely, and then showed himself most interesting and delightful company”. Within ten years of his arrival, this intensely hard-working and somewhat enigmatic man had raised Richmond to become one of the best secondary schools in South Asia.

Soon after Darrell arrived at Richmond, the vernacular school building collapsed in a monsoon storm. Darrell decided to build a fine new College Hall in its place. By September 1898, two years almost to the day after his arrival, Darrell had begun construction of the new hall, which was completed within two years. Like Woodward at Mahinda a few years later, Darrell was a “hands on” construction supervisor, for example designing the steel frame roof so well that local engineers marvelled at his breadth of skills. Despite claims by some expert observers that the roof would soon collapse due to its breadth and lack of internal support pillars, the building solidly remains in place to this day (2001). The hall was judged to be one of the best of its kind on the island at the time. A new boarding house for 100 boys was next in his sights, but he died of typhoid fever before the new hostel construction could begin. It was left to Joseph Small to complete this task.

Darrell brought many innovations to Richmond, including personally training his staff for the Teaching Certificate exams, introducing the school prefect system, letting the boys run their own literary and debating society, establishing the Richmond College Magazine (again, run by the boys themselves), starting a chess club, and so forth. He managed to have some high ground on the Hill cut down and the soil used so that the boys had a flat playing field for sports. One of his favourite admonitions was: “Take care of your character. Reputation will take care of itself.” It was James Darrell the Methodist who collaborated with his friend Frank Woodward the Buddhist Theosophist in 1905, to establish the tradition of the Richmond v. Mahinda cricket game a.k.a. the “Big Match”, an annual Galle Esplanade event that survives to this day. In 1902, Richmond had the best results Island-wide in the Cambridge locals. It was Darrell who spotted C. W. W. Kannangara at a village school prize-giving and offered him a scholarship to Richmond; the same village boy grew up to become first a teacher at Richmond and then independent Ceylon’s first Minister of Education and the Father of Free Education.

In late June 1906, typhoid fever struck the Richmond boarding hostel. As there were no trained nurses to look after the boys, Principal Darrell himself undertook the task of looking after the afflicted, cleaning the sick ward and even emptying the bedpans. Little wonder then that he too contracted the dreaded disease, yet he continued to tend the sick pupils without ceasing, until finally he collapsed with exhaustion. His condition worsened, and in his delirium he tried to get up to go and tend his sick boys. His last words were, “Faith, trust in God” before he died on July 12, 1906. He was buried at Dadalla cemetery near Galle. He was only 34 years of age.

One old boy recalled 70 years later, “I well remember the shock of his death. As the older boys were away at Diyatalawa with the cadets, it fell to my lot to carry the College banner in the funeral procession.” Another (P. de S. Kularatne) recalled that the gloom cast over Richmond by his death was indescribable. Such was the respect felt for James Darrell by his former students, that one old boy (J. E. Perera) for many years afterwards used to stop at Dadalla on his way between Galle and Colombo, and raise his hat or bow his head as a sign of reverence to Darrell’s grave. In 1976 the Richmond Centenary Souvenir mentioned that students and teachers of the school still annually visited the “hallowed” gravesite to clean it up. Darrell’s name is perpetuated in the Darrell Memorial Boarding House at Richmond Hostel, and the Darrell Scholarship begun in 1911.

[viii] Compare the morning ritual at Richmond’s main local rival, the Buddhist Mahinda College, Galle, as recounted by Michael Powell in his biography of F. L. Woodward, “Manual of a Mystic”: the students and teachers would gather at the start of each school day in Olcott Hall to await their Principal’s arrival in “absolute, pin-drop silence”. Then, Woodward “would descend, cloaked in full academic robes, the rhythmic sound of his footfall gathering volume as he made his way along the cobbled corridor between the classrooms, from the principal’s quarters to the hall.” As Powell points out, the effect of this entrance was “solemn, austere and monumental, with more than a touch of Victorian theatricality”. Another formal assembly would take place after school, at which the (British) National Anthem would be sung after recitations from Buddhist stanzas. Such rituals, deriving from the late Victorian English public school culture that men like Small and Woodward had grown up within, and which might appear somewhat grandiose to modern observers, had the value of bringing a sense of occasion to aspects of everyday life that elevated the activity concerned beyond merely repetitive routine. The attraction of Small, Woodward and their ilk both to their contemporaries and to many modern eyes, is that their personae totally lacked the pomposity that so often accompanies such formality, and that they concerned themselves with the essential human substance, the innate individual value of those fortunate youngsters who came within their charge.

An incident occurred during one of Small’s daily descents of Richmond Hill to Morning Assembly, that those Richmondites present at the time long remembered. Victor Wirasinha, who was a pupil of Sneath’s in the 1930s, tells the story in his contribution to the Island supplement published in Colombo on June 22, 2001 to commemorate Richmond’s 125^th anniversary: “On his way from his bungalow down to the Hall for Assembly, he [Rev. Small] had found a garden lizard, bloodied, battered against a coconut tree, and dead. He had stooped down, picked it up and wrapped it in his hankerchief and brought it down to Assembly, where he unwrapped and held it up, saying, ‘The boy who has done this is not fit to be in this school.’ This was well known.” One is reminded here of the ancient Buddhist respect for wildlife, respect which was considered noble in keeping with the teachings of Gautama. A famous example from the 2^nd Century A.D. is the royal decree of King Kirthi Nissanka Malla of Polonnaruwa, immortalised by a stone inscription at the Ruwanveli Dagaba, Anuradhapura: “…ordering by beat of drum that no animals should be killed within a radius of seven gau from the city (Anuradhapura) the King gave security to animals. He gave security also to the fish in the twelve great tanks and bestowing on Kambodin-gold and cloth and whatever other kind of wealth they wished, he commanded them not to catch birds and so gave security to birds”.

[ix] Rev. Joseph Small’s actions, it has been justly observed, seemed to obey the dictates of an inner voice. Speaking in 1907 about the issue of Scholarships for children, he said: “Probably some people have thought me hard-hearted, and I may be, but I have a reason for it. I hold that no boy should be made free unless he is both poor and bright. To make a dull boy free is no true kindness.” In the 1916 incident, at a time when the Richmond cricket team was particularly strong, he decided to cancel all matches and announced his decision thus: “In consequence of the strong party feeling shown in the elections at the Games Club Meeting yesterday, I have decided to cancel all school matches for the term……I am fond of sports, specially cricket. I believe in them for boys: but only if they promote healthy rivalry and loyalty to the school. In any case sports are only of secondary importance……It is a painful step to take, but I believe that good will come out of evil. If we of Richmond learn the lesson that there are matters more important than games, and give ourselves wholeheartedly to the task of reconstruction in which we are engaged, with the object of making ourselves thoroughly efficient educationally, and above all if we learn to shun the person of party spirit and faction, these lessons will have been worth learning at any price.” These words spoken over eight decades ago by one not hidebound by the fear of unpopularity, resound with especial significance in an era when international sport has become big business, factionalism thrives not least in the world of Joseph Small’s beloved cricket, and over-excited parents verbally and even physically assault referees at their children’s ice hockey games in my adopted country, Canada.

In Great Days: Memoirs of a Ceylon Medical Officer of 1918, the oral reminiscences of Dr. P. R. C. Peterson (1889-1983) as compiled and edited by Manel Fonseka, the 92-year-old retired medical officer recalls his schooldays at Royal College, Colombo, around the turn of the last century. Each year on the eve of the Royal-Thomian “big match”, Principal Hartley would summon all the boys and tell them: “Tomorrow’s our big match. Sometimes boys misbehave. But every boy from Royal must remember: Royal produces gentlemen!”

[x] Gottlieb Daimler in Germany had invented the prototype of the first-ever practical “automobile” in the mid-1880s, not long after Joseph Small’s birth. It has been written that the 1890s was the last truly “heroic” decade of the Raj, when there was still no air conditioning, no motor vehicles, and no refrigerators or electric fans! When Joseph Small was born in 1883, General “Chinese” Gordon was yet to meet his end in Khartoum at the hands of the Dervishes, and there were still British army veterans alive who could remember the Battle of Waterloo in 1814. The initial trickle before the mighty onrush of 20^th Century modernism started innocuously, even comically. In 1902 a motorist named Otto Bierbaum complained after making a car journey from Berlin to Italy: “Never in my life have I been cursed at so frequently…not to mention the wordless curses, shaking fists, stuck-out tongues, bared behinds and others besides”. The first motorcar in Galle arrived in 1905, the year before Joseph Small came to Richmond. One particular “two-seater” moved slowly making a big noise! A local worthy named Fred Abeysundera had an “armchair car” that he would bring down to Fort every Sunday to offer the Galle maidens in turn a thrilling ride around the Esplanade. In fact the first motorcar to reach Ceylon was an 8 h.p. single cylinder steam driven Rover “locomobile” imported by one Edgar Money, an aptly-named Colombo European businessman - possibly related to the Bombay-based Thomas Money mentioned above who was such a crucial benefactor of the earliest Methodist missionaries to Ceylon - whose photograph suggests a remarkable facial likeness to Rev. Joseph Small! Mr. Money’s Rover took three whole days to get from Colombo to Nuwara Eliya, having stalled at its first attempt on the Ramboda Pass. The first gasoline (petrol) driven motor car was a 5 h.p. Oldsmobile imported by G. C. Gnapp in 1904; in 1904 only two indigenous Ceylonese owned motor vehicles. Mauritius, which had become a Crown Colony in 1810, received its first motor vehicle in 1903, and at around the same time the Maharaja of Patiala’s De Dion Bouton (licence plate number 0) became the first-ever car in India! In 1905 the Automobile Club of Ceylon held its first meet, with four cars competing. Apres la - le deluge. The local rubber industry benefited greatly from the pre-War boom in demand caused by this exciting new mode of transportation. Providentially some of this new-found local wealth found its way into building development funds for struggling schools like Richmond and Mahinda. Ceylonese rubber seeds were first planted in Kalutara in about 1883, having come originally from the Amazon via Kew Gardens, London, and by 1904 prices hit an all-time high of 6s. 1d. to the pound. In the later 1960s Galle had twice as much acreage under rubber as tea, in all about 75,600 acres. It is interesting at the outset of the new Millennium to read that in the Peradeniya Botanical Gardens, the wheel has turned full circle (as it were) so that motor vehicles will be banned from the 147-acre grounds to save the flora from their noxious exhaust fumes, and that instead a fleet of bullock carts will convey those visitors unable to stroll!

[xi] Frank Lee Woodward (1871-1952) has been aptly described as a phenomenon. Reading about his life many years after I heard Reverend Small praise his Buddhist opposite number at Mahinda College, Galle for his scholarship and fine character, I have begun to understand something of the uniqueness of this extraordinary man. That early 20^th century Galle serendipitously should have brought together at around the same time two such outstanding educationalists as Woodward and Small, is itself remarkable. Like Small, Woodward was an enlightened product of the late Victorian English middle classes: Small’s father was a Lincolnshire merchant, while Woodward was the son of a Norfolk country parson. Both men attended Cambridge University, Woodward some ten years before Small. Like Joseph Small, Frank Woodward went up to Cambridge on an Entrance Scholarship, but in his case he graduated in the Classics Tripos with a Second. In a sense, both men embodied the Arnoldian principle of mens sana in corpore sano, being above-average sportsmen. Unlike Small however, Woodward had the benefit of several years’ teaching experience at various prestigious public schools in England before coming to Ceylon at the age of 32. For some years in England he had studied Western classical and oriental philosophy and religion, as well as ancient Pali and Sanskrit. In 1902 he joined the Theosophical Society, an event that he later described as the most important of his life; it led to his officially becoming a Buddhist in or around 1907, the fourth year of his Principalship at Mahinda. Theosophy also brought him into contact with another extraordinary man whose name is well known to Sri Lankans, the American President of the Theosophical Society, Col. Henry Steele Olcott.

Olcott, a former military man, lawyer and agriculturalist, together with the Russian spiritualist, Madame Helena Petrovena Blavatsky had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, its mission to study the core of every world religion (motto: “There is no higher religion than Truth”). On their first visit to Ceylon in 1880, arriving at Galle, this egregious pair embraced Buddhism, having already been influenced by the world-famous 1873 “Panadura Debate” between Migettuwatte Gunananda Thera and a group of Christian clergy. Olcott’s vividly-written travel journals, with their often-barbed and richly ironic descriptions of personal encounters in late 19^th century Ceylon with various antipathetic Christian groups, make for both informative and (at times) highly amusing reading. Olcott saw how neglected Buddhist education had become over the past century of British imperial rule, and with the active support of the Maha Sangha he tackled this daunting challenge with characteristic verve. In 1880 there were only two Buddhist schools, compared with over 800 Christian schools! In a few years Dhamma schools sprang up in Galle and all over the Island. Ananda College, Colombo opened in 1886, followed soon afterwards by Mahinda College, Galle. In Colombo, the German-born Theosophist Marie Musaeus Higgins founded Musaeus College, a Buddhist girls’ school, in 1894. Overall, the foreign Theosophists combined with indigenous revivalists like D. B. Jayatilaka and the young Anagarika Dharmapala, to infuse new life into Ceylonese Buddhism, albeit with a distinctly “Protestant”, laicised twist. Wesak Day was finally declared a public holiday by the colonial government in 1885, and Buddhist ceremonies and processions were legalized.

It was into these cross-currents that Frank Lee Woodward sailed when he arrived in Ceylon in August, 1903, barely a few months after he had contacted Col. Olcott by letter earlier that same year and been recruited to run Mahinda College, then a struggling foundation with 60 pupils located in a dusty, airless old Dutch building next to an arrack tavern and a bawdy house at the junction of Church and Pedlar Streets in Galle Fort. In a relatively short space of time (four years) Woodward increased the roll count to 300 and eventually (after Olcott died in 1907) relocated the College to its present site on donated land outside the fort, at Elliot Road. He himself participated in the construction, and indeed among the names memorialized on a brass plate in one of the Mahinda classrooms is that of “Vanapala” – “Keeper of the Forest”, a rough Sinhala translation of “Woodward”. (Like Small, Woodward personally lacked vanity or vaingloriousness). Woodward occasionally offered alms to Buddhist monks in the school hall, serving them meals and humbly washing and wiping their feet as they filed in for the alms giving. Again like Joseph Small, he lived frugally, often secretly putting his own money into his school. He had the same deep conviction in his own beliefs as did Small, and regularly observed the Eight Precepts of Buddhism on poya (full moon) days, wearing the simple garb of a white shirt and cloth. Like Small, not only was he a hard-working administrator, but also (first and foremost) a dedicated “hands-on” teacher, often spending several hours a day in the classroom. To this day there survives a chalk cartoon by Woodward on the blackboard of one of the Mahinda classrooms, covered by Perspex. He knew every pupil personally by name, another characteristic that Small was also affectionately long remembered for. Thanks largely to Woodward’s efforts, Sinhala was established as a subject for the Cambridge Local Examinations; he was also actively involved with the movement to start a University of Ceylon, and was appointed to the board that advised the Director of Education. Little wonder that in 1948, many years after his departure from Ceylon, Woodward received a book of poetry from Ceylon in which the Sinhala Buddhist author had inscribed “To my old master and the best Buddhist I have known.” How ironic then that when the stunning news from Ceylon reached the Norfolk parson’s family back in England that he had become a Buddhist, his sister is said to have snorted: “What a lot of rubbish this talk is of Frank becoming a Buddhist; there ought to be a law to make everyone Church of England!” Unlike Small, Woodward never married and apart from one very brief visit in the early 1920s, he never saw England again after he set sail for Ceylon.

In 1919, at the age of 48, Frank Woodward decided that his work in Ceylon was done. He may also have been discouraged by the loss of Henry Amarasuriya, his great supporter and Mahinda benefactor who had died a few years before. While in Ceylon he had begun translation work for the Pali Text Society, and had come to believe that this kind of scholarly work was to be his life’s mission. Seeking peace and seclusion to devote himself to this purpose, characteristically he did something completely unexpected – he removed himself to north-western Tasmania, in those days known to be something of a retirement area for India and Ceylon civil servants and the like. There he spent the remaining thirty-odd years of his life painstakingly translating Pali texts and compiling his vast Concordance of the Pali canons. To this day most scholars in the field, while sometimes critical of his work on accuracy grounds, unreservedly admire Frank Woodward for his prodigious achievement, which he himself once compared in volume to the complete version of the Oxford English Dictionary! He also wrote several popular books on Buddhism, including Some Sayings of the Buddha that was first published by the Oxford University Press in 1925. A later (1939) edition was published in the World’s Classics Series, with a long introduction by the renowned Tibet explorer, Sir Francis Younghusband. I recently obtained from Vedams in India a modern (1999) reprint of a book entitled Pictures of Buddhist Ceylon (1914) that includes a chapter on “Olcott Day in Galle”, in which Principal Woodward of Mahinda College describes vividly the events of this “Founder’s Day” at the College, the highlight of which was a meal served to over 70 local bhikkhus (Buddhist monks) assembled in the school hall. Dr. Michael Powell at the University of Tasmania has recently released a full-scale biography of Woodward, titled “Manual of a Mystic”. Any Internet search under “F. L. Woodward” will come up with any number of editions of his Pali translations and other works on Buddhism.

Frank Lee Woodward lived out the remainder of his life quietly and unostentatiously in the Rowella district of West Tamar, Tasmania. In 1952, soon after his death that same year, an account of his life appeared based on an Australian Broadcasting Corporation talk by N. J. (Nigel) Heyward, the son of a neighbour of Woodward in Tasmania who had grown up knowing him. Heyward recalled how Woodward spent the final 27 years of his life in a house named “Bhatkawa” by the previous “Anglo-Indian” (in the sense of English-born but India-resident) owner – a name that he freely and humorously translated to a visiting Sinhala student as “Is your rice eaten, or in other words have you eaten your grub?” Besides his overriding absorption in his translation work, his other interests included music, the eccentric Shakespeare-Bacon controversy (needless to say, he was an avowed Baconite!), walking through the country lanes of West Tamar, astrology (a very Theosophist preoccupation that tied in nicely with the commonly-found Sinhala belief in astrology), firewood-chopping and raking the twenty acres of “bush” behind his home. He maintained an active correspondence with old associates in England and Ceylon, even recording the scores of every match played by the Rugby XV of his old school, the Bluecoat School (Christ’s Hospital), and remaining in regular touch with (and receiving occasional visits from) past pupils at Mahinda College. He contributed humorous articles regularly to The Blue (the school magazine of Christ’s Hospital) and to the East Anglian Quarterly Review back in England. Socially a cheery and even boisterous personality, never seen to be depressed, he was popular with the small children to whom he handed out sweets and gruffly humorous but kindly greetings at the local village store. He once told a neighbour that he had turned down an offer of a Doctorate of Letters from his alma mater, Cambridge University, on the ground that if he accepted it and became known as Doctor Woodward, all the young mothers in the district would come rushing to him to deliver them!

A one-time associate of Woodward’s in the fight to establish a University of Ceylon, the distinguished scholar and jurist Sir Ponnambalam Arunachalam, wrote of him: “He combined in a rare degree the culture of East and West…the active spirit of the West with the mysticism of the East. He belongs to the great apostles of Mahayanist Buddhism who carried its message and its culture over the mountains and deserts of Asia to the Pacific Ocean.” Surely only Frank Woodward’s snorting sister could have remained unimpressed by such a compliment from such a source!

[xii] Woodward, like Small, was the sort of person who bent over backwards to be fair and despised self-promoting competitiveness. In later years, one of his former pupils wryly recalled how one year many of the Mahinda 1^st XI secretly hoped that their Principal, who invariably acted as an umpire at major school cricket events, would turn up at the ground after the two teams had chosen their respective umpires for the particularly important annual “Big Match” or “Battle of the Lovers” against Richmond College. The problem was that Woodward “because he was so upright…was loath to give a decision against the opposing team, if he was in the slightest doubt”. (One suspects that some members of the opposing Richmond team may have harboured similar secret thoughts in light of the equally-unyielding umpiring ethics of their own esteemed Principal)! Of course, promptitude being yet another Victorian virtue, Woodward never failed to be among the first to arrive, “dressed in immaculate white”. It was in the same intensely scrupulous Victorian spirit of decency and “fair play” that Joseph Small would cancel all Richmond cricket fixtures in 1916, a year when the school team was particularly strong, because of excessive factionalism in the Games Club elections.

Victorian ideals of fair play notwithstanding, human nature (and particularly schoolboy nature) being what it is, sporting competitiveness between the various schools was intense. Lyn Ludowyk fondly recalled as a boy at Richmond from 1914 onwards, being gripped with the “fanatical partisanship” generated by inter-school cricket matches, to the extent that it was rumoured that Father Murphy, the Prefect of Games at St. Aloysius College in Galle, “secretly blessed the cricket ball with which his team played”. The rumours of sorcery were not dispelled by the Jesuit Father’s appearance – apparently he was bearded and forever muttering over the book that he was carrying. (It comes almost as a light relief to know that not necessarily all schoolmasters were quite so superhuman in their scrupulosity as Frank Woodward)! According to Ludowyk, the Richmond College team however had its own ingenious way of countering Father Murphy’s supposed machinations: one member would sprinkle “charmed” water on the Esplanade cricket pitch first thing in the morning, supposedly in order to give Richmond’s slow left-arm bowler the edge over the opposition. One wonders what Principals Small, Woodward et al would have made of that!

On that note, the eminent Sri Lankan journalist E. C. B. Wijeyesinghe once wrote an entertaining newspaper article under the title School cricket as played in the Good Old Days, about inter-school cricketing rivalries (The Sunday Times 25-1-1976). Looking back half a century or more, Wijeyesinghe recalled competition that was so fierce that hand-to-hand fighting formed a finale to an exciting day. Partisan onlookers often vociferously gave umpires such a hard time, that many school principals eventually relegated their traditional umpiring role to their Cricket Masters. One anecdote, possibly apocryphal, did the rounds for years. According to the story, the legendary Warden Stone (of St. Thomas’ College, Mount Lavinia) was watching a Royal v. Trinity match in the company of Father Le Goc of St. Josephs’, a leading Catholic school. During a chat about the relative merits of their respective colleges during the upcoming cricket season, Fr. Le Goc innocently confided to Warden Stone the weakness of the St. Joseph’s team that year. “I know, I know,” said the Warden, in the sardonic style for which he was famous, “But you have a very strong umpire.” (The St. Joseph’s umpire, Captain Perera, apparently was “not amused” when this story was relayed to him)!

Cricket and Christian idealism often went together in Victorian and Edwardian England: as Head Master of Eton College (1905-1916) and a fashionable preacher, the aristocratic Edward Lyttelton confessed that he never walked up the nave of a church or cathedral without bowling an imaginary ball and wondering whether it would take spin. Much earlier in his career at Eton, in celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, he had erected a notice on his house: “50 not out”.

It has been well written that in the long afternoon of the British Empire, the sun never set on its playing fields. The game of cricket endures while the Empire is but a dusty memory. In central Calcutta, for example, hundreds of cricketers, all clad in faultless white flannels, can be found playing a dozen matches on the grassy Maidan under the bronze gaze of Subhas Chandra Bose, Bengali nationalist and leader of the Indian National Army that fought with the Axis against the forces of the British Empire and its allies in World War Two. In fact, cricket first took root in Calcutta with a two-day match between Old Etonians and other Europeans residents of the city, in 1804, barely after Ceylon became a Crown Colony. Soon, Parsees, Muslims, Hindus and Europeans all became equally besotted with the game. In 1899, the Maharajah Sir Ranjitsinhi Vibhaji, the Jam Sahib of Nawangar, universally known as “Ranji”, was the hero of the England victory over Australia. For late Victorian and early Edwardian frontier adventurers like the enigmatic Sir Francis Younghusband, much later the mystic writer of an introduction to F. L. Woodward’s Some Sayings of the Buddha, the cricketing and the imperial themes were inextricably interwoven, each exhorting their participants whether battling on the cricket pitch or on some dusty, God-forsaken battlefield to (in the words of the poet Sir Henry Newbolt inscribed at Lord’s Cricket Ground) “Play up! Play up! And play the game!” Truly it can be said that cricket, with its exacting rules, civility, and tradition of fair play, is among the more benign legacies of the British Empire.

N.B. The September 27, 2001 edition of NewsLanka, a weekly paper on Sri Lankan affairs published in London, contains an interesting snippet on the back page, under the heading, Richmond regains Challenge Trophies in the annual “Big Match”. The article goes on to describe the September 9, 2001 “10^th annual Cricket Encounter (Battle of Lovers)” held in bright sunshine at Ruislip Village Cricket Club grounds, Northolt, Middlesex, between Richmond and Mahinda alumni. Apparently it was a superb game of exciting cricket! After strong show by the Mahinda Old Boys, Richmond won by 14 runs in a thrilling finish after fighting back with some superb bowling and fielding all round to bag all the wickets for 173 not out. A good crowd of Old Boys and well-wishers from both sides turned out to watch the match, and managed to relive the carnival atmosphere prevailing back at home. After the prize distribution, everyone enjoyed a “sumptuous and delicious rice and curry hot buffet dinner prepared by the Old Mahindians”. How Messrs. Woodward and Small would have relished that event!

[xiii] Since available copies of the Richmond Souvenirs that refer to that 1907 Match are relatively few and far between (under a thousand copies of the 1976 Centenary edition were printed, for example) it seems only fitting to include here a brief but vividly atmospheric description of that day from the pen of C. H. Wickramanayake, the Richmond Team captain that year. For Woodward 1907 was the fateful year in which both his Galle benefactor Thomas Amarasuriya and his mentor Col. Olcott died, and for a time things must have seemed to be at a very low ebb at Mahinda. Within a year, however, a new site had been donated and enough money had poured into the Olcott Commemoration Fund to enable Woodward and the Board to relocate Mahinda College away from the confines of the busy Fort to a vastly more attractive (and practical) location in town. Also in 1908, Woodward took pansil for the first time from the Buddhist monks, and “officially” became a practicing Buddhist (while still remaining a lifetime member of the Theosophical Society). Joseph Small meantime was in the throes of rescuing Richmond College from its serious post-Darrell financial and spiritual doldrums, and gathering desperately-needed funds to expand the boarding hostel. Moreover, Richmond had lacked a proper-sized cricket ground until 1904 when Darrell had levelled most of the top of the Hill to create a playing field, a huge task requiring a retaining wall to contain the displaced soil. But for two days at least, the third “Big Match” of the century took precedence over all these pressing concerns. Here is part of what the Richmond skipper Wickramanayake had to say:

“Mr. Woodward had been at Mahinda for a few years (4) and Rev. Small had only just arrived at Richmond. Excitement had been high on both sides, and all Galle was awaiting the encounter. The morning shone bright and the Esplanade was full to capacity. George Weeratunga, the Mahinda captain, won the toss and sent his men to bat. R. D. Jayasinghe, ably assisted by D. N. Goonesekara ran through the Mahinda side. Mahinda fared even worse in the second innings. But Richmond had a difficult task before them in making the runs needed for victory. From the Mahinda account we learn that they had lost 7 wickets and still needed some 30 runs. At this stage D. A. Abeysekera came in and lashed out (he hit the first 2 balls he received to the boundary), and victory was in sight. With a further couple of runs to make Abeysekera hit again at one sent down by the Mahinda skipper, Weeratunga, who was bowling from the Rampart end. The ball went past the bowler, who seeing the two outfielders quite far apart, ran after the ball in an attempt to save the boundary. The excitement at this stage was so high that Mr. Small himself ran after the bowler towards the boundary line, apparently to do his duty correctly. George failed to save the four. The spectators were highly amused, and the match resulted in a glorious victory for Richmond.”

[xiv] Joseph Small contributed a short piece on the history of the Richmond Master’s Club in the 1976 Centenary Souvenir, in which he refers to the “considerable success” the Team enjoyed against other Clubs in the Southern Province. C. W. W. Kannangara (one-time Richmond pupil and teacher, and the future Father of Free Education) had moved to Colombo but played with the Team occasionally; J. Vincent Mendis, inter alia the original founder of the Richmond National Association, and E.F.C. Ludowyk Snr., father of the future English Literature scholar Lyn Ludowyk, who were both on the Richmond staff by this time, also played regularly, as of course did Small himself. Small comments that not only did the Masters’ Club “bring fame to Richmond”, but it “certainly helped to bring the Principal into a close friendly relationship with the members of the Staff” – an important morale-raiser in the aftermath of the 1906 Darrell tragedy and the financial and psychological crises that the Richmond community went through in the early part of Small’s Principalship. One suspects moreover from reading between the lines that Darrell, esteemed and indeed revered though he obviously was, at times during his sojourn at Richmond must have been a rather distant (hence, “awe-inspiring”) personality compared to the more accessible Small. From his article, it is easy to tell that Small retained lifelong enchanting memories of the Team’s 1910 Match against the Colombo C.C. – “at the time one of the strongest sides in Ceylon”. He mentions that the Colombo Club had the English first class spin bowler W. T. Greswell, who was a regular Somerset County player. Small goes on to say: “Those who played in that match, at least on the Masters side, could never forget that wonderful day as long as they lived.” After briefly detailing the highlights, Small winds up his account of the Match thus: “We returned to Galle by the last train rather weary but very happy.” The Masters’ Club beat the Colombo side again in 1911 at Galle Esplanade, but finally lost to them in 1912 in Colombo “and after that the Masters’ Team faded out”.

[xv] Generally good-natured rowdiness and horse-play, not entirely unconnected with alcohol intake, have been a feature of crowd behaviour at Sri Lankan cricket matches for many years, particularly among the “Old Boys” of the competing colleges. Times change, however. Recently (March 2001) English cricket team supporters in Galle for the First Test Match at the new international stadium on the Esplanade, attracted criticism from the Sri Lankan media for their “crass insensitivity” to local customs, especially “indecent dressing and streaking”. Apparently the modern English cricket fan, when inebriated, has a tendency during matches to run stark naked across the grounds. Police in Galle and Kandy tackled the problem by carrying blankets to wrap around offenders, a step up from the 1970s when (as captured in a famous news photograph of the time) a British “bobby” used his helmet strategically to cover up the offending parts of a male streaker at a sports event. Another tactic used by the Galle stadium management after two English streakers had encountered the Police Special Task Force, was to ban spectators from using the grass embankment from where the streak had begun, and which had previously been used by hundreds of spectators for sunbathing. I have a sneaking suspicion that at least some of the Galle local crowd would have found the spectacle more amusing than the official reaction would suggest! (A separate furore arose during the same week when BBC camera crews, lacking a permit to enter the stadium, opted to film the Test Match from atop the Galle Fort ramparts, on the very spot where the young Lyn Ludowyk and his boyhood cronies once stood to watch cricket in the early years of the last century). Confrontational scenes such as these would have been unimaginable during the annual “Big Matches” on Galle Esplanade in the early 1900s, presided over as they were by the likes of Small and Woodward.

[xvi] As mentioned in an earlier end note, the first Wesleyan Mission school in all Asia had been set up at a private home in Dickson Road, Galle by Rev. Benjamin Clough soon after the first Methodist missionaries to Ceylon arrived in Galle in 1814. In 1857, the momentous year that the Indian Mutiny took place and Burton and Speke set out on their first exploration of East Africa, the Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Trust Association, at the instigation of Rev. Joseph Rippon, took the fateful step of purchasing from four Burgher gentlemen a 17 acre block of bare hillside locally known as “Doctor’s Hill” that was located at Kumbalwella, just two miles north of Galle Fort. The selling price was Rs. 937.50, about twice that paid by the previous owners in 1851. After the Mission purchased the land, local people referred to it as “Padilikanda” or “Padres’ Hill”. Mr. Rippon officially named it “Richmond Hill” after the Methodist theological college at Richmond, Surrey, England. At this time, the land was a neglected coconut plantation standing on a hill 500’ above sea level and overrun with low scrub. Eventually with other adjacent land acquisitions, the property increased in size to 26 acres. It was not until May 1^st, 1876 that the first Mission school opened at Richmond Hill, under the name of Galle High School, Principal Rev. Samuel Langdon. There were 8 other teachers and 108 boys. The objective was to stem the flow of bright Wesleyan elementary school pupils to high schools of other denominations. What with the Boys’ School, the adjacent Rippon Girls’ School and (in 1878) the new church, Richmond Hill rapidly evolved into a major Methodist centre in Southern Ceylon. Small’s immediate predecessor, the ill-fated James Darrell, injected tremendous stimulus into Richmond during the period 1896-1906, during which time he undertook much new construction and caused the school to expand in all senses of the word. Then Darrell’s sudden death and the circumstances surrounding that tragedy, struck the still-fledgling College a massive hammer blow.

Like Frank Woodward at Mahinda three years before, Joseph Small arrived at his new post at a time when the institution that he was taking over was in a somewhat fragile state. In Richmond’s case, the shocking and demoralizing effect of the typhoid outbreak that had killed Darrell had left the school in a state of limbo. Enteric fever had struck the boarders at the school in October 1906 and caused the deaths of the Head Boy and one other pupil. A number of the best pupils had been withdrawn by their parents and sent elsewhere. Staff members were demoralized, and the public needed to have its confidence restored in the future viability of the College. Finances were precarious, to put it mildly. As a writer in the 1951 Diamond Jubilee Souvenir pithily stated: “No Principal of Richmond College ever entered his duties in circumstances so tragic and prospects so bleak as did Mr. Small.”

Joseph Small was the man for the season. Outwardly undaunted, like Frank Woodward he plunged into his tremendous task with zeal and enthusiasm. Within a week of his arrival, he attended the November 9^th, 1906 ceremony for the laying of memorial stones at the site of the new boarding hostel at the top of the Hill. In nine months the building was completed, and on August 17^th, 1907 the Darrell Boarding House was declared open by the Chief Justice of Ceylon. Rev. Small gave a frank speech in which he revealed that there had been anxious times when it seemed that work would have to stop for want of money. Up to the present he had only just been able to pay his way, having received just over Rs. 20,800 in grants, subscriptions and donations, but where the balance of around Rs. 2,000 needed for furniture and drainage would come from, he did not know. In due course he hoped to add a third wing, which would cost another Rs. 6,000, and so he appealed to former pupils for help. Providence intervened as he had hoped, and in 1907 a gift from the parents of a pupil who had recently died enabled the construction of a new Sick Ward. The third wing was begun in 1909 and completed in June of the following year. In honour of Thekla Hermine Guenther, the German lady whom Joseph Small was to take as his wife a few weeks later, the new dormitory was named Hanover. By the time that the Smalls went on their first home furlough in April 1914, four new classrooms had been added. In 1916 the gymnasium was completed. By then it was abundantly obvious that Richmond had no ordinary man at the helm, and the long-term future of the school was assured.

[xvii] Lord Chalmers, who was Governor of Ceylon 1913-1916, was something of an improvement over his immediate predecessor, the arch-conservative Governor McCallum (1907-1913). Chalmers gained the respect of Frank Woodward in part because of his Pali scholarship, an attribute rare to the point of being non-existent among other Ceylon Governors of that era, although in private Woodward criticized his textual errors and “superficial” translations. Both men were translators for the prestigious Pali Text Society, although (to Woodward’s chagrin) Chalmers eventually abandoned his long-time interest in this work, when in his eighties he became re-married to a “widder” lady. Woodward claimed that Chalmers reminded him of an “old Roman”, which he speculated that he could have been in a previous lifetime, and that he resembled Fitzgerald, author of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, whom Woodward remembered from his own boyhood when his father was a curate on the Norfolk coast. Chalmers was an interesting, unconventional character behind the crusty, official facade. As a young Treasury civil servant in London, he had worked anonymously among the Whitechapel missions, and in later life (when Master at Peterhouse, my old Cambridge college) he generously - and again, anonymously – provided financial assistance to a number of deserving undergraduates..

Along with the deep love and respect that Joseph and Thekla Small had earned in southern Ceylon over the previous few years, the unusual (at least, for a Ceylon Governor) character of Lord Chalmers may help to explain Joseph Small’s success in obtaining permission for his German-born “enemy alien” wife to escape the arrest and detention that other German nationals resident in Ceylon endured for the Great War’s duration, especially in the context of the 1915 communal rioting crisis and the resultant “German spy conspiracy” paranoia. At heart the two men were perhaps more alike than a casual observer would have suspected.

The 1915 communal riots and their martial law aftermath ultimately cost Chalmers his governorship. Essentially, with a “world war” ongoing the colonial civil authorities over-reacted, panicked and for a time surrendered power lock-stock-and-barrel to the military. The scholarly civil servant Chalmers was totally out of his element in this new situation. Even Brigadier-General Malcolm commented on this “most unusual” transfer of “absolute power” in late May, 1915. Chalmers was recalled to London prematurely in 1916, “booted upstairs” to a better civil service position, and by the war’s end had lost two of his sons in the European conflict. Sic transit Gloria.

(I am indebted to Michael Powell’s earlier–mentioned biography of F. L. Woodward and to V. Vamadevan’s The Story of the Sri Lanka Muslims for much of this information about Lord Chalmers).

[xviii] Lyn Ludowyk recalled as an eight or nine year old boy in the early days of the First World War, walking out after dark along the Galle Fort ramparts with his grandmother, seeing the darkened streets, gazing out at the heaving water and wondering what its depth concealed. Were there German submarines waiting to emerge and confront them? The ship La Ciotat had been sunk not long before, with the loss of some Ceylonese lives, including a close relative of the family’s pharmacist, and the German battle cruiser Emden was reported lurking in the Indian Ocean. At this time the Smalls would have been on their one year furlough in Europe, starting in April of 1914, some four or five months before the outbreak of conflict. To the young Ludowyk and his peers Germans were shadowy figures compared to the ever-present English, but well spoken of personally by some of the family’s friends and neighbours. Bertha (“Birdie”) Ephraums, wife of the Burgher owner of the New Oriental Hotel in Galle Fort (and mother of the magnificently redoubtable Nesta Brohier, later to be known to many within and without Sri Lanka for her long reign over the “NOH” until her death at age 90 in 1995) spoke warmly of German efficiency and friendliness after the Ephraums family had sailed to Europe aboard the Friedrich der Grosse in about 1912. Resident German families like the Freudenbergs and the Hagenbecks were both well known and respected. (John Hagenbeck had founded the Dehiwela Zoo in Colombo; nevertheless his brother was interned in 1914 and languished in a Colombo gaol until he died. Leonard Woolf in his autobiography refers to “the famous Herr Hagenbeck of Colombo – famous in the world of zoos and circuses” who brought down a visiting Danish baron to join a hunting party in eastern Hambantota District). And of course, as Ludowyk tells us in his memoirs, the German wife of Richmond’s young Principal was very much admired. For most Ceylonese, far removed from the main theatres of conflict, the “bugles of England” must have seemed as remote as they were for the first Gurkha detachments bound for Europe, who, as their train drew into Calcutta for embarkation, sharpened their kukris, supposing that they were nearing the battlefront. For example, there is the amusing anecdote told by Norah Roberts about E.W. Jayawardene, the future Justice of the Supreme Court and father of the late President Junius Richard Jayawardene. Early in the War “E.W.” was posted to Galle as a Captain in the Ceylon Light Infantry (C.L.I.) in charge of a detachment guarding the Fort against possible German naval attack (the much-feared Emden was then still roaming the Indian Ocean). One night the British Commander visited the Fort and found the ramparts strangely deserted by their sentries. On further investigation he found the men in their Mess enjoying themselves at a party thrown by their sociable Captain on the occasion of his birthday. A disgraced “E.W.” was posted back to Colombo the next day!

Official attitudes nonetheless dictated that “British” Ceylon was at war with Germany and that was that! For example, as Norah Roberts recounts in her marvellous book, GALLE As Quiet As Asleep, there was the case of the German Buddhist scholar-monk Nyanaloka Maha Thera, founder of the Polgasduwa Island Hermitage at Dodanduwa, on the coast between Galle and Colombo. Born at Wiesbaden in 1878, he came to Ceylon in 1902, thereafter becoming ordained in Burma as the first-ever European Buddhist monk. The island hermitage that he founded in 1911 quickly became a magnet for devotees from both East and West. (Frank Woodward of Mahinda and the German-born Maha Thera became close friends). After World War I broke out in 1914, the Maha Thera and all his German disciples were interviewed, interned and then shipped off to exile in Australia. In 1920 he sailed back to Ceylon but was forbidden to land, so he moved on to Japan and became a professor in Tokyo until he finally managed to return to his beloved Dodanduwa hermitage in 1926. In 1939 the whole saga repeated itself, except that this time Nyanaloka and his German pupils were interned and shipped to Dehra Dun in North India to be imprisoned behind barbed wire for five long years. The German monks returned in 1946, and happily their peaceful Island Hermitage continues to thrive into the 21^st century.

Another curious case described by Norah Roberts is that of Herr Waldeck, the German-born Superintendent of the large “Stokesland” rubber estate at Udugama, not far from Galle. The highly industrious and very popular Waldeck suddenly and rather mysteriously departed from Ceylon just before war broke out in 1914. After leaving he wrote to his friends in Ceylon thanking them for their friendship and hospitality that he had greatly enjoyed, but much regretting that he had been a German spy! His bungalow was long afterwards known by locals as the “German Bungalow”.

One incident early on in the War served to highlight the underlying state of general paranoia among the small British community in Ceylon: the “Emden scare” and the resultant arbitrary arrest and imprisonment of “Engelbrecht the Boer”. Fortunately, Thekla Small was away with her husband on furlough at the time this incident blew up.

When World War I broke out in August 1914, the German East Asiatic Squadron, commanded by Admiral Maximilian Reichsgraf von Spee, consisted of 2 heavy cruisers, 3 light cruisers and a few armed merchant vessels. Realizing that the Squadron was heavily outmatched by the Japanese fleet, von Spee sailed off towards South America, leaving behind the light cruiser Emden and a converted merchant cruiser, Cormoran, to harass British shipping in the Indian Ocean. The 387 feet long Emden, under the command of Kapitan Karl von Muller, was hunted by every Allied warship in the area. Muller and his officers’ resourcefulness enabled them to sink eighteen merchant vessels, convert another to an armed merchant cruiser, and capture and use three colliers. They also raided two Allied ports (including a bombardment of Madras), sank a destroyer and cruiser and generally created mayhem for shipping in the Indian Ocean. In Ceylon, both Sinhala and Tamil adapted the ship’s name to signify enterprise and ingenuity. The British authorities were concerned about the elusive German cruiser prowling around Ceylon’s shores, and rumours spread like wildfire that she had moored off the east coast, and that foreigners had encamped in the jungles near Hambantota to the south. H. E. Engelbrecht, a former Boer POW who had been given the job of game warden at the Yala sanctuary, was accused of providing livestock and hospitality to the Emden crew, on the strength of some empty champagne bottles lying in the jungle and the fact that he had refused to take the oath of allegiance after the Boer War ended in 1902. In vain did Engelbrecht protest that the bottles had been left by various pre-war European shooting parties, and that he had simply kept them to store his kerosene oil. A military squad from Colombo arrested him at Yala and took him off to an army detention centre in Kandy. Refusing to wear prison uniform, Engelbrecht (an extremely stubborn man) remained naked in solitary confinement in a darkened room for three months, without trial. Eventually the authorities tacitly admitted their bungling, and he was released and allowed to return to Yala, presumably even more embittered against the British than before. Under cover of wartime emergency laws, no explanation or compensation was ever provided. The Australian Navy finally cornered the Emden at the Cocos (Keeling) Islands in November 1914. The outgunned and battered German cruiser ran aground on a reef, where the remains sit to this day, and the Captain and crew were taken prisoner. The rest of von Spee’s squadron was cornered by the Royal Navy off the Falkland Islands, near Argentina, in December 1914, and sunk apart from s solitary light cruiser that was later scuttled by her crew after being trapped by the British in the South Pacific.

Engelbrecht died in 1922, and lies in the old cemetery in Hambantota. The honourable Kapitan von Muller followed him into Eternity soon afterwards in 1923. In 1931, when the successor Emden visited Colombo, her Captain (Withoeft, who coincidentally had been second-in-command to von Muller in 1914) gave a talk to the Rotary Club in which he informed the members that the previous Emden “left your beautiful Island alone. There was no point in attacking a small island”. Afterwards, an old friend of Engelbrecht obtained a letter from Kapitan Withoeft, who had been the speaker that day, that stated: “I may be allowed to inform you that the old Emden never received a supply of cattle and there was never the least connection with your beautiful island or anywhere else.” Long after his death, Engelbrecht was finally vindicated in one respect, at least.

[xix] Thekla Small was credited in the 1951 Richmond College Diamond Jubilee Souvenir Magazine with providing such devoted care for the hostel boarders, almost all of whom suffered from the 1918 influenza pandemic, that Richmond escaped without a serious casualty. The writer goes on to say: “From the 2^nd of August 1910, the day of her marriage, the school, the church and the neighbourhood had her kind ministrations. Till the time of her death in February 1950, she continued to be the true helpmate of Mr. Small.” Unfortunately Mrs. Small suffered severely from insomnia during her final years in Galle. I dimly recall Rev. Small once telling me that his late wife had found the coastal humidity of Galle increasingly hard to bear. (Frank Woodward likewise admitted to finding the coastal climate of the South increasingly debilitating, and it appears to have been at least one of his reasons for leaving Ceylon and moving to Tasmania’s cooler climes in 1919). When Joseph Small took his second year-long furlough in 1920, once again leaving the Principalship in the capable hands of Rev. Cash, Thekla Small had already left ahead of him for Europe. The Smalls returned to Galle in 1921, but Mrs. Small’s health failed to improve. In 1922 he made the difficult decision to leave his beloved Richmond College, and the Methodist Church appointed him to the Principalship of their Peradeniya Training Colony, up in the Kandyan highlands, where it was hoped that his wife’s health would improve in the less humid and slightly cooler climate. Unfortunately Mrs. Small’s health problems finally forced the couple to depart Ceylon in 1926. Before then, in a moving speech that he gave at Richmond on his last prize day in 1922, Joseph Small revealed something of himself and what he meant to his pupils: “I have been absent during the greater part of last year. Yet, though I have been absent, I have been in touch with a great many of both old and present boys by correspondence. I do not think a mail passed without bringing some letters from Ceylon. I received many which gave me joy and some which touched me deeply, especially some that told me of temptations overcome, and temptations that still beset them. I count it one of the greatest privileges of a school master to be thus confided in by his pupils, and not only a great privilege but a great responsibility, which I could not bear except through faith in Jesus Christ.”

The March, 1950 issue of The Ceylon Methodist Church Record carried this death notice: “SMALL, THEKLA HERMINE wife of the Rev. W. J. T. Small at 24, Newtown, Tewkesbury, on February 20^th after an operation for appendicitis followed by Pneumonia and Heartfailure.”

A brief but poignant “Appreciation” of Mrs. Small by P. C. R. Perera of Galle, appeared in the May 1950 issue of The Ceylon Methodist Church Record. The writer errs slightly in stating that Thekla Hermine Guenther had come out to Ceylon to marry Rev. Joseph Small the year after his arrival in 1906. But he hits the nail on the head when he states that Mrs. Small “relieved Mr. Small of much of the burden that he was bearing alone”. Obviously an old boy who had been a Richmond pupil at the time, Mr. Perera recalled Mrs. Small giving medical attention to the 100-odd hostel boarders, supervising the giving-out of the day’s provisions, accompanying the Principal at morning prayers at the hostel, playing the organ at services, and teaching the Christian boys amongst the boarders hymn singing at the Principal’s bungalow on Sunday evenings. Significantly, in light of Joseph Small’s own life-long habit of quietly assisting the disadvantaged in the wider community, Thekla Small “did much social service work in the neighbouring villages and her service is still remembered with gratitude by these same villagers”. Mr. Perera closes with these heartfelt words: “Today we mourn the death of a devoted wife and a zealous worker for Christ. Generations of Richmond boarders will remember her for her kindliness and sympathy. While praising God for the life of a noble woman, our prayers go out to Mr. Small in his hour of loneliness.”

The writer James (now Jan) Morris has pointed out the appeal of the evangelical aspect of empire for many women, for whom it gave a rare chance to serve in the field, usually in the mission stations of Asia and Africa. (The Theosophist leader and Indian nationalist crusader Annie Besant, actually became President of the pre-Independence Indian Congress Party). Morris mentions the example of Emily Lutyens, who while her architect husband was building the Viceroy’s palace in New Delhi in the later 1920s, organized a crèche for women labourers on the site – the first of its kind in India.

[xx] The total absence of any “superiority complex” (part of what has been called the “pathology of imperialism” that generated such phenomena as the signs often seen in fin de siecle colonial hotels asking “gentlemen” to “please not strike the servants” and the frequent observations of even relatively enlightened European travellers of the era about “the infantile mind of the Oriental”) was a distinctive characteristic of all the best missionary and other leading educators in Ceylon at this time. It emerges in Joseph Small’s 1956 biographical sketch of his one-time colleague, Rev. Henry Highfield, Principal at Wesley College, Colombo from 1895 to 1925. In many ways Small, when writing about Highfield, could have been describing himself: phrases such as “his many unostentatious acts of generosity and kindness”, “his humility, great scholar though he was”, and “his kindly benign face” appear again and again in the narrative, including the appendices written by various ex-pupils of different religious affiliations. Like Small (and Woodward), Highfield quietly gave away his own money and offered other practical help to the genuinely needy. One example – Highfield bore the entire expenses of educating the son of a Wesley teacher who had died. This sincerity and what a Hindu ex-pupil called his “catholicity of influence” enabled Henry Highfield to raise a large sum of money for the development of Wesley College during a year-long “big beg” in 1903-4, when he bicycled on his own 6,000 miles all over the island fund-raising from all manner of men, many of them non-Christians. As one former pupil wrote of him: “His sincerity and his integrity were so evident that he received donations from all classes of people from all walks of life, from Buddhists, Hindus, Muslims and Christians.” The same could just as aptly have been written about Joseph Small.

It was at the Highfields’ home in the Wesley College grounds at Karlsruhe in Colombo that 23-year-old Joseph Small had stayed briefly on his arrival in Galle in early November 1906, before heading down the coast to take up his new position in Galle. Highfield and James Darrell, Small’s predecessor at Richmond, had been good friends both at Cambridge and at Richmond Theological College in Surrey, England. Darrell came out to Ceylon in 1896, one year after Highfield. In a tragic coincidence, Highfield’s first wife died in 1907 of typhoid fever, just ten months after the death of his dear friend Darrell from the same disease, and only six months after Joseph Small’s first visit to their Colombo home.

Another, related characteristic of the great educators of early 20^th century Ceylon that has already been alluded to above, is their essential lack of sectarian bias, however strong their missionary zeal (or, in Woodward’s case, Buddhist revivalist zeal). Pupils of all the major faiths and beliefs in Ceylon attended schools such as Richmond, Mahinda, Royal and Wesley. Old Boys who praised Joseph Small in the 1976 Richmond Souvenir included devout Buddhists, for example. Small goes out of his way to emphasize this aspect in his biography of Highfield. As Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake, a leader who in his time was described by admiring western newspaper editors as the “Abraham Lincoln of the East” and who is remembered for his efforts to weld Ceylon’s diverse elements into one united whole, observed during his keynote speech at the 75^th anniversary celebrations of Wesley College:

“The Christian missionaries had no use for communalism, whether it took the form of colour prejudice or of divisions among the Sinhala…We in our generation as schoolboys, and our fathers before us, worked with and played with all communities. If we have been able to avoid communal troubles, and to have a government in which Sinhala, Tamils, Muslims and Burghers find a place, it must be because we were taught that these distinctions are of no political importance, and that we can keep our respective religions and cultures without bringing them into politics.”

One of Highfield’s old pupils, a Tamil Hindu, recalled that while his Principal made no secret of his strong religious convictions, he never tried to convert pupils of other faiths to those convictions and never interfered with his non-Christian pupils’ religious beliefs, either directly or indirectly. A Muslim ex-Wesleyan recalled that Rev. Highfield made a point of allowing non-Christian pupils leave during school hours to attend to their obligatory religious duties, such as Jumma prayers at the mosques on Fridays from noon. This tolerance attracted Muslims, for example, from all over Lanka to Wesley College. (One highly-distinuguished Muslim pupil, who won a form prize at Wesley College in 1893, was the future Sir Mohamed Macan Markar from Galle. Markar, who was later knighted in 1938, was the first Muslim member of the Legislative Council in 1924. Among other contributions he made, was his work to reconcile the Muslim and Sinhala communities after the 1915 Riots). Like Small and the other great educators, in Highfield there was “nothing narrow, sectarian or circumscribed”. Another Hindu pupil remembered that Highfield’s “talks made me a better Hindu, made me understand Hinduism better and made me appreciate the Hindu way of life as I never did before”. Highfield, in an 1905 article titled “Three Hundred days of Begging in the Tropics” that he wrote for the Methodist Missionary Society’s magazine, “Foreign Field”, about his epic bicycle tour over the island, concluded his stirring account by saying that among the most valued gifts he received was one large donation from a “Mohammedan” who told him: “Sir, you must keep our boys longer in your school. They learn how to read and do sums, and then come into our shops; but that is not enough. When we die we cannot take our shops or houses with us – only what is in our minds. Therefore you must keep them longer that they may learn more.” But in one respect Highfield refused to compromise – he rejected “unhesitatingly” an offer from a Parsee gentleman to make a huge donation from that community if the Principal would agree to admit a “conscience clause” allowing their boys to study something else during Scripture lessons. The end result was that virtually no funds came from the Parsee community.

This frank admiration for the standard of teaching and ethical instruction-by-example that many Ceylonese non-Christians held for the missionary schools, is all the more remarkable in light of the increasing nationalism and Sinhala Buddhist revivalism, the zeitgeist of the era that Small and Highfield worked in. As Highfield himself wrote, the missionary schools were (understandably) often regarded as “a very real weapon of Christian propagandism” and the education offered by them looked on suspiciously as “the jam which conceals the distasteful pill”. Apart from their own outstanding human qualities, the Smalls and the Highfields, like the Woodwards, of the early part of the 20^th century differed from the majority of their predecessors in one other fundamental way, which is alluded to by one of Highfield’s ex-pupils quoted by Small in his biographical sketch – they were “very far-seeing, and looked forward to the day when we Ceylonese would manage their own affairs”.

[xxi] The 1976 Richmond Centenary Souvenir, co-edited by Rev. Joseph Small, has this short but telling passage near the back relating to the 1915 Riots:

“During the riots of 1915, one of those who was imprisoned was Don Samuel Situge de Silva. His father, Don Hendrick Situge de Silva, who was the famous Buddhist philanthropist, sent his only son, Don Samuel, to Richmond. After leaving Richmond, Don Samuel became a well-known public worker. He was taken into custody along with other great nationalists such as D. S. Senanayake and Edmund Hewavitharana. Don Samuel died in prison.

The Richmond College Magazine of 1915 records his death in the following words: ‘He was tried by court for alleged rioting: he was sentenced to a long term of imprisonment. In revision of judgement, H. E. the Governor found him not guilty and ordered his release. The order came too late, for he had passed away the previous day.’

His memory will always be cherished by Richmondites as that of a great patriot who sacrificed his life for his motherland.”

Writing in 1956, when he was Warden at the Peradeniya Training College, Small referred to the 1915 Riots in a “Biographical Sketch” of Rev. Henry Highfield, who from 1895 to 1925 was Principal of another Methodist Mission School - Wesley College, Colombo. The reference consists mainly of this vivid quote from an article written after Highfield’s death in 1955 by one of his former pupils:

“When in that awful crisis during World War I, our government ran amok, and surrendered its administration to the military – when our leaders like Sir D. B. Jayatilaka and the late Mr. D. S. Senanayake and others were lugged along to jail without a charge or a trial, and some were shot to quell the riots – it was an Englishman, Highfield of Wesley, who wrote to the Governor thus: ‘This is not what I was taught at Cambridge as British fair play.’ He thereby stood a chance of facing a firing squad, for the mood of the Military Government was unpredictable and uncertain.

One more incident from this time of civil commotion, when rioting, looting and shooting were a common feature. One afternoon a mob were attempting to loot the Muslim boutique adjacent to our College tuck-shop at Baseline Road. About 30 or 40 men were trying to break through from the front entrance. The Moorman had barred it, and he and his family had hid inside, when I noticed Mr. Highfield hastily making his way to the spot. I followed hard on his heels, ready for any emergency. Mr. Highfield pressed his way through the snarling crowd, and placing his back against the planks shouted, ‘Go away; go away!’ Immediately the crowd fell back and, one by one, they slunk away. We took the entire family of eight, men, women and children, to a College dormitory, till the Military came on the following day.”

To this account Joseph Small added his own comment: “Highfield’s courageous actions at this time made a deep impression, and have never been forgotten.”

The Buddhist Theosophical Society schools were the subject of a secret report by H. L. Dowbiggin, the Inspector-General of the Ceylon Police at the time of the 1915 communal riots. Prepared at a time of heightened paranoia and anxiety, the report accused “persons connected with Buddhist and Theosophical Societies” for being prominently involved with elements writing and preaching “in such a manner as to foster contempt for authority and to stir up feelings of ill-will between classes”. Dowbiggin singled out the Buddhist schools in particular as an “unwholesome influence” which did not “appear to encourage affection towards the British Empire” and disseminated “politics of a vicious type”. (This echoed the view of the Bishop Weldon, Anglican Metropolitan of India around the time Woodward came to Ceylon, that “any Native who is not a Christian is a disloyal subject of the King”)! Woodward had written to the authorities to protest about the charges against his Galle benefactor, the prominent Buddhist Henry Amarasuriya J.P., for owning a ceremonial sword at the time of the riots. (Amarasuriya was temporarily placed under house arrest at the New Oriental Hotel, Galle Fort). According to his biographer Michael Powell, it may have been this incident that prompted a visit to Woodward by a British Brigadier-General and a very senior official from the Education Department around this time. At any rate, thanks in no small part to Woodward’s disarming genuineness of character, the visit was uneventful. The Richmond National Association’s 1915 activities in the immediate post-Martial law period, including the choice of Woodward as a patron of the high-profile “Legislative Council of 1918” event staged in November of that year, take on added significance when seen against this highly-charged background. It is worth mentioning in this context that Annie Besant, one of the most prominent Theosophists and early colleague of Col. Olcott, was interned by the British in India during the First World War because of her political activism in support of Indian nationalism and Hinduism – views that were officially regarded as seditious while the Empire was under direct attack from without. Anyone publicly supporting nationalism, teetotalism (part of the Buddhist revivalist philosophy) or deviating in any obvious way from the “official” standpoint at this time certainly walked a dangerous tightrope.

(In a Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia, published in 1999, joint authors Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac provide some illuminating background about the so-called “Mystical Channel” in which the Theosophist movement played a prominent role, and its attraction as a medium for imperial (and sometimes anti-imperial) agitation and intrigue in both Tsarist Russia and England around the turn of the 20^th century, the apogee of the Age of Mystical Imperialism. The suspicion of the British authorities towards the Buddhist Theosophical Society’s activities in Ceylon during the 1915 troubles may have derived in part at least from this relatively recent historical context. Russian and British “forward school” imperialists had been playing a complex game of intrigue against each other for years in Central Asia, reaching its climax when the British, suspecting a plot between the Russians and the Chinese to carve up Tibet between them to the disadvantage of adjacent British India, used Russian discussions with the Lhasa authorities through an Central Asian lama acting as an intermediary, as an excuse for briefly invading Tibet in 1904.

In 1891 an Imperial Russian Navy frigate visited in Colombo harbour. On board was the future Tsar Nicholas II, on an extended Asian tour with an entourage that included Prince Ukhtomsky, a leading member of the “Forward School” of Central Asian imperialists in St. Petersburg who later became the new Tsar’s eastern affairs consultant. Col. Olcott of the Theosophical Society was staying in Ceylon at the time, and was invited on board to meet the Russian party, which had just visited the Society’s Adyar headquarters near Madras. A delightful meeting followed, during which Olcott noted the Prince’s intense interest in Buddhism. This passing incident reflected a complex inter-relationship between Russian high society and Theosophism. By the early 1900s Theosophy had become the newly-fashionable cult of the St. Petersburg intelligentsia, including some leaders of the revolutionary Bolshevik movement rising to prominence in the aftermath of the humiliating Russian naval defeat by the Japanese in 1905. A Theosophical - Buddhist Temple was completed in St. Petersburg by 1913, vigorously opposed by the Russian Orthodox clergy but built anyway with the active support of the Tsar and Prince Ukhtomsky; it was no accident that its first service coincided exactly with the 300^th anniversary of the founding of the House of Romanov, underscoring the role of Nicholas as the soi-disant successor of the fabled “White Tsar” who would be the “protector” of Buddhism across Central Asia. An active member of the fund-raising committee for the new temple was Nicholas Roerich, a prominent St. Petersburg intellectual, artist, mystic Shambhala-seeker and Central Asia explorer-cum-Russian secret agent. Roerich had joined the Society’s St. Petersburg branch when it was founded in 1908, having been an adherent for some time of the Theosophical movement’s Russian-born founder, the late Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky (d. 1891). In the early 1900s a surviving sister of “HPB” edited Rebus, a prominent Russian spiritualist magazine. After the Russian revolution in 1918-19, Roerich relocated to New York and was the subject of several dossiers at the U.S. State Department when he tried to fuse Theosophism with Marxist-Leninism into a single doctrine of worldwide peace and brotherhood directed against colonial powers, especially Britain.

During the later years of her career, Madame Blavatsky herself was no stranger to this heady brew of mysticism and imperial rivalries. Long before she arrived in India with Col. Olcott in 1879, direct from New York where they had founded the Theosophical Society in 1875, “HPB” had developed a fascination with Tibetan Buddhism while a child in Tsarist Russia. Her maternal grandfather had been an administrator for Buddhist Kalmyk settlers, living in the lower Volga Basin by the Caspian Sea but originally from Central Asia, and the grand-daughter stayed with him for extended periods. Later she claimed (somewhat dubiously) to have lived in Tibet for seven years and absorbed the secrets of “esoteric” Buddhism from Tibetan lamas. Her brainchild Theosophism, a cosmology blending Buddhism with other mystical sources, centred on in a mysterious “Lord of the World” based in Shambhala, located somewhere in the Gobi Desert, and an invisible “chain of command” or Brotherhood of “Mahatmas” (or “Masters”) including Buddha, Jesus, Confucius, Moses, Plato et al who communicated psychically with “Adepts” (such as herself and Col. Olcott). By 1885, out of 121 Theosophist lodges worldwide, 106 were located in India, Burma and Ceylon. One secret of the success of the Movement was its treatment of Hinduism and other occidental religions and philosophies as serious subjects, deserving of great respect rather than the usual European condescension.

So extravagant was HPB in her expressions of contempt for the British rulers, in contrast with her equally-extravagant regard for all aspects of Hindu society, that during the 1880s British Intelligence in India placed her and Col. Olcott under surveillance, convinced that HPB in particular was a Tsarist spy intent of stirring up Indian nationalism for ulterior motives, a foreshadowing of their later suspicion that Theosophists might be manipulating Ceylonese Buddhist revivalism for pro-German, or at least for anti-imperial aims in 1915. A.O. Hume, a retired ICS man who became an ardent Theosophist in the early 1880s, was instrumental in the first meetings of the Indian National Congress at this time; A.P. Sinnett, editor of the Allahabad Pioneer, where the young journalist Rudyard Kipling was a rising star, was another recruit. As Meyer and Brysac’s book points out, Theosophy’s links with Indian nationalism were of especial concern to officialdom throughout the pre-War period because of HPB’s prominent Russian connections. Born into minor Russo-German nobility, her cousin was the railway magnate and proponent of eastern expansionism, Count Sergei Witte, who in 1904 was to become Prime Minister of Russia. HPB furiously denied allegations in the Indian press in 1884 accusing her of her serving “Russian interests”. In fact, as Tournament of Shadows mentions, Tsarist Russian intelligence documents first revealed publicly in 1993 suggest that the British suspicions were not entirely paranoid: in an apparently authentic letter she wrote in 1872 to the Director of the Third [Intelligence] Section, precursor of the notorious Okrana, Madame Blavatsky offered her services as an agent to “my native land” and candidly explained her technique of exploiting people’s spiritualist beliefs to uncover their secret thoughts. She went on to state: “I have played every role, I am able to represent myself as any person you may wish.” The outcome of this overture is unknown, but it is a fact that after she founded Theosophism, HPB developed a close working association with Mikhail Katkov (1818-87), the fiercely reactionary apostle of Russian imperial expansion to the East and South, to whose propagandist (and hugely influential in St. Petersburg) Moscow Chronicle she contributed many articles on occult matters.

In 1885-6 another incident obliquely involving Theosophists with an abortive Sikh uprising conspiracy in the Punjab Province caused some panic in British government circles at Simla. Thakar Singh, a virulently anti-Christian-missionary and pro-Sikh-liberation cousin of the exiled “Maharajah” Duleep Singh (who had lived mostly in England since being brought there as a child when his father was deposed by the British) was closely linked to HPB, and may indeed have been one of the authors of her “Mahatma Letters”. (Another possible model for HPB’s mysterious “Mahatmas” may have been the real-life Sarat Chandra Das, founder of the Buddhist Text Society in Bengal and one of the remarkable Indian pundits used by the British in the later 1800s covertly to survey Tibet and adjacent regions beyond the far northern frontiers of India. Das – who was the inspiration for the fictional pundit Hurree Chunder Mookerjee, alias “the Babu” or R17 in Rudyard Kipling’s 1906 novel Kim - met with HPB on several occasions between 1885-7 at the Ghoom monastery near Darjeeling that was a sort of way station for monks and mystics travelling across the frontier. Like Das, the abbot of the monastery was a paid British agent). In any event, the Punjab plot was stillborn as alerted British officials in Aden prevented Duleep Singh from reaching India. He later issued a futile call for the Russians to invade and liberate India. By then HPB was thoroughly alarmed by rumours of her supposed intrigues against the Imperial Government, and even tried to offer her services as an informer to the Viceroy! Soon afterwards, she left India for good on “health” grounds.

None of this convoluted history of imperial intrigue and counter-intrigue, both real and imaginary, had anything remotely to do with Frank Woodward or Buddhists in Ceylon in 1915. On the other hand, mixed in with fears of German plots at a time when the Great War was going badly for Britain and her allies, the official mentality it generated doubtless played at least a subconscious role in the over-reaction of the colonial authorities and the senior European officers commanding the Punjabi troops freshly arrived from India, towards the perceived “causes” of the 1915 Riots).

Lyn Ludowyk well recalled the “bitter murmurs” of the “Martial Law” period following the Riots, and the impetus this widespread feeling of resentment gave to the rebirth of the National Association at Richmond in 1915. At a more intimate level, he remembered his father (soon afterwards to be appointed Headmaster at Richmond) fussing over his Town Guard puttees, and the painful ingrown toenail that Ludowyk Snr. suffered as a result of wearing the uniform boots! He recalled hearing schoolboy ditties like “Law, Law, Bonar Law; Law, Law, Martial Law!” His strongest memory however was of himself and his younger brother Vyvil coming upon sparkling chandelier crystals amid the ruins of a burnt-out mosque, a beautiful sight in contrast to the ugly heaps of blackened and sodden wood scattered all around. Some Moslem families normally living outside the Fort moved inside it for better protection, and no incidents of note occurred in Fort, perhaps partly due to the presence of the “strange, bearded” Punjabi soldiers encamped by the ramparts near the Sun Bastion, who as Ludowyk recalled were rumoured to be “fierce and ruthless”. (The Punjabi troops brought in to quell the riots in Ceylon were Muslim, not Sikh. This may well account for some of the ferocity that was displayed by the Indian Army soldiers toward Sinhala crowds in the immediate aftermath of the anti-Muslim riots. By the early 1900s around fifty percent of the imperial-era Indian Army consisted of Punjabi Muslims from places like the hill country north of Rawalpindi). Since the Smalls left for England in April 1914, and Rev. Small’s furlough period likely would have been for the typical twelve-month stretch, one can reasonably assume that they returned to Galle either a few weeks before, or at any rate around the time of, the outbreak of the rioting in May, 1915. Certainly the Richmond 1951 Diamond Jubilee Souvenir makes reference to the quiet succour provided by Joseph Small to poor families in the Galle area hard hit by the aftermath of the Riots, as well as by the shortages of imported rice and other staples during the War years.

Leonard Woolf, who served with the Ceylon Civil Service (CCS) from 1904 to 1912, including three unforgettable years as Assistant Government Agent (AGA) for Hambantota District in the South, comments with feeling in his autobiography about the aftermath of the “1915 Riots”. He states that Courts Martial presided over by army officers condemned 83 persons to death and sentenced 60 to life imprisonment. He compares the claim by the Ceylon Government that the riots were “seditious” with the valid point made by the Sinhala leadership that no Europeans suffered personal or material damage from the rioting. Woolf attributed the communal troubles to economic rather than religious or political factors, and criticised the authorities for being “weak and incompetent” at the outset and allowing the problem to get out of hand. In his book he describes his meetings in 1916-17 with the Colombo advocate, E. W. Perera, and (later Sir) Don Baron Jayatilaka, the Sinhala representatives sent to London to lobby the Government for an enquiry and a revision of the harsh sentences. For instance, he recalls the delightful Sinhala singing of Mrs. (Mallika) Jayatilaka at the Bloomsbury, London home of himself and his wife, the novelist, Virginia Woolf. Mallika Jayatilaka was a formidable intellectual in her own right, a Sanskrit-speaking daughter of the famous Oriental scholar Pandit Batuwantuduwe, and an important figure in the history of the women’s emancipation movement in Ceylon/Sri Lanka. One interesting piece of trivia: it is said that the reproachful expression “Jayatilaka Bridge” used by Ceylonese card-playing bridge experts for long years afterwards, derived from his travelling companions’ unsuccessful efforts to teach the game to an impatient Don Baron at an English seaside resort during Christmas 1917!

(E. W. Perera, the famed advocate known as the “Lion of Kotte”, was born at his mother’s home village of Unawatuna, Galle. Although a Christian, his father had publicly supported Col. Olcott and the Buddhist revivalists in the successful campaign to have Wesak (the full moon day in May) recognized by the Government as a public holiday. Legend has it that “E. W.” carried a copy of the infamous “Shoot to Kill” 1915 order of Governor Chalmers to England on board ship, concealed inside the sole of his shoe! While in England lobbying political figures during this time, he is also said to have devised the outline of the future Sri Lanka flag, with the lion emblem based on the original flag of Sri Wickrama Rajasinghe, the last King of Kandy who was dethroned by the British in 1815. Perera found the original Kandyan flag tucked away from view in a British hospital and breathed new life into it. Don Baron Jayatilaka, one-time headmaster of Olcott’s foundation Kandy (later Dharmaraja) College and later Vice-Principal of the Buddhist Ananda College in Colombo, was imprisoned along with other Buddhist leaders during Martial Law, and in the 1920s was to play a leading role in the reform movement that led up to the Donoughmore Commission and the subsequent acceptance by the Legislative Council of the Donoughmore Constitution).

After Woolf and the Sinhala delegates had done an immense amount of work in the media and at Westminster for over a year, they managed to arrange a meeting with the Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, W.A.S. Hewins, M.P. and his senior civil service staff. The “Ceylon” deputation consisted of the two aforementioned Sinhala delegates, Woolf, the Bishop of Lincoln, and several other English worthies. When Woolf introduced himself by informing the government team that he had been seven years in the Ceylon Civil Service, he got a frosty reaction from other side of the table. In the end their efforts met with what he terms “the inevitable refusal”. He winds up his account of the episode with the rhetorical question, “Who killed imperialism?” and answers it by adding contemptuously, “I, said the imperialist, with my imperialism – and my Hewinses and my refusals.” After his death in 1969, Leonard Woolf’s letters and other papers dealing with the aftermath of the 1915 Riots were deposited with the University of Sussex Library, and photocopies are with Cambridge University’s Department of South Asian Studies. They would surely make most interesting reading. Eventually British public opinion was roused and Westminster yielded most reluctantly, and a so-called “Shooting Commission” was set up to investigate (or whitewash!) the actions of the colonial authorities. Sir John Anderson, Chalmer’s replacement as Governor, is said to have exclaimed with horror that his countrymen appeared to have been schooled in brutality by the Germans in Belgium and that their conduct in Ceylon during the Martial Law period “deserves the loathing and disgust of every Englishmen”.

Tragically for subsequent Sri Lankan history, early 20^th century Buddhist revivalism tended politically to go hand-in-hand with an increasing degree of ethnic exclusivism. The 1833 Legislative Council’s (Governor-appointed) system of communal representation had created the political conditions for this social trend. “Ceylon Moors” were considered a distinct race for purposes of colonial administration (to the exclusion incidentally of “Indian Moors”). In 1905 a controversy had erupted over the banning by the Chief Justice of a Batticaloa Muslim advocate, M. C. Abdul Cader, from appearing before the High Court wearing the traditional fez. A mass meeting at the Maradana Mosque, and even a petition to the King Emperor in London, resulted. One difficulty for the petitioners was that the fez had only very recently started to be worn by some Ceylonese Moslems, having become fashionable after its introduction to the island by the exiled Egyptian nationalist, Arabi - or Orabi - Pasha). In any event, the Ceylon Supreme Court later withdrew the ban. (With regard to Muslim headwear, it is interesting to note that in early May 2001 the U.K. Sunday Times reported that London's Metropolitan Police would become the first force in Britain to allow Muslim policewomen to wear the traditional hijab -- or headscarf -- on duty. The police-issue version of the hijab, which covers the head, neck and shoulders, will be made from black or dark blue cotton and will feature a police-style black-and-white checkered band on its edges. The move is part of a drive to get more members of ethnic minorities to join the police).

Muslims and other minorities were often a target of political attack by elements of the early Sinhala Buddhist revivalist movement: for example, the militant Buddhist revivalist and Maha Bodhi Society founder – and one-time Olcott interpreter before falling out with the Theosophists – the Anagarika Dharmapala (né Don David Hewavitarne from Matara, a few kilometres east of Galle along the southern coastline) complained in 1922 that certain (non-Sinhala Buddhist) minorities “are employed in large numbers to the prejudice of the people of the island – sons of the soil, who contribute the largest share”. Moors became an early target of resentment: Dharmapala portrayed Muslim traders as unethical exploiters of Sinhala Buddhists. Revivalists complained that mosques (like Christian churches) in sacred Buddhist cities like Anuradhapura were an affront to Buddhism. In 1915, around the time of the anti-Muslim riots, Dharmapala - obviously well attuned to wartime anti-German sentiment in Britain - wrote to the Secretary of State for the Colonies: “…What the German is to the Britisher the Muhammedan is to the Sinhala. He is an alien to the Sinhala by religion, race and language…” (Presumably Dharmapala, born and raised in the Southern Province, was aware that the Muslim community in Galle Fort had been particularly supportive of Buddhist Mahinda College when the school was founded in 1892. Consequently a good proportion of the earliest pupils at the old Pedlar Street building were in fact not Sinhala Buddhist, but Muslim. In light of the events of 1915 and after, there is poignant irony here). Some time before the 1915 crisis, when explaining the animosity of Sinhala peasantry toward Muslim traders, then-Governor Chalmers had stated that the latter had “always been viewed by the villager with feelings entertained…in all lands towards transitory aliens who make money out of the local peasantry by supplying their wants at the shop…” (A foreshadowing can be seen here of the motivation for expulsion from Uganda of Asian (i.e. Indian) traders by Idi Amin in the 1970s). Against this charged background the “1915 Riots” had a profound impact on communal relations in the Crown Colony. Trading rivalry is thought to have been the main underlying cause of the outbreaks. Interestingly, Malay Muslims and Muslims to the North, Northwest and East were largely unaffected by the troubles compared with those in Colombo, central Ceylon and the South, where labour unrest and political tension were much more acute. This would suggest that the driving impulses for the communal tensions were economic rather than religious. In Colombo, rumour-mongerers whipped up communal angst by alleging atrocities against Sinhala women and children, such as rapes and massacres by Muslim mobs. The normally-serene precincts of the Maradana Mosque, School and their vast grounds were given over entirely to harbouring a cadjan and canvas “tent city” for a huge caravanserai of over 4,000 Muslim refugees in what one leading Colombo English-language newspaper later described as “the fierce alchemy of sorrow and suffering”. On a lighter note, Dr. Peterson in Great Days recalled how he and his fellow students at the Ceylon Medical College had to go to the Pettah to bring away those injured in the communal riots. As he told Manel Fonseka, the compiler of his oral reminiscences, almost 70 years later: “All sorts of things were being thrown out of the windows, lamps and cloth and so on. And tins of chocolates, too. We students couldn’t resist carrying off a few of those along wit our patients!”

One result of 1915 was that the “besieged” Muslim elite felt impelled by considerations of self-protection to collaborate more than ever with the British colonial administration. Symptomatic of this increased trend toward political isolation was the fact that the Muslim leadership was excluded from the infant Ceylon National Congress founded by a fragile alliance of Sinhala and Tamil nationalists in 1916-1917.

Another profound impact of the 1915 Riots was the added momentum the crisis provided for Sinhala cultural nationalism. The extreme over-reaction by the British against Sinhala nationalists and clergy naturally only strengthened Buddhist ethnic self-identification. The unfortunate “downside” effect was that the seeds were planted for the highly-communalised society that Sri Lanka has become today, far more so than was the case in 1915. One small example of this phenomenon: I vividly recall riding my bicycle in Galle Fort after dark one evening in 1974 and to my considerable alarm witnessing a nasty fight between three young men beneath a street light near the main entrance gate. Later I heard that the dispute had arisen because one of the young men, a Muslim, was romantically involved with a Sinhala (Buddhist) girl who was a sister of one of the others in the trio. In 2001 it was estimated that 74% of Sri Lanka’s total population (14.8 million in 1981, based on the census that year) was Sinhala, mostly concentrated in the densely populated southwest. Sri Lanka-origin Tamils made up about 12%, living mainly in the north and northeast. Indian Tamils, mostly descendants of tea workers brought in by British plantation owners in the later 19^th century, made up a further 6%.

Much more recently, it was disturbing to read reports of violent Sinhala-Muslim street clashes in early May 2001 at Muwanella, a small town in central Sri Lanka on the main Colombo to Kandy highway. Subsequent reports indicated that an ugly communal disturbance was triggered by attempts by Sinhala thugs (reportedly operating under political patronage) to collect “protection” money from Muslim shopkeepers in the town. According to police, it was the worst street violence in the town in 50 years, as an angry retaliatory mob led by angry young Muslim men armed with an improvised arsenal of home-made shotguns, rocks, firebombs and sticks burned down a number of shops belonging to Sinhala people, before police could impose a curfew. A few days afterwards (just after traditional Friday mosque prayers) police used tear-gas against mainly young, male Muslim street marchers in several areas of Colombo who were protesting over the incidents at Muwanella. Some Muslim demonstrators reportedly damaged school buses and vehicles, and (reportedly) led in one case by the son of a prominent Muslim politician, they attacked several places of worship, police stations and Sinhala shops in the Pettah and Maradana. Various politicians and religious leaders from the main communities appealed for calm while some commentators expressed a realistic fear that “communalist elements” might be trying to cash in on the unrest. Plus ca change, plus c’est la même chose…the communal virus (so E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe disgustedly termed it) persists to this day in Sri Lanka as in so many other countries and, notwithstanding this so-called age of globalization, insidiously resists all eradication efforts.

[xxii] Tucked away inconspicuously at the back of the 1976 Richmond Centenary Souvenir, in a section headed “Alphabetical Index to Pages of Remembrance”, is the following entry for page 19:

“Mr. Lionel A. Mendis – Pupil of Darrell, Member of Staff 1906-1910. Editor of ‘National Monthly’ and ‘Church of Christ in Ceylon’, and Founder, with others, of the National Missionary Society. Author of a number of books and pamphlets on national and religious subjects. Died 13^th October 1919. Donated by one who owes more to him than he can tell.”

There can be little doubt that the anonymous donor (and writer) in this instance was none other than the co-Editor of the 1976 Souvenir, Rev. Joseph Small.

Small’s account of Lionel Mendis appears in a 23-page pamphlet entitled A Christian Nationalist of Ceylon – The Life and Letters of Lionel Mendis, that he wrote in 1954 soon after his final return to Ceylon as Warden at the Peradeniya Training College. Mendis’ father had been a Sinhala Methodist minister, who was responsible for the building of the Methodist church at Dehiwela, Colombo in 1883, the same year that Joseph Small was born. There were five sons in the family, of whom Lionel was the oldest. Their father was a Theological Tutor at Richmond Hill from 1900 to 1903, during which time Lionel attended Richmond College as a dayboy, having been a hostel boarder there previously. He moved to Wesley College in his final school year, then after a brief spell as an office worker, became a teacher in Moratuwa. In 1906, aged only 20, he joined the Richmond staff as a hostel master. This was just before the typhoid outbreak at the school that followed the demolition of the old boarding hostel and the digging of the new hostel foundations. Lionel was one of the early cases and always recalled with gratitude how Principal Darrell had nursed him, until the disease struck down Darrell too, leading to his death on July 12, 1906.

By now Lionel was keen to enter training for the Methodist ministry, but initially was held back by the Mendis family’s straitened circumstances in the aftermath of their father’s death earlier that same year. A solution was found, in that he was able to continue teaching at Richmond while studying at the Richmond Hill Theological Institution, finally completing his studies there in 1910. During this time Lionel worked part-time as an evangelist in the Galle suburb of Mahamodera, where a sizable Muslim community resided. At the end of his Richmond studies, the brilliant young theology student was slated to go to India to further his studies at the newly established Bangalore Methodist Theological College. (Joseph Small himself was to teach there from 1928 to 1931).

Fate intervened however, in the form of a leprosy diagnosis. Segregation was necessary, so Lionel moved into a specially-built room at his mother’s home in Dehiwela, now a suburb of Colombo, where his sister devoted herself to nursing him for the remaining nine years of his life. During those final years he produced a stream of writings, in pursuit of his two great aims: Christian evangelization and the nationalistic salvation of Ceylon. His monthly magazine, “National Monthly”, sought to guide the rising tide of nationalism into the most fruitful channels. In 1914, after the outbreak of World War I, he expressed concern in a letter to a friend about articles in leading Buddhist papers criticizing Christianity for failing to prevent the War. In the same letter, he also criticised leading articles in certain religious newspapers that appeared to subordinate Christian principles to recruiting for the military. In this respect he found the Roman Catholic Church superior to the Protestant Churches. At other times he simply enjoyed the silence and beauty of the flower garden that he had made beside his isolation room, or building “fine castles in the air” in conversation with his younger brother George, a recent entrant to the Methodist Ministry. At times he felt a sense of self-abnegation at a point where Buddhism and Christianity seemed to converge (but also diverge, as he noted). Finally first his eyesight and then his strength left him, and he died quietly at home on October 13, 1919. He was only 32.

Naturally, Rev. Joseph Small attended the funeral, which he described as inspiring. Small commented that Lionel Mendis realized that many Ceylonese held a prejudice against Christianity because foreigners had imported it into the country, and to accept it would mean a betrayal of the religions of their ancestors. His belief was that true patriotism meant seeking whatever was best for one’s country, regardless of origin. In this way he sought to persuade his fellow Ceylonese to reconcile nationalist feeling with “foreign” Christian belief. His example was drawn from the ancient King Tissa, who had accepted Buddhism brought from North India to Hindu Lanka by Prince Mahinda. I would like to venture the suggestion that in this belief held by Lionel Mendis can be found a central tenet of Joseph Small’s own life in Sri Lanka, and the clue to Small’s quiet but firm support for the growing nationalist movement at Richmond College, especially in the bitter aftermath of the 1915 Riots and the Martial Law period.

J. Vincent Mendis, a founder of the Richmond National Association while a junior master at Richmond and who is quoted elsewhere in this profile of Small, was a brother of Lionel Mendis. Another sibling was the notable historian, Garret C. Mendis, born in 1893. Garret Mendis became a Lecturer at the University of Ceylon and taught there until he retired in 1954. He pioneered the scientific study of Sri Lankan history, writing many books such as “Early History of Ceylon”, “Ceylon Under The British”, and other works.

[xxiii] In one of his Daily News articles (18.9.78) E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe, by then the eminence grise of Sri Lankan journalists, described a deliciously ironic scene at the December 6, 1911 opening of the famous Tower Hall theatre in Maradana, Colombo. The play was Charles Dias’ Pandukabaya and on one side of the author sat the arch-conservative imperialist, Governor Sir Henry McCallum, while on his other side – in a rare appearance at such an event – sat none other than the spiritual spokesman of the Buddhist revivalist and nationalist movements and thorn in the paw of the British lion, the fiery Anagarika Dharmapala. The following year, in 1912, the Anagarika spoke in the very same hall in the presence of eminent members of the Sangha when (in good old Wesleyite Methodist style!) he thundered from the stage against the evils of drink. (The temperance and Buddhist revivalist/nationalist movements were closely inter-related at the time, another irony as some of the leading supporters on the revivalist movement, such as the arrack-renting Amarasuriya family in Galle, and indeed the founder of the Tower Hall itself, the liquor-importer G.D.H. Seneviratne known to his contemporaries as “Hendrick Appuhamy of Dematagoda”, had built up their early fortunes through the purveyance of alcoholic refreshment for the masses. Dharmapala later convinced the Tower Hall owner to forswear the bottle, join the Temperance Movement and hive off his lucrative liquor trade business to others less sensitised to the new ways).

[xxiv] Armand de Souza – born in Goa, India but a naturalized Ceylonese citizen, was one of the most powerful writers of his generation, and an outspoken figure who was once fined Rs. 250/- for contempt of court. He also figured in a court case stemming from the 1915 Riots and the Martial Law aftermath. Altogether the British put on trial for sedition a total of 8 Ceylonese newspaper editors. De Souza wrote a book on the events of that year, with the title “One Hundred Days in Ceylon Under Martial Law in 1915”, that was published in Colombo in 1916; it is now one of the scarcest books on colonial Ceylon, and was recently (April 2001) listed in an out of print books catalogue at US$195 – alas, well beyond the budget of this writer! With the benefit of hindsight, there is perhaps more than a little historical irony in the fact that the subject of Armand de Souza’s lecture given in July 1914 at the Richmond College Hall was, “Our Place in the Empire”. This was the first in a series of public lectures arranged by the Richmond National Association (R.N.A.) for the stated purpose of trying to “encourage and develop on properly constituted lines the growing public spirit and philanthropic instincts of our young men that are calling aloud for guidance”. [Extract from Richmond College Magazine 1914 Trinity Term Vol. 3 No. 2, article submitted by J. Vincent Mendis, Hon. Secy. R.N.A.; excerpted in 1994 Richmond Souvenir.]

It is easy in the modern context to forget how inescapable the British Empire must have seemed to many of the world’s inhabitants in the early 1900s. As James Morris has written, it “seemed so old, bore itself so majestically, that it had become a universal fact of life, something natural to the world”. In the later 1890s one leading British newspaper proudly advertised itself with the slogan, “the Daily Mail stands for the power, supremacy and greatness of the British Empire”. Frank Woodward at Mahinda, sincere Buddhist that he was, was reportedly downcast at the news of the death at sea during WWI of Lord Kitchener, that supreme warrior of Empire; as mentioned earlier, the 1939 edition of FLW’s Some Sayings of the Buddha had an introduction by Sir Francis Younghusband, the famed mystic and explorer who in his younger days had been an aggressive imperialist and proponent of the Great Game on India’s northern frontiers, declaring to Lord Curzon in the early 1900s that the Tibetans were “not a fit people to be left to themselves between two great [Chinese and British] Empires”. In his 1992 political memoirs, J.R. Jayawardene notes that it was not until the 1930s that any Ceylonese politician went so far as to publicly mention the word “I”- word - independence. (As noted earlier, the title of Armand de Souza’s 1915 public address in Galle arranged by the Richmond National Association was Our Place in the Empire). The early popularity in Ceylon’s European-run schools (including especially Buddhist Mahinda College) of the Boy Scouts movement is symptomatic of this dominant spirit of the age, as exemplified by a small incident described in the Richmond Centennial Souvenir by J. Vincent Mendis, a moving spirit behind the Richmond National Association. It happened during the First World War, at the Ceylon Cadet Battalion Annual Competition held on the old Colombo Race Course. As Mendis tells the story, when the various companies had taken up positions before the flagstaff base where the Commandant was in charge, a Richmond College cadet named Duncan de Lanerolle spotted that the Union Jack was flying upside down. Young Duncan boldly marched forward, smartly saluted the surprised Commandant, and said, “Excuse me, Sir, the Union Jack is flown upside down, which means that the Empire is in distress. I hope it is not so.” The (doubtless rather flustered!) Commandant looked up, saw that it was so, and took immediate corrective action. Lanerolle was a member of the newly-formed Richmond Scout Troop, and naturally had been taught the right and wrong ways of flying the Union Flag. It was precisely this spirit of subject peoples’ co-option that the young Galle schoolmaster and former Joseph Small pupil Wijayananda Dahanayake was demonstrating against when, a couple of decades later, he boldly led his St. Aloysius class along the ramparts of the old Dutch Fort in a “black flag” protest against local celebrations marking the anniversary of the accession of King George V.

The late-Victorian military hero Sir Hector Macdonald, a Scottish crofter’s son who had achieved the rare feat for the time of rising from the lower ranks of the British Army to become a Major-General, and who had arrived in Ceylon in March 1902 as commander of troops, evoked a similar spirit later that year. Presenting colours to a newly-established Boys Brigade troop in Colombo, “Fighting Mac” (as an admiring Victorian public knew him especially after his heroic and immensely skilful rearguard tactics at Omdurman in 1897 had saved the British expeditionary force from last-minute disaster at the hands of Sudanese Dervishes) complimented the lads on their fine turnout and expressed the hope that they would grow up to be “manly fellows” who in due course would transfer their allegiance to the colours in service of the Empire. On a subsequent occasion he was far less complimentary to a parade of Ceylon militia, mainly members of the “plantocracy”, even shouting at some of their “gentlemen” officers for their slovenly drill. The European upper echelons on the island never did forgive him that perceived slight, which along with his preference for non-English society may have contributed to his sudden fall from grace not long after; exactly a year after his arrival in Ceylon, he shot himself to death in a Paris hotel when the the New York Herald’s European edition published sensational allegations concerning his improper behaviour with Burgher schoolboys on a Kandy-bound train.

[xxv] The Servants of India Society was founded in 1905 by Gopal Krishna Gokhale (1866-1915), a respected Maratha member of the Indian National Congress and the leader of the moderate nationalists in the early phase of the Indian independence movement. In 1905 he was elected President of the Congress, only three years after leaving academia and entering politics. Gandhiji himself revered Gokhale as one of his political gurus, and Jinnah aspired to become the “Muslim Gokhale” early in his political career. Gokhale was deeply interested in social reform, opposing ill-treatment of the untouchables, or lowest-caste Hindus, and championing the cause of impoverished Indians living in South Africa. Servants of India Society members took vows of poverty and life-long service to the underprivileged. The Society eschewed sectarianism, since its members were of all religions and castes. It was the first secular organization in India to devote itself to underprivileged rural and tribal people, emergency relief work, the increase of literacy, and other social causes. It continues to exist to this day, and though few in members has had a disproportionate influence because of its practical demonstration of social service ideals. Members train for five years and accept very modest salaries. There are around five major branches throughout India. The example of Gokhale’s Servants of India would have been a very powerful one to nationalist-minded young people at Richmond and elsewhere, and their sympathisers like Joseph Small. Small himself quietly went to work in remote, impoverished villages during school vacations at Richmond. At this time, around 1910-1920, the Gokhale brand of “moderate” nationalism was shared by many “mainstream” Ceylon nationalists, who envisaged a sort of autonomous Dominion status for Ceylon within the British Empire. It seems likely that Woodward and Small took this “enlightened” view as well.

[xxvi] Father Mervyn Fernando, in a Colombo “Daily News” feature that appeared on March 21, 2001 reviewing the just-published “The Good At Their Best: Selected Writings of E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe, Actor and Journalist”, has this to say about Joseph Small, one of the many leading Sri Lankan personalities profiled in Wijeyesinghe’s writings:

“I was fascinated by what ECB had to say about a man I knew personally towards the end of his life, Rev. W. J. T. Small, whose name is almost synonymous with Richmond College. He regularly attended the meetings of our Astronomical Association even at the age of 90, travelling all the way from Galle to Colombo by bus. Up to…recent times, Christians and Buddhists ran on parallel tracks with hardly any communication between them. So Rev. Small had been very much ahead of his times. According to ECB ‘some of the most distinguished Buddhists in the Southern Province were guided to goodness and greatness’ by Rev. Small. He refers in particular to P. de S. Kularatna who made ‘Ananda [College] the pride of the Buddhists’ and S. F. de Silva ‘who rose to the pinnacle of the educational ladder’. Both had been devoted pupils of Rev. Small. He had also started the National Association of the College ‘aimed at producing patriots’.” In fact, writing about the legacy of Joseph Small, Wijeyesinghe goes so far as to state that pre-Independence Richmond was known for its “ultranationalism” and that “the nationalist seeds which Kuleratne and other old Richmondites sowed in Colombo came from the fruit which the Methodist missionary had planted in Galle”.

[xxvii] The Encyclopedia Britannica informs us that Halley’s Comet was the first comet whose return was mathematically predicted, thereby demonstrating that at least some comets are part of the solar system. In 1705 Edmond Halley, an English astronomer, published his findings showing that certain comets reported in 1531, 1607, and 1682 were really the same comet, and that it would reappear in 1758. The comet did reappear in that year, reaching its perihelion in 1759, and was named Halley’s Comet in his honour. Earlier manifestations include 1066, when it was recorded in the Bayeux Tapestry as having been a large, bright comet seen during the Norman Conquest, and various other recorded sightings every 76 years starting in 240 B.C. It has been calculated that the Comet moves at around 80,000 mph (128,000 kph).

The Encyclopedia suggests that Earth passing through part of its tail, which is millions of kilometres in length, may have been responsible for the exceptional brightness of the Comet in 1910. After 1910, it passed by Earth again in late 1985 and reached its perihelion in the spring of 1986. Spacecraft observations suggest that the Comet has an oblong nucleus of about 9 by 5 miles (15 by 8 km). It is composed of ice and rock dust covered by porous black crust with an outer temperature of 170 deg. F (about 80 deg. C), and as it rotates on its axis the sunward side vents dust and gases through the crust – hence the “tail”.

If the medieval Anglo-Saxons of 1066 were (as it turned out, with good reason!) superstitiously pessimistic about Halley’s Comet, so too were the rural Sinhala folk in 1910. Leonard Woolf, at the time AGA in Hambantota, six degrees north of the Equator, left a description of the comet’s appearance in his autobiography. But Woolf also drily recorded this episode in his official diary entry for April 29, 1910:

“The people [at Hatagala] informed me that they don’t like the comet: the present is an evil age for the people they say: among the misfortunes come upon them…are (1) the road tax, (2) the V.C. tax, (3) the irrigation rate, (4) the taxes on carts and guns, (5) the restrictions of chenas [cultivation clearings in the jungles] (6) a strict Assistant Government Agent. He [the Velvidane of Netolpitiya] invites me to take as my model Mr. Murray who allowed chenas freely and when he left the district wept among weeping headmen.”

The Sinhala villagers of 1910 were experiencing a horrendous outbreak of rinderpest, a cattle fever that wiped out whole herds of domestic cattle and buffalo in the Hambantota area. Woolf’s popularity among the locals did not benefit from his having to shoot cattle in affected areas. Woolf’s own reaction to the appearance of the Comet – as recorded half a century later in his autobiography - is, to say the least, unusual:

“From my point of view…there is something ridiculous about the universe – these absurd comets racing around the sun and the absurd suns flaming away at impossible speeds through illimitable empty space. Such futility is sinister in its silliness…”

As famous science fiction author, space expert and Sri Lanka resident Arthur C. Clarke sardonically noted in an essay contained in a book published in 1984, which describes Clarke’s experiences playing the role of Leonard Woolf the magistrate in the Sinhala film based on Woolf’s 1912 novel, Village in the Jungle, that observation certainly puts the universe in its place, as a rather ill-managed extension of Bloomsbury!

George Dangerfield, author of the well-known 1935 book, The Strange Death of Liberal England 1910-1914, tells readers that his first memory was of being held up to a window and shown Halley’s Comet in 1910, and in the first chapter he paints a vivid picture of Prime Minsiter Asquith hurying back to England aboard the Admiralty yacht Enchantress after receiving word that King Edward VII was seriously ill. Somewhere north of the Bay of Biscay at around three in the morning of May 7, 1910, a second message arrived from the new King George V, announcing his father’s death earlier that night. Saddened and shaken, Asquith went up on deck and gazed into the night sky, portentously aglow with Halley’s Comet. A bare three months earlier, as the Comet lit up the Himalayan skies, Qing Dynasty cavalry had burst into Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, and on the night of February 11, 1910 the thirteenth Dalai Lama, after narrowly escaping capture by the rampaging Chinese troops, had fled south into exile in Sikkim. Almost exactly two years later, in February 1912, the Chinese boy-emperor Pu Yi abdicated during a nationalist uprising, the world’s oldest monarchy ceased to exist, and the Dalai Lama returned to Tibet.

[xxviii] Leonard Woolf’s instinctive existentialism, the product of a “spiritual crisis” in his first year at Cambridge, stayed with him throughout a long and highly industrious life; in his eighties, he would write stoically: “This passage from non-existence to non-existence seems to me a strange and, on the whole, an enjoyable experience.” This kind of philosophy was in stark contrast to the typical late-Victorian Englishman’s view of the world as rational, harmonious, teleological – the kind of linear-progress weltenschauung that caused a 23-year-old Winston Churchill in his first public speech, made in 1897 while on home leave from his regiment stationed in Bangalore, India, to refer to “our mission of bearing peace, civilization and good government to the uttermost ends of the earth”. Woolf’s relativistic pessimism was also in stark contrast to the deeply-felt sense of higher purpose that fuelled the Christian evangelism that swept through middle-class England during the 1870s and 1880s, and impelled serious young men like Joseph Small to devote their lives to the spiritual betterment of their fellow creatures. Nevertheless, for all his inner misgivings about imperialism, misgivings that later led him to support the cause of Indian nationalism, Leonard Woolf throughout his years in Ceylon was the very model of the imperial civil servant. As has been said of the British soldier, the British missionary and the British imperial civil servant of those times was given a small island for his birthplace, and the whole world as his grave.

Leonard Woolf and Joseph Small were more-or-less contemporaries at Cambridge University: Woolf went up to Trinity College (then the citadel of Cambridge rationalism, the secular version of the evangelical social conscience) in 1899, on a classics scholarship. In a small, market-town environment like fin de siecle Cambridge, they must have crossed paths unwittingly time and again in the town’s labyrinthine warren of narrow streets, although their social circles would have been dramatically different, Woolf mixing with the likes of J.M. Keynes, E.M. Forster, Lytton Strachey and a rising young Cambridge don by the name of Bertrand Russell. All belonged to the Apostles, an exclusive University society whose membership (by invitation only) prided themselves on their scepticism, comprehensive irreverence (Woolf’s own words), and intellectually subversive attitude to all forms of authority, particularly religious. This “Cambridge spirit” – there was a well-known saying that an Oxford man thought he owned the world, whereas a Cambridge man did not care who owned it – resulted in Leonard Woolf’s lifelong disdain for status and pedigree, his lack of driving desire for power, wealth and other trappings of material success. His later Fabianism was an integral part of this core personality trait, and in this respect the social reformer Woolf more closely resembled the evangelical Methodist activist Small (and the Theosophical activist Woodward) than might appear to be the case at first glance. At any rate, the Cambridge that both Small and Woolf attended at the dawn of the twentieth century (Woodward went there some years ahead of the other two) has been described as productive of one of the most creative and interesting groups of modern times. Fin de siecle Cambridge was a place of intellectual ferment, with a challenging, often non-conformist atmosphere in many ways more akin to the heady 1960s than (say) the early 2000s.

Also like Small, and indeed Woodward, Woolf - the secular Jew - was a product of the later Victorian expanding mercantile-based middle class, his grandfather having been a shopkeeper and his father a successful barrister, whose untimely death when Leonard was only 11 years old had left the family genteelly impecunious. For Woolf, a Ceylon Civil Service (“CCS”) cadetship was much less a matter of mission, divine or otherwise, than of embarrassing pecuniary necessity. He frankly dreaded the prospect of leaving his close circle of friends for an alien land, devoid (as he saw it) of intellectual stimulation. And yet, in his own secular, serious-minded way, in the space of a few years after his arrival in the colony in December 1904 he would become every bit as dedicated to the welfare of Ceylon and its people as the missionaries he was determined to distinguish himself from. Like Darrell, Woodward and Small, all highly competent men like himself, he drove himself remorselessly. In Hambantota, he often worked 16-hour days in the most austere conditions. He became proficient in both Tamil and Sinhala. At times he was criticized by locals for being over-zealous in his application of rigid moral and administrative standards – the chena permit restrictions being but one example – criticism that with benefit of hindsight he frankly endorsed in his memoirs. The same man who would later become a leading critic of the sacred premises of British colonial rule, devoted himself heart and soul in the best tradition of paternalistic middle-class British imperialism, to the welfare of “his” people. (It has been written that the Ceylon Civil Service at its zenith combined the early 19^th century values of liberal humanitarianism with utilitarian ideals, modified to fit in with the practical realities of governing in the East. Unlike some of the more outstanding missionary educators, however, CCS men – while sometimes highly knowledgeable academic scholars of Sinhala history and culture – generally did not hold any special sympathy with the Ceylonese people or the spirit of their civilization, let alone their aspirations toward self-determination. Hence the description of them as a “caste of benign despots”). Most of these administrators were long forgotten by the 1960s, when as an octogenarian Woolf returned to the independent Dominion of Ceylon on a sentimental visit half a century after he last departed her shores in 1911; in his case however, he was remembered and the respect and genuine affection everywhere displayed for him was touching. At the time of his return visit, Dr. W. Dahanayake of Galle was caretaker P.M. and with his finely attuned historical sense saw to it that his Hambantota official diaries were rescued from bureaucratic oblivion and published, with a fascinating introduction by leading Sinhala scholars.

Other parallels come to mind between the secular-minded Woolf and his educational missionary contemporaries in Ceylon. Like the youthful Small, who in 1906 at age 23 was entrusted with the running of a large school without any previous teaching experience, Woolf at around the same time and at a similar age quickly experienced the remarkable delegation of authority that was so typical of British colonial administration, and would be almost inconceivable for a newly-appointed government servant or schoolteacher today. Within four years from his arrival, Woolf was in day-to-day sole charge of a remote area (Hambantota District) comprising 100,000 square miles and a scattered mainly-rural population of 100,000 souls. (The entire Crown Colony was officially run by no more than a few dozen British civil servants, although in reality over much of the island everyday power lay with the likes of the local headmen and money-lenders). Consequently his range of duties appears almost limitless by modern standards, including as they did, administration, judicial work, investigative magistracy, customs, agronomy, dispute arbitration, and policing. Once he oversaw the Mannar pearl fishery, with over 40,000 Arabs; another time he oversaw the annual Kataragama pilgrimage. Living conditions were more often than not extremely austere, and involved much arduous circuit travel by foot, horseback, bicycle or jolting buffalo cart. (This was at the tail-end of the Empire’s “heroic” period)!

All the time this amazing adventure in his life was happening, like Joseph Small and other enlightened missionary educators at around this time, in his private thoughts Leonard Woolf knew full well that there was a fundamental fallacy in the imperial system, that its anachronistically authoritarian premises were directly antithetical to the prevailing political and social values in contemporary Britain itself, and that they really belonged to an past era that had effectively ended over half a century before. In retrospect, the final 15 years of the 19^th Century saw the last flush of the “red-coat era” when British imperial possessions (mainly in Africa) had increased dramatically to around 2.6 million square miles, when imperial Britain glittered on its splendid pinnacle, the envy of the entire world until the “khaki-era” Boer War fatally tarnished Kipling-esque imperialism. By the very early 1900s nationalism was spreading rapidly in Ireland and in emergent Asian countries like Japan (outright winner of the 1905 Russo-Japanese war), Burma and India, and the loud awakening of the urbanized, unionized working classes was starting to change forever the political climate of Britain itself. For not much longer in world history would there survive what the writer James (now Jan) Morris has described as “the deliberate enclavity…undeniably effective in sustaining the brazen bluff that lay at the heart of Empire [to foster] sham alienations…hypocrisies…apparently unbridgeable gulfs [based upon] racial awareness and arrogance”. In a 1947 poll, it transpired that around 75% of the British people did not know the difference between a colony and a Dominion.

In his letters home, Woolf reflected this new mood when he privately ridiculed the “circumstantial air of a tropical suburbia” that his European colleagues generated around themselves, middle class folk at home with patrician pretensions abroad, bolstering their frequently empty social lives with a ruling caste mentality, elaborately-outdated class system and quaint assumptions of racial superiority. At the time, to express such scepticism in his position about the permanency and precepts, the behaviourist fallacies of the British Empire was akin to questioning the principles of the solar system. Like many of the missionary educators, as time went on and circumstances permitted, Woolf deliberately excluded himself more and more from this social milieu of Empire. It was his way of coping with the inner conflict. It may also have enabled him to avoid what Lord Curzon, as newly-arrived Viceroy of India a few years before, had criticized as the typical expatriate (British) Indian civil servant’s perception of himself as living “in unfortunate exile in a land of regrets”; according to Curzon, greatly-improved steam and postal communications with Europe from the later 1800s contributed to this pervasive feeling of displacement and lack of heart-felt commitment to life in India. Certainly Woolf’s instinctive empathy for the local people far exceeded that of most of his colleagues, at a time when very few Englishmen yet wondered if it might actually be wrong in principle for one nation to forcibly rule another; hence the popularity even today in Sri Lanka of his 1912 novel, Village In The Jungle. Like the missionary educators and most of his CCS peers and superiors, the “professionals” of empire, Woolf believed in principled, well-disciplined, incorruptible and purposeful performance of his responsibilities. After all, they came from broadly similar, middle-class social backgrounds, all of them without exception raised on a rigorous diet of what Woolf later called a “classical paté de foie gras” education!

Within a very few years from Woolf’s Hambantota sojourn, however, in the grim aftermath of the bloody stalemates at Flanders and the Somme, imperialism was fast becoming an embarrassment to the educated British middle-classes, its erstwhile primary supporters; unsurprisingly after 1918 both the ICS and CCS noticed the number and quality of their new applicants declining sharply. In Ceylon, the disgraceful handling of the 1915 crisis by a panicked and inept colonial administration changed for many any lingering perception of Anglo-Saxon “superiority”, in parallel with the dramatic decline in deference displayed by ordinary Britons towards their social “betters” in the aftermath of the latter group’s often-disastrous military conduct of the First World War. Public awareness of the terrible atrocity of April 13, 1919 at Amritsar, Punjab Province of India, where British troops under Brigadier-General Dyer fired indiscriminately on an peaceful crowd gathered to hear testimony from victims of harsh government reprisals for an earlier incident (a missionary had alleged that someone had molested her on a city street), would have exacerbated the deep sense of anger and disillusionment over the official handling of the 1915 Riots. In hindsight, as the historian William Manchester has written, we can see that just ten words spoken in 1922 by Tory premier-in-waiting Bonar Law (he of 1915 Martial Law notoriety) in criticism of the post-war Turkish policy of Lloyd George’s doomed coalition government, effectively provided the epitaph for Great Britain’s golden imperial era: “We cannot act alone as the policeman of the world.” It would not be too many decades before that particular poisoned chalice would be handed over to America!

Unlike the more individualistic missionary educators like Joseph Small, however, Woolf belonged to a highly homogenized ruling caste that, while it generally rewarded hard work, demanded undeviating loyalty at the expense of individuality or creative non-conformity. Outwardly at least, he followed to the letter, even ruthlessly at times, centrally-determined policies even when he believed them to be locally inapplicable, wrong or unjust. While Small, Woodward, Highfield and their ilk worked in schools alongside Ceylonese colleagues who were often in highly responsible positions, it was not until 1923 that a Ceylonese national reached even Woolf’s relatively junior level in the CCS of Assistant Government Agent (AGA), and then only in the minor Mannar posting. (In fairness it should be added here that it was not until 1940 that Richmond actually had a Ceylonese Principal). Even a distinguished, superbly able and loyal CCS man like (later Sir) Ponnambalam Arunachalam never made it to GA level. Lord Curzon, that “most superior person” who was Viceroy of India from 1898 until 1905, the year before Joseph Small arrived in Galle, once observed that there were no Indian natives in the Government of India because among all the 300 million people of the sub-continent, there was not a single man capable of the job, native Indians being “less than school children”. In Ceylon at the turn of the century, while giving a speech at the Trinity College, Kandy Prize-Giving, Sir Alexander Ashmore, then Ceylon’s Colonial Secretary, reportedly explained that it was necessary to bar “natives” from certain key posts since the “locals” were lacking in that high sense of duty and honour which the British Government expected of its civil servants.

Little wonder then that the British “ruling caste” – just like the youthful imperialist Winston Churchill back in 1897 - saw indigenous colonial political aspirations as a hindrance to “good government”. Such views about all indigenous people’s incapacity for self-government (at least in the “non-white” colonies) were part of the almost universally accepted establishment perception of imperial responsibility. Curzon honestly could not understand anyone holding a contrary view of Empire – it being “so sacred and so noble a thing”.

For all the shortcomings of his short career as a colonial administrator, the at-heart nonconformist Woolf never shook off the emotional impact of his ”Eastern experience”. His later letters and memoirs often raise poignantly the spectre of his years in rural Hambantota. In his own way, like Joseph Small, he felt ever-bound to Ceylon and her people. In a Proustian passage in his memoirs, he states: “I have only to murmur to myself Angunakolapelessa and it brings to me from 50 years ago quite clearly the vision of that small Sinhalese village: I can feel again the whip of heat across my face from the village path: I can hear again the hum of insects across the scrub jungle: I can smell again the acrid smell of smoke and shrubs!”

Woolf died in 1969, aged almost 90. Small survived him by almost a decade. Both, in their highly individual ways, will be long remembered in Sri Lanka.

[xxix] As the 1951 Richmond Diamond Jubilee Souvenir so aptly states, Saturday the 18^th of September 1915 “stands out as the darkest day on the Hill after the death of Mr. Darrell”. The Richmond party consisted of 15 swimmers, and apart from Mr. Amarasekara two senior boys, A. J. Fonseka and W. H. de Silva, lost their lives. Had it not been for the heroic efforts of Mr. Small and Mr. Bandara, more boys would have died in the sea that day. The Closenberg incident compounded an earlier Richmond tragedy, the drowning two years earlier at Dodanduwa Lake (between Colombo and Galle) of another College pupil, C. V. M. Goonewardene, who was one of a party of picnickers from the school. Some years later, according to Norah Roberts, a similar kind of tragedy hit the Roman Catholic St. Aloysius College in Galle. Father Soden, a talented Austrian Jesuit teacher at the school who had arrived in Galle in 1921 and who was especially known for his interest in photography, was leading some pupils on a photographic outing at Watering Point, near Closenberg, when one boy’s camera washed off a rock into the sea. The boy tried to recover his camera but got into difficulties. Fr. Soden went into the water to assist him and both were carried out to sea by the strong current and drowned. Norah Roberts tells the story of how one member of the Perera family that once owned the still-standing mansion, also called Closenberg, that overlooks the bay, miraculously avoided drowning in the sea off Galle harbour in the early part of the 1800s. He was swept off a barge by a large wave, and had given himself up for lost when he was caught in a current and washed ashore, alive, at nearby Kaluella – a marvellous escape in such treacherous waters. Roberts recounts how in the 1870s Governor Gregory himself narrowly escaped drowning in Galle harbour while disembarking upon his return from furlough in England. During the S.W. monsoon in particular, the old sea captains dreaded Galle harbour, exposed as it was to the heavy ocean rollers and with its submerged rocks and rocky bottom that afforded little purchase for a ship’s anchor. Small wonder then that the harbour bed is littered with submerged wrecks from centuries gone by, a joy for modern marine archaelogists like Somasiri Devendra, and that when Colombo’s massive new breakwater was completed in the early 1880s, it led to Galle’s rapid eclipse as a sea-going international emporium.

Herbert Keuneman, himself a Sri Lankan Burgher, wrote an entertaining account of his southern birthplace titled Galle – Something To Crow About (it appears in the 1976 Richmond Souvenir) in which he mentions a remarkable natural event in Galle harbour, as recalled to him by his (creole) Portuguese-speaking grandmother. She remembered as a young pupil-teacher on her way to school one morning, coming within sight of the harbour and noticing that the water had vastly withdrawn and on the wet sand were exposed the back-bones of long-drowned ships. Years later, Keuneman realized that what his grandmother must have seen that day was the aftermath of the paroxysmal explosion of the Krakatau (Krakatoa) volcano in Indonesia on August 26, 1883 (incidentally, just seven weeks after the birth of Joseph Small). Over 36,000 human lives were lost to the resultant 100-foot-plus tsunami waves that slammed into the Sunda Strait in Western Java and southern Sumatra. Most likely the “sucking” effect on Galle harbour was caused less by these giant tsunami waves, which were mostly confined to the Sunda Strait, than by the attendant atmospheric pressure waves that rippled around the globe. In his enchanting 1930 classic Jungle Tide, the writer John Still mentions quantities of pumice to be found among the flotsam thrown up by the ocean along the remote North Eastern coastline of Ceylon; since the island lacks volcanoes, Still speculated that this may have been the last relic of the great eruption when the sea broke into Krakatoa a half century earlier. At any rate, the sound of the massive volcanic explosion itself was heard as far away as Australia.

[xxx] Albert P. had a story that illustrates perfectly Rev. Small’s intensely scrupulous character. Some 23 years after his death, I serendipitously re-established contact with Albert’s children, who are now scattered throughout the globe. Chanaka Panditharatne, who lives with his family in Oman, sent me the following anecdote from the late 1960s or early 1970s that he recalled hearing from his father. Albert, who had been a Richmondite under Alec Sneath’s principalship in the 1930s, was still serving with Colombo Customs at the time in question:

“Somewhere in the late 60’s or early 70s Rev. WJTS was returning to Sri Lanka on the P. & O. liner ‘Oriana’ which used to do the London/Australia run. My father was still then in H. M. Customs (as it was known then). In order to hasten Rev. WJTS passage through the customs, along with a customs preventive officer (PO) my father had met Rev. WJTS on board the ship. The PO had asked the Rev. whether he had anything to declare and Rev. had responded that he had a new tape recorder. PO had then said that if it was declared as a used tape recorder (or even if it was new but used as the Rev. had used it a few times in the UK) the customs duty would be significantly lower. However the Rev. had said that he had not used it and the tape recorder was delivered directly to the ship by the vendor and was still in the original packing. The PO had no option but to charge full customs duty.”

[xxxi] The Smalls’ stay in India coincided with a pivotal time in that country’s slow but steady march towards national self-determination. Mahatma Gandhi symbolically declared January 26, 1930 to be “Independence Day”, and on March 12 of that same year began his famous “Salt March to the Sea” that ended at the remote fishing village of Dandi on the Indian Ocean a few weeks later, on April 5. This peaceful demonstration was followed by widespread civil unrest that resulted in violent police action, with over 100,000 arrests by May 1931, including Gandhiji himself. After his release in early 1931 the Mahatma (whom Winston Churchill of course promptly characterized as a “seditious fakir”) held a series of unprecedented informal meetings with the Viceroy, Lord Irwin, at the newly-completed viceregal palace in New Delhi. Later that same year Gandhi visited Britain and took tea with King George V at Buckingham Palace (generating further Churchillian fulminations). By now an increasing minority of Englishmen resident in India were displaying covert or even open sympathy towards the nationalist cause. Around this time the novelist George Orwell, a former Burma colonial police officer, while travelling on an Indian train happened to fell into conversation with a British official of the Indian Education Service. Gradually both men discovered that they shared a common antipathy to the whole imperial ethos, and at their destination as Orwell later wrote, “We parted as guiltily as any adulterous couple”.

It would be interesting indeed to know something of Joseph Small’s thoughts on the Indian political scene during his teaching sojourn in Bangalore. As Pandith Nehru later wrote, “the best of individuals seem to me to play a relatively unimportant role when vast elemental forces are to play against each other”. In hindsight, the events of 1930-1 heralded the final stage of the decline of Empire, and given Joseph Small’s known sympathy for the nationalist cause while at Richmond, he must have found this a highly fascinating time to be in India. (The very early 1930s also saw a failed nationalist uprising in Burma. Ironically, this time coincided with the late afternoon high tide of Empire from a purely geographical aspect). The 1935 Government of India Act, the longest single piece of legislation ever passed at Westminster, finally gave Indians a substantial share in the running of their own country. (Former Viceroy Lord Curzon, who died in 1925, must surely have been spinning in his grave)! A few years later in 1938, General Dyer, the chief villain of the piece at Amritsar in April 1919 - or the heroic preventer of a repetition of the Great Indian Mutiny, depending on one’s point of view - died after a stroke; refusing to be comforted by continuing expressions of support, he told his daughter-in-law: “I don’t want to get better. I only want to die, and to know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong.” Which brings to mind the old saying about the wise owl of Minerva spreading its wings only at dusk.

[xxxii] The strange case of H. H. (Henry) Engelbrecht the Boer has already been referred to in a earlier note, in regard to his arbitrary imprisonment by the British colonial authorities on a trumped-up charge of assisting the enemy, possibly motivated by Engelbrecht’s earlier refusal to take the oath of allegiance to the Crown after the Boer War ended and most of his fellow POWs had done so, in order to be allowed to return to South Africa. It is doubtful (though not impossible) that Small would ever have met Engelbrecht, but the Hambantota-based Boer’s story was well known to contemporaries. Leonard Woolf has left us with this arresting description of his appearance: “He was tall, straight, and very thin, his hair and beard reddish, his eyes small, very light blue with a glint in them every now and then of icy malignancy.” According to Woolf, Engelbrecht behaved toward the Sinhala in the same manner as his fellow-Boers treated black Africans, for which, not unnaturally, he was hated in Hambantota. Woolf recalled sitting as Police Magistrate one day when a paternity case involving Engelbrecht came before the court. A large crowd had gathered at the Police Court, and when the Sinhala complainant produced her baby as supporting evidence, it was apparent from its skin tone that the infant had European blood. Engelbrecht denied paternity, but Woolf found against him and ordered maintenance. He recalled that the crowd, silent and tense before the ruling, then filed out of court with almost audible sighs of relief. Woolf suggests in his autobiography that Engelbrecht’s copulatory activities were at least partly responsible for the two most horrible acts of revenge that the locals took on him. In one incident, as mentioned in my article, his two magnificent cart bulls were decapitated and the heads left on his doorstep one morning. Woolf enquired into the matter and became convinced that this had been the work of the brothers of the woman in Police Court that day. The other, even more horrible incident, involved a young bear cub rescued and reared by Engelbrecht, which often followed him around the Yala jungles like a pet dog. One day the bear managed to escape from its pen at Engelbrecht’s lodgings, and happily followed his master’s scent along the road. Everyone in Hambantota knew that the bear was harmless, but they also knew that it belonged to Engelbrecht, so some of them beat the poor creature to death in the street.

Interestingly enough, when the writer and corporate financier Christopher Ondaatje, himself of old Sri Lanka Burgher stock, was re-visiting Yala Game Park in the early 1990s, he not only encountered wild descendants of Engelbrecht’s original domestic cattle herd that had scattered while he was in detention camp in 1914, but he also met a local villager named Baba Singho. Baba, who was about 75 years old at the time and was blind in one eye, had been a tracker all his life and was said to be the illegitimate grandson of H. H. Engelbrecht, a rumour that he had always denied aggressively. Ondaatje notes however, that he was “certainly more fair-skinned than everyone else” and speculates that even after so many years, such was the hatred and contempt for Engelbrecht retained in local folk memory, that the old man didn’t want to be associated with his name. A photograph of Baba Singho appears in Ondaatje’s remarkable book about his Sri Lanka experiences, The Man-Eater of Punanai.

[xxxiii] Small certainly was not unique among his missionary colleagues in this regard. Included in a supplement to the Colombo Island newspaper published on June 22, 2001 to celebrate the 125^th anniversary of Richmond College’s founding, in an article about the activities of the Richmond Union (U.K.) since the 1980s, is a brief account of a luncheon for Richmondites hosted by Rev. J. Dalby at his home. John Dalby first came to Ceylon as Vice-Principal of Wesley College, Colombo in 1926, and for a year in 1939-40 he acted as Principal of Richmond during the interregnum between Alec Sneath and E. R. de Silva. Before lunch began, the aged Dalby (he passed away not long afterwards) startled and impressed his Sri Lanka-born guests by uttering a prayer – in classical Sinhala!

The writer James Morris points out in his masterly evocation of fin de siécle British imperialism, Farewell The Trumpets, that languages especially were an imperial concern. The most unlikely members of the imperial services, even “dim infantry subalterns”, seemed able to master Burmese, Arabic, Nguni or Fijian. He gives as examples a young ICS member, posted to Darjeeling in 1900, who so mastered Tibetan that after only 4 years he published a Tibetan Dictionary; or the Welsh Wesleyan missionary James Evans, otherwise expunged from history owing to alleged misconduct with American Indian squaws, who left as his only lasting memorial the hooked alphabet of the Cree language. The mastery of technique was often the key to authority – and acceptance. It was indeed a “diligent empire”.

[xxxiv] In a similar vein, the American Baptist missionary Harriet Winslow, who became first principal of the pioneer girls’ college at Uduvil on the Jaffna Peninsula, described how she had “approached with trembling the hideous figure called Boodhu” during a visit to a Buddhist temple in Galle shortly after first arriving in Ceylon early in 1820, while the Winslows were guests of Rev. and Mrs. McKenny, the Irish couple who ran one of the earliest Wesleyan missions in the town. Mrs. Winslow went on to comment in her diary about “the prospect of bringing these poor idolaters to a knowledge of the truth”. In the (Colombo) Methodist Mission Press Jubilee Memorials 1814-1864, there appears this sentence: “On account of the strong hold which Buddhism has upon the minds of the Singhalese generally in the south of the island, all the conquests of Christianity are as the wresting of the prey from the teeth of the enraged lion.” The writer, while noting that Christian tracts are eagerly snapped up by “Moormen, Hindus, and Buddhists alike”, regrets that the “self-reliance of the Mahommedans” causes them to feel “sore displeasure” at assertions of Christ’s divinity, yet expresses the hope that such assertions may yet “scatter the illusions of Islam”. In 1888, the Cambridge-educated Advocate Alfred Edward Buultjens (1865-1916) scandalized his fellow-Burghers by renouncing Christianity and becoming a Buddhist (almost unheard of for a Ceylonese Burgher) on his return that same year to Ceylon. His old school, St. Thomas’ College, Mutwal, where he had been an outstanding student who had won the Bishop’s Prize for Divinity, actually erased his name from the school’s panel of honour. As the journalist E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe drily wrote about Buultjens in 1978, his fellow Dutch Burghers shed enough tears over his conversion to fill another canal! (This was only a few years after the 1883 Kotahena Riots brought to the surface the mounting tensions between some of the well-established Colombo Christians and the increasingly-confident Buddhist revivalists). Buultjens went on to play a vital role in two important movements – the cause of Buddhist education, and the emerging trade union movement. In 1889 at age 24, coincidentally the same age as Joseph Small when he was appointed Principal at Richmond College some 17 years later, Buultjens became Principal at the Pettah Buddhist Boys School (later Ananda College). From 1890 to 1903 as General Manager of Buddhist Schools, Buultjens helped to establish such schools all over the Island. For several years he edited the militantly anti-Christian weekly The Buddhist which attacked the missionary objectives of conversion. Typically of many 19^th century radicals, he was a strong supporter of female emancipation, being active in the Women’s Education Society in the 1890s and helping to set up Buddhist girls’ schools providing a modern education. In 1893 he became secretary of the newly-formed Printers’ Union during a ground-breaking strike at the English-owned H. W. Cave & Co., Ceylon’s biggest printer and bookseller. To cap all this, Buultjens was one of the leading scholars of his time, being proficient in medieval Dutch and Pali. Along with Dharmapala and a few other leading activists, he was both a prominent figure in the Buddhist revival of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries and a champion of working class agitation. And yet compared to others, Buultjens’ contributions seem to have fallen into comparative obscurity; perhaps (or perhaps not) his eclipse reflects a core ambivalence in the historically often-symbiotic, interdependent relationship between majority Sinhala Buddhists and the once-dominant Burgher minority, and the increasingly divisive emphasis on “racial purity” among the more radical Sinhala nationalists of the post-Independence era. At any rate, in his 1978 article E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe - never one to avoid tackling a sensitive issue if he felt it merited discussion - raised the question as to why no statue or portrait existed to mark Buultjens’ great services to religion and education - and pointedly added that people were beginning to ask why.

H. A. I. Goonetileke, referring to 19^th century American Christian missionaries in the north of Ceylon, charitably offers this perspective in his introduction to Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes: “[A]s the century progressed, and fears and suspicions receded, the hot ardours of spiritual militancy began to be replaced by the warm passions of a gentler humanization, and the blatant misunderstandings and impatient dismissals of the variety, colour and depth of native custom and belief gave way to more balanced and perspicacious judgments.” Certainly, from what the 1864 Jubilee Memorials author tells us, those Galle folk who did become Methodists, “have ever been remarkable for the attachment they have shown their pastors”.

[xxxv] Annie Besant (1847-1933) arrived in India in 1893, after a varied career including life as the wife of an Anglican clergyman, from whom she separated in 1873, then atheist, social activist and Fabian Socialist. In 1902 she presided at the initiation of the 13-year-old Jawaharlal Nehru as a Theosophist, although Nehru soon left the movement behind him. In 1907 she succeeded Col. Olcott as the third President of the Theosophical Society. Politically highly active in India, she started the militant Home Rule League in 1916 and went on to preside over the Indian National Congress the flowing year, having previously designed its orginal banner. The British administration interned her without trial for part of World War I, after she refused deportation. She wrote: “I love the Indian people as I love none other, and…my heart and my mind…have long been laid on the altar of the motherland.”

In 1909, together with the charismatic, highly eccentric (and in some of his personal proclivities rather dubious) Theosophist C. W. Leadbeater, Annie Besant was closely involved in the recruiting of a 14-year-old South Indian Brahmin youth, K. Krishnamurti, into the Society and his preparation by “C.W.L.” at the Society’s headquarters in Adyar, Madras for his eventual role as “World Leader” and vehicle for the advent of the Metteyya Bodhisattva, under the banner of the occultist “Order of the Star of the East”. Eastern Star conventions, with their heady mix of eastern spiritualism, vegetarianism and pacifism attracted large numbers of questing young people to annual Woodstock-like conventions in Holland during the immediate post-First World War period. To Annie Besant’s intense dismay, Krishnamurti however was to abandon altogether Theosophism and his World Leader role in 1929, declaring that “Truth is a pathless land, unapproachable by any path, religion, or organized belief”.

Pupul Jayakar, author of Krishnamurti – A Biography, makes the point that once Krishna and his younger brother Nitya had been accepted into the Theosophical fold, everything possible was done to strip them of their “Indianness”. Their mentors at Adyar decided that they should speak only English, they dressed as Europeans and had their hair cut and parted in the centre in the approved Theosophical manner, they ate with a fork and spoon rather than with their fingers, and so forth. The boys were to become English gentlemen, because in Leadbeater’s scheme of evolution, English gentlemen represented the pinnacle of human development. Even the so-called “instructions” that C.W.L. claimed to have received from the invisible Himalayan “Masters” (or “Mahatmas”), laying out the principles for the boys’ future education, were steeped in typically British-colonial prejudice about Indian culture. In an extreme way, this attitude reflected the general Euro-centricity of many of the foreign-directed educational endeavours in both India and Ceylon, a mind-set to which the Ceylonese Theosophical-Buddhist schools headed by Europeans in the post-1880 “Olcott” era arguably were as inherently predisposed, as the Christian mission schools. On the obverse side of the coin, early 20^th century Christian mission schools like Richmond College could harbour – and indeed foster – growing nationalist sentiment every bit as much as their rival Buddhist foundations. As Krishnaji said, Truth is a pathless land.

[xxxvi] Lyn Ludowyk, who was of mixed-race “Burgher” descent, in his childhood memoirs has left us a finely-nuanced account of the subtle ambiguities and apparent contradictions that were an inherent part of colonial social life. For adult Ceylonese, to describe a “European” as “anti-native” was the ultimate condemnation; yet those few Europeans who did not seem to be “anti-native” were deemed by those same Ceylonese to be “not quite ‘Europeans’ of the purest water”. Those select Europeans who were in more intimate contact with the “natives” somehow “lacked the flavour of the crème de la crème of the group”. And while most missionaries were in daily contact with their flock, “they were not to be compared in influence or eminence with other Europeans”. (The Sri Lanka-born Canadian writer Michael Ondaatje in his 1982 book Running In The Family refers to the large social gap continuing into in the earlier part of the 20^th century, between the intermarried, mixed-race Burghers and the Europeans and English who were never part of the Ceylonese community, being regarded for the most part as totally separate and “transients, snobs and racists”). As Ludowyk points out, the pejorative use of the term “native” was also common among indigenous Ceylonese themselves to categorize nuances of status within their own society – what Michael Powell describes as the way in which colonial peoples unconsciously absorb the “destructive sub-text of valuation” from their foreign rulers. Powell describes as an example of a European flaunting the conventions of the time, Woodward’s refusal to mount the carriage awaiting him at the Galle jetty on his arrival there in August 1903, and instead his insistence on walking along with the Sinhala dignatories assembled to greet him, all the way through the old Dutch gateway, past the Kachcheri and along the narrow lanes of the Fort to Mahinda College’s then-location at the junction of Pedlar and Church Street. The message was not lost on his companions. Small’s preference for riding a bicycle around the Galle area would have sent a similar message to the local people. This is one of many reasons that such men are remembered with true affection long after their more “eminent” contemporaries in the European community in Ceylon have long since been forgotten.

(When the Prince of Wales, the future King-Emperor George V, visited India in 1906, the same year that Joseph Small arrived in Ceylon, he went on shikari accompanied by 14,000 people and 600 elephants. A 50 mile road was specially built to connect his two hunting camps. Some years later, his oldest son also travelled to India and was met by the Maharaja of Bharatpur in an open landau drawn by 8 elephants! The grander style could have its drawbacks, however. George Nathaniel Curzon, first and last Marquess of Kedleston, who was Viceroy of India from 1898 until 1905, visited the Persian Gulf in true high imperial style in the very early 1900s. In Kuwait, after being carried ashore on the backs of retainers, there being no jetty, he was conveyed to the Sheikh’s palace in a victoria that had been specially imported from Bombay. The Arab horses pulling it had never been between shafts before, and while Viceroy and Sheikh conferred in the latter’s palace they spitefully kicked the carriage to pieces! Curzon later recorded wryly that he and his host had to walk back to the embarkation point “very gingerly, over heaps of ordure”. The incident may have indirectly reminded the Viceroy of his brief visit to Ceylon in 1887, when he was still plain George Curzon, M.P. A sufferer from a spinal defect that required him to wear a steel body cage every day of his adult life, he thus described his harrowing night-time treks by bullock cart: “I had to curl up like a caterpillar with stomach ache. Not a wink of sleep: jolt, jolt, jingle, jingle, mixed with the most diabolical noises from the driver.”)

[xxxvii] It seems that the notion of chewing one’s food properly to promote longevity must have been something of a Victorian preoccupation. In The Several Lives of a Victorian Vet, their biography of the pioneer veterinarian Dr. Griffith Evans (1835-1936), Jean Ware and Hugh Hunt make passing reference to one of Dr. Evans’ professors at the Royal Veterinary College in London, which he attended in the early 1850s. The narrator is Evans himself, reminiscing in his later years:

“It was Professor Simonds who made me realise the importance of throroughly masticating one’s food. Adequate mastication helps one to think clearly and prolongs life. Gobbled food and confused thought go together.”

Evans was a most intriguing man, a Victorian phenomenon: trained as both veterinarian and medical doctor, he had seen service as an Army vet in Canada during the 1860 Fenian Uprising, and had briefly toured the the American Civil War battlefields in Virginia on a medical fact-finding tour (during which time he met President Lincoln on several occasions). He subseqently served for a number of years as a British Army veterinarian in various parts of India, where amongst other achievements he pioneered the scientific study of a deadly fly-borne parasitic disease (surra) in cavalry horses on the North West Frontier. While in India he was stationed for several years in the early 1880s in the Madras Presidency at Ootacamund, the so-called “queen of the southern hill stations”. It was there that Dr. Evans and his wife had this most curious encounter with the leading Theosophists Col. Olcott (himself a U.S. Army veteran from the 1860-1865 Civil War period) and the enigmatic Russian-born mystic, Madame Blavatsky:

One day, Dr. Evans and his wife saw a middle-aged European couple riding into Ootacamund in a tonga coming from the plains. They were struck by the ethereal expression on the woman’s face. Later they discovered that she was Madame Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, a founder of the Theosophical Society commonly referred to as “HPB”, and that the man was her co-founder, Col. Henry Steel Olcott. They had come to “Ooty” to study the Todas, aboriginal inhabitants of the area. By then, the pair had been in India for about five years. The Evanses invited them to luncheon at their residence. It turned out to be a memorable occasion…

Evans had collected an eclectic variety of artifacts during his years in India, including a copper image of Vishnu surrounded by consorts, attendants etc. which a temple Brahmin had insisted he keep as a gift after he had accidentally defiled it by touching it. Madame Blavatsky showed great interest in these items, but appeared particularly intrigued by a crystal prism engraved with symbols that Evans had acquired from a travelling pedlar in Simla, which she dramatically proclaimed to be of the most sacred and mystic significance. Blavatsky, who was around 54 at the time, told her hosts that she had been initiated into “esoteric” Buddhism (presumably a cryptic reference to her visit along with Olcott to Galle and Southern Ceylon a few years before) and could perform supernatural feats with the aid of her mysterious Himalayan spiritual teachers, the “Mahatmas” or “Masters”. During luncheon the company was treated to an apparent display of her occult powers when the sound of ringing bells was heard in the room coming from somewhere between her shoulders and the ceiling! As polite Victorian hosts, the Evanses made no comment. The convivial atmosphere began to deteriorate however when Dr. Evans, in Victorian rationalist mode, began to question his lady guest rather closely about the identity of her “Mahatmas”. Mrs. Evans later recounted that the conversation became rather tense, so much so that she resorted to “accidentally” knocking some object off the table to creat a diversion, after which the topic of conversation was hastily changed to the native customs of the Todas. Dr. Evans later claimed that he had forced Madame Blavatsky to admit that some of her celebrated phenomena were simply natural tricks, although he never managed to explain the trick of the bells! (The author Rudyard Kipling recalls in his memoirs that his father, Lockwood, who knew ‘HPB’ well during her years in India, described her as “one of the most interesting and unscrupulous impostors I ever met”).

Madame Blavatsky and the then-lawyer Col. Olcott had first met in Vermont, USA in 1874, and were immediately attracted to each other by a shared interest in matters oriental. The following year they had founded the Theosophical Society “to study the hidden laws of nature”. In 1878 they had left America to travel to India, determined to disseminate Asian religions and philosophies to the West and to combat inter alia Christian missionary “propaganda” against Oriental spiritual traditions. Their first visit to Galle in 1880 was an integral part of this mission. Olcott remained primarily interested in Ceylon and Buddhism until his death in 1907, after which the Society drifted more heavily into Hinduism and occultism. Frank Woodward at Mahinda College (1903-1919) belonged very much to the “Olcott” phase of the Theosophical movement. Olcott grew away from Blavatsky, alarmed by her explosive temperament, her claims to psychic powers and her frequent criticism of his work; a practical propagandist, publicist and mass energiser, he was never really “into” psychic phenomena and the Occult. In 1885, not long after the peculiar luncheon party with the Evanses, Madame Blavatsky left India (ostensibly on health grounds, but in the wake of mounting allegations in the Indian press about her concocting fictitious spiritualist phenomena), and returned to Europe to write her most important Theosophical works before her death in London, in 1891.

[xxxviii] In the 1951 Richmond Souvenir there is a memorable photograph of the Richmond College Cadets, headed “1918 Winners of the All-Ceylon Drill Shield”. Rev. Small sits in the centre at the front, with the Shield itself on the ground seemingly balanced against his right knee, in dark jacket and tie and white trousers - and sporting a very “colonial-style” topee and a splendid “Lord Kitchener” handlebar moustache. At first glance the contrast to other photographs that show him bare-headed, clean shaven, trimly-moustached and wearing his academic robes and clerical “dog collar”, is quite startling. The diminutive figure of Lt. (later Major) F. A. de S. Adhihetty in his full Cadet Corps regalia including “Sam Brown” belt, sits on Small’s right, dwarfed by the tall figure of his Principal. On the other side of Lt. Adhihetty sits the young E. R. de Silva, later to become the first Lanka-born Principal of Richmond College. The teenaged P. H. Nonis, future Principal of Wesley College, Colombo, is seated on the far right end of the same row. And immediately behind Rev. Small stand two young boys whose surname would become almost synonymous with 20^th century Galle – the 16-year-old Dahanayake identical twins, Kaliyanapriya and Wijayananda, sons of Pandith Dahanayake, a reputable Sinhala scholar and ardent Buddhist revivalist who had been one of the welcoming party when Col. Olcott first arrived in Galle in 1880. The Dahanayake family home sat right beside Richmond Hill. It was Wijayananda, born on October 22, 1902 and named after the Buddhist temple at nearby Dangedera where Col. Olcott first observed pansil (and where his father was a prominent lay official) who was destined to be the “Voice of Galle” in Parliament and for a brief time in 1960 the country’s caretaker Prime Minister. At the time of the photograph, however, not only were both brothers extremely brainy but also they were notorious practical jokers, and to make it worse neither of them could be pinned down for the sins of the other! Trying to tell them apart was an ordeal that their teachers and even Principal Small constantly underwent.

A short time after that 1918 photograph was taken, the Dahanayake twins left Richmond College to complete their schooling at St. Thomas’ College, Mt. Lavinia and thereafter both attended teacher training college in Colombo. “K” taught at Richmond from 1928-1931, then went into journalism at Lake House where he became a constant thorn in the sides of more consevative colleagues, sometimes to the point of fisticuffs. “W” taught briefly at Richmond from 1924-1925, while still in his very early twenties. I believe that he also acted as a Hostel master during this time. He later taught English, Mathematics, Geography and History for 8 years at the Roman Catholic St. Aloysius College in Galle. On a famous occasion in 1935 he led an entire class of his students in a black flag demonstration to the top of the Galle Fort ramparts, in protest against celebrating the 25^th anniversary of the coronation of King George V (whose initials “GR”, incidentally, still adorned the old red post boxes dotted around the Fort when I was last there in 1988). After this incident “Daha” (as “W” was to become more widely known) resigned – or rather was fired! - from his teaching post and entered his true vocation – politics. He won a seat on the local Municipal Council, eventually becoming Galle’s first Mayor in 1939, beating by a single vote District Judge T. W. Roberts (father of an enormous family including the Galle historian and chronicler Norah Roberts, still living in Colombo in her mid-90s, and Michael Roberts the Australia-based anthropologist and prolific author on Sri Lankan politics and society). Many of his fellow-council members were former St. Aloysius College pupils who had accompanied him on the black flag demonstration, been expelled for their trouble, and like their mentor had gone into politics. During his tenure as Mayor, “Daha” - reputedly - almost bankrupted Galle Municipal Council by introducing a series of populist measures to alleviate the problems of the poorer classes: the tax on bicycles and rickshaws was reduced, taxes from poorer households were waived, new roads and housing were built, and employment relief schemes were set up with central government assistance, and so forth. Then in 1944 he won the distant Bibile seat in the State Council, and entered the national arena, where he formed a one-man opposition party (the main anti-government leaders being in jail) and became famous as the “Bibile Brook” for a twelve-and-a-half hour speech. In 1947 he won the Galle seat as an L.S.S.P. candidate in the first Parliamentary elections, comfortably beating prominent Gallean Henry Woodward Amarasuriya, son and grandson of the two Amarasuriyas who had been such outstanding benefactors to Mahinda College and crucial supporters to Frank Woodward in the early years of the century.

In 1952, “Daha” was expelled from his party for welcoming the U.N.P. Prime Minister, Dudley Senanayake, to Galle – typically, in defiance of Party orders. “Daha” was ever the contrarian. In 1956, he became Education Minister in S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s S.L.F.P. cabinet, a post he used to confer University status on the Buddhist Pirivenas of Vidyodaya and Vidyalankara, introduce science to rural schools and, equally memorably, introduce free midday meals of a bun and a glass of milk in schools. For this latter feat he earned the popular title “Bunis Mama”.

When Prime Minister Bandaranaike was assassinated in 1960, “Daha” reached the pinnacle of his political career by being unanimously elected caretaker Prime Minister. It is said that he arrived at Temple Trees, his official residence as P.M., with but a single suitcase, and ordered his huge bedroom to be partitioned to make a small room for him to sleep in. This was in stark contrast to Sir John Kotelawala’s tenure as P.M., when he kept at least 50 pairs of shoes (admittedly not quite as many as Imelda Marcos)! Though a hard and dedicated worker, his tenure did not last for long – falling out with his colleagues, he called a General Election in March 1960 – and lost. To his credit however, as Norah Roberts (who as a lifelong Galle resident and long-time custodian of the Galle Fort Library evidently held “Our W” in affectionate regard) points out, he removed the Government side’s traditional advantages by bringing in the One Day Election and allowing all political parties access to public radio during the run-up. “Daha” doughtily soldiered on regardless, and in 1970 was the only U.N.P. candidate to retain his seat in the South. In 1977, he lost his Galle seat but then succeeded in overturning the result by special petition, due to the winner being shown illegally to have held a Government contract during his election campaign. His civic contributions to the Galle area have included the present railway station and bus-stand, the Fisheries Harbour and Cement Factory, and (more controversially) the replacement of the old cricket pavilion with a new stadium on Galle Esplanade. Like Rev. Small, he had his own prescription for a long life (he also survived well into his nineties) – walk barefoot on the wet dewy grass in the early morning, and avoid cakes.

In my time at Richmond (1973-1974) “Daha” in his early seventies was of course still very politically active, though because of his idiosyncratic, contrarian personality he was rather a marginal figure at the national level. Locally however he was very much a man of influence and quasi-seignorial status, albeit often-times controversial. Michael Powell in a footnote to his “Manual of a Mystic” biography of Woodward, describes “Daha” in passing (and not entirely unfairly!) as “a somewhat irascible and unpredictable personality”. I recall him as being a touch formidable, with a very acerbic wit and considerable charisma. (Norah Roberts provides some hilarious examples of the often-impromtu parodies with which he used to enliven parliamentary debates and deflate parliamentary egos). He never shrank from publicly criticizing any incidents of what herecognized as Police brutality. Very occasionally during my year at Richmond, I would go down to his home next to Richmond Hill to telephone Colombo, there being no telephone connection to the School Hostel in those days. Invariably “Daha’s” wide, open front verandah would be busy with the comings and goings of a diversity of humble petitioners seeking the ear of the “big man”, and others (like me) allowed use of his telephone as M.P.s did not have to pay for even their long-distance calls. He was known for riding the buses and travelling third class on the train, chatting freely and swapping yarns with the local characters. In fact, he never used a car until he became Education Minister, preferring to walk from the station to Parliament. Even then he often stole a lift after work from Parliament to the MPs’ hostel “Sravasti” on the back of a reporter’s scooter. On foot he liked to stop at roadside kiosks for a cup of tea and a chat. Once he came to Parliament dressed Gandhi-like in only a loin-cloth – to highlight the prohibitive cost of cloth. Famously, during colonial times he once answered Lord Soulbury’s question, “Mr. Dahanayake, how many parties are there in Ceylon?” with the riposte, “Only two, Sir, the oppressors and the oppressed!” In 1985, by then well into his eighties, “Daha” virtually single-handedly forced the UNP government of the day, to withdraw a circular banning the issue of new food stamps for the underprivileged.

For all his aura of power and influence, “Daha” never lost his common touch. He liked to refer to himself as Sri Lanka’s Dick Whittington because (presumably metaphorically, but then again with “Daha” you could never be sure!) he had “walked barefoot” from the Bibile backwoods to Temple Trees, the P.M.’s residence in Colombo. Somasiri Devendra has recalled to me how he had offered his seat on a Colombo bus one day years ago to an older man in national dress standing in the aisle. The offer was firmly refused (shades of Rev. Small!), and it was only then that Somasiri realized that he was talking to the famous ex - P.M. Dr. Dahanayake. “Daha” immediately proceeded to grill the younger man about his family and where he came from, and on learning who his father was, recounted some of his memories of the late D.T. Devendra. Then he came to his stop and was gone, leaving Somasiri to answer the incredulous queries of his fellow passengers – “Was that really Dahanayake?” According to Norah Roberts, he was the first Sri Lankan M.P. to travel with a third class ticket on the railway; he explained to anyone asking why, that he did this because there was no fourth class! (Having travelled third class once from Colombo to Galle, I can sincerely attest to the sacrifice involved in this gesture). Above all, “Daha” was incorruptible.

As recounted in Norah Roberts’ book, GALLE As Quiet As Asleep, on his 89^th birthday on October 22^nd, 1991 the Colombo Daily News had a front-page photograph of “Daha” with a “Tissahamy” beard, long white hair and roll hat – stroking a cat. The book also features a colour photograph of him in his early nineties, sporting sage-like long white hair and beard and standing to the west of the Esplanade with the Galle Fort ramparts in the background. The Clock Tower seen beyond the walls was erected in 1883, the same year that Joseph Small was born in far-off Lincolnshire, to commemorate the services of Dr. P. D. Anthonisz both to the world of medicine and to a successful battle to preserve the 17^th century Dutch Fort ramparts from demolition. In the picture, however, it soars skywards…seemingly straight out of the top of Wijayananda Dahanayake’s roll hat.

[xxxix] Bishop Heber composed his famous (or infamous!) hymn in 1811 for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. As Joseph Small points out in his letter, no ethnological slur was intended by Heber, rather he was making a standard theological point concerning the poverty of human achievements compared with the richness of divine creation. This has not prevented many from reading more controversial meaning in to Heber’s words. Heber made a short, five-week pastoral visit to Ceylon almost 15 years after writing his hymn, and commented at that time about how remarkably little man had done for the country, for all its “natural riches”. Unfortunately, as H. A. I. Goonetilleke has pointed out in the excellent introduction to the 1976 first edition of his Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes, the “man is vile” theme of the hymn provided a catchphrase for some early 19^th century missionaries and others whose cultural myopia led them to view “natives” as “savages” in need of redemption and upliftment. Even in 1882, the year before Joseph Small was born, the relatively-complimentary American traveller Maturin Muray Ballou patronisingly described the Ceylonese as “these lazy, betel-chewing, irresponsible children of the tropics, idling in the shades of palms”. (Even today, the expression “palm tree justice” is used by Anglo-North American lawyers and judges to characterise a form of justice dispensed to achieve certain “warm and fuzzy” social objectives). As Goonetilleke also suggests however, the “Heber” furore has by now abated completely, and to illustrate the point he quotes from a 1950 newspaper article by E. F. C. (Lyn) Ludowyk: “The vileness of man is of little consequence now, and, if prospects still please restaurants will crown their summits, and an eager generation rush to write their names on rocks on which once the sage correctly ruminated.”

[xl] Archbishop Lakdasa de Mel had died some six months earlier, in October 1976. I must have sent Rev. Small a clipping with the obituary from one of the main U.K. newspapers. In a Colombo Sunday Observer October 1977 article headed Laughing Cavalier of the Church of Ceylon, E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe (no laggard in the humour stakes himself) paid handsome tribute to the late Prince of the Anglican Church. Just as Joseph Small recalled his keen sense of humour, Wijeyesinghe wrote that de Mel “was the life and soul of every party and even the timbers of Lambeth Palace vibrated perilously during informal gatherings at the Bishops’ Conference”. He also made the comical observation that some men when becoming prelates, “assume an air of deepening gloom and when they open their mouths everyone wants to know what the Owl said to the Pussycat” – but hastens to add that Lakdasa de Mel suffered from no such inhibition! The Archbishop was christened Sri Lak Vijaya Singh Kith Warnamana Dissanayake Saparamadu Nanyakkara Laksapathy Maha Vidane Muhandiram Ralahamilage Hiyandrindu Lakdasa Jacob de Mel, so it is doubtful whether he could always have remembered all of his forenames in the correct sequence, or at all. His father, Sir Henry Lawson de Mel, a leading Colombo businessman property owner (he once owned much of tony Horton Place in Colombo) and trade adviser to the Government, had left him a sizeable fortune that Lakdasa applied cheerfully and unstintingly to the public good. Lakdasa de Mel studied at Keble College, Oxford, where he acquired that “tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority” (but mercifully, in his case without the self-conceit that can go with it) that enabled him to rise above all his peers to become His Grace the Most Reverend Metropolitan of India, Burma and Ceylon. Among many feats, Archbishop de Mel contributed much to the Asianization of the Anglican Liturgy, something that Joseph Small as the author of a Sinhala Concordance of the Bible would surely have appreciated. Old Jacob de Mel of Moratuwa, Lakdasa’s merchant grandfather, of whom it has been recently written that he and his wife, Helena, had as many descendants as there are stars in the sky, would have been inordinately proud of his eldest son’s son. No slouch himself, Old Father Jacob, the Portuguese-Sinhalese descendant of Samuel de Mello and Dominga de Soisa who had married in 1691, had risen from obscurity to the upper ranks of the business ranks of colonial Ceylon. When annoyed by the tactics of some of his competitors, many of whom were of his own faith, he was occasionally heard to mutter: “Oh, Father Abraham! What these Christians are!”

[xli] According to the Colombo journalist E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe, writing in the Sunday Observer soon after Joseph Small’s death, Mr. Small was an astronomer of repute and “was held in the highest regard by men of the calibre of Arthur C. Clarke”. I remember laying ill with a fever on my hostel bunk one typically hot and humid day in 1974, a few days after the celebratory excesses of the aftermath of the Richmond-Mahinda cricket match, and no doubt feeling very sorry for myself, when Rev. Small hove suddenly into view on the verandah outside my door, holding an illustrated book on astronomy: “Hello, I thought that you might like to borrow this book to occupy your mind,” he said solicitously and then – doubtless sensing my innate wariness of any task requiring abstract mathematical ability– adding with the merest glimmer of a kindly smile, “But you don’t really need to concern yourself with the mathematics!”

[xlii] According to a newspaper report at the time, Rev. Small was in the process of boarding the bus when the conductor signalled the driver to start off, and the elderly passenger fell off and broke his brittle bones. At the time he was on his way from Fort to Flower Road to pay a Christmas 1978 visit to two old friends, Dr. John Wilson and Hope Abeyewardene. Many in a similar situation would have bitterly condemned the callousness (or at the very least, the carelessness), of the bus conductor. Characteristically, Small bore no ill will towards his C.T.B. nemesis, merely remarking on his death-bed that it had been a pure accident. (I like to think that Rev. Small would have appreciated an anecdote about the kindly Rev. Harcourt, Archbishop of York in the 1830s at the start of Queen Victoria’s reign, who died in his 90^th year after falling off a bridge into a pond. “Well, Dixon,” he is said to have resignedly commented to his chaplain, “We appear to have frightened the frogs.”) It is reported that Rev. Small had a premonition that his last annual Christmas message to friends from Richmond Hill would be in December 1977. That year his message quoted St. Paul on forgiveness and forbearance, but added that Buddhism taught the same lesson, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, hatred ceases by love”. The report writer, E.C.B. Wijeyesinghe, credited Small with aiming to produce Ceylon patriots during his time on Richmond Hill, particularly through the School’s National Association: “The result was a harvest of young men whose love for the country transcended other affiliations. Consequently Buddhists became better Buddhists and Christians awoke to the full glory of the example and the precepts set by Mr. Small…”

[xliii] Herbert Keuneman, at one time a Richmond teacher, in a delightfully evocative treasure-trove of nostalgic writing called Galle – Something to Crow About that appeared in the 1976 Richmond Souvenir, provides this fine description of the view of the old Dutch Fort of Galle from Dadalla: “[N]ear Dadalla on the road from Colombo there is a brief glimpse of great battlements, green trees at their foot and red roofs overtopping them as they rise grey and grim out of the watchet glints of the sea, that calls forth part of an ancient mystique…” I can remember in early February, 1988, en route from Colombo to Galle on my only return visit since my year at Richmond, stopping the car on the road near Dadalla to gaze for a few moments across the intervening water at this same glimpse into a past era, and wondering if my whole experience of early 1970s Sri Lanka had been somehow only a surreal dream.

[xliv] Michael Powell describes how the Buddhist Theosophist Society (BTS) from the early 1880s onwards expended extraordinary missionary energy in reviving Buddhist culture in Ceylon, particularly through by means of establishing schools (thus closely emulating the Christian missionaries) to foster learning in a sympathetic Buddhist environment – but as Powell also points out, the emphasis was still very much on western learning. In 1880 there were only 4 “grant-in-aid” registered Buddhist schools in Ceylon. (This does not take into account the myriad pansala and the higher pirivena teaching establishments run by Buddhist clergy providing a mostly-religious education for local people that did not follow government educational guidelines. It was largely due to these traditionally-run monastic establishments that the literacy rate in Ceylon actually exceeded that in Britain at the time of the take-over from the Dutch in the mid-1790s). In 1905, the year before Joseph Small arrived in Ceylon, there were 14 grant-in-aid BTS English-medium schools, compared with 42 Wesleyan (Methodist) and 53 Anglican English-medium grant-in-aid schools. Among the vastly more numerous grant-in-aid vernacular schools, the BTS ran 141 compared with 350 and 272 run by the Wesleyans and Anglicans respectively. Additionally among the grant-in-aid schools, there were 3 English-medium and 44 vernacular establishments run by the Roman Catholic Church, 30 English-medium ones run by American Christians, plus a very small handful of Moslem schools of both sorts. [Source: Ceylon Administrative Reports, 1905, cited by Michael Powell.]

While the 19^th and early 20^th century imperialist world-view took it for granted that life beyond the eurocentric “pale” was a blank slate waiting to be inscribed by “civilization”, the complex reality was that in culturally-sophisticated “colonial” pluralistic societies like Ceylon, accustomed to centuries of foreign intrusion and absorption, indigenous groups were well equipped to take full advantage of the opportunities presented by such association. (James Morris in Farewell The Trumpets, writes that “[i]n most parts of the Empire the British imposed their ways by sheer force of example; the western culture was so obviously superior, in economic and technical terms, that the subject peoples flocked in self-interest to its schools, its counting houses and its drapers”). As Michael Powell observes, previously-subordinate elements arose to economic and social prominence in 19^th century Ceylon that were resolutely capable of responding “creatively and originally” to external western influence. In particular, the entrepreneurial karava and other “minority” castes among the Sinhala had overtaken the historically-dominant goyigama caste in economic power and influence in the culturally-distinctive maritime South of Ceylon. Such “up-and-coming” indigenous elements were well able to read into outside ideas and ideologies what Powell calls their own “sub-text”, and to adapt them to their own purpose. These newly-emergent groups needed to reconcile economic success with the traditional Buddhist sense of distance from materiality, while continuing an all-out assault on crumbling social boundaries. One solution was to emphasize merit-creating dana (charity) by philanthropic works. Another was to re-invent (and appropriate) “tradition” in the form of a “Buddhist revival”. (The parallels with European history are striking). The Buddhist Theosophical Society’s educational activities in Ceylon from 1880 onwards provided an ideal (and most timely) outlet for these collective urges, that had already gained momentum before Olcott’s arrival in 1880.

These underlying factors help to explain the disproportionately significant role that the South was to play in emergent Ceylonese nationalism before, during and after the time of Frank Woodward and Joseph Small in Galle. They also provide a context for the student nationalist movements of the early 1900s, impelled by the dramatic circumstances of the First World War and the “1915 Riots”, that found nourishment not only in “Buddhist Revival” English-medium schools like Mahinda College, but in the (superficially less likely) environment of Methodist Richmond College. As mentioned earlier, Frank Woodward was a “Patron” of the “1918 Legislative Council” event staged by Richmond College’s National Association in the highly-charged atmosphere of late 1915. Furthermore, the Sinhala Methodist minister and writer Lionel Mendis, a Richmondite who during his affliction by leprosy became the great soul-mate and spiritual mentor of Joseph Small until his premature death in 1919, was also a fervent promoter of Ceylonese nationalism.

In his otherwise-superlative biography of Woodward, Powell refers rather dismissively in an aside to the non-Buddhist English-medium schools as set on producing “little brown sahibs”. However justly this epithet might apply to the indigenous products of all the pre-independence English-medium schools in Ceylon, and it has been used often enough by Sri Lankan critics of colonial educational methods, it is unfair to imply (with benefit of hindsight) that the Christian schools were any more remiss in creating this result, than the “Buddhist Revival” foundations. Likewise, to ignore or depreciate the significant contribution to nationalist ideology that the missionary schools made is to create an unbalanced picture. The reality is that 20^th Century “Third World” transformation has been largely in the hands of educated, elite tiny minorities, often featuring in the very low single digits as a percentage of the total populations that they sprang from. This is particularly true of Ceylon / Sri Lanka, where the sole entry point for joining the ruling elite remained an education at an English-medium high school until well after Independence in the late 1940s. The “western” schools that educated these critically-important elite minorities therefore have had an impact incalculably greater than mere statistics would imply. The leverage that this historical phenomenon gave outstanding educationalists (and personalities) like Frank Woodward and Joseph Small and the establishments that they headed, should not be underestimated.

When reading Powell’s book, one is constantly struck by the confluence as much as the divergence between the Buddhist Revival and the Christian (particularly the Methodist) missionary drive in Ceylon. In many ways, revivalist Buddhism echoes the revivalist Methodism that emerged from the crucible of the established Anglican Church in the later 1700s. On a purely coincidental level, there is the amusing irony of the fact that a leading anti-Christian polemicist of the 1860s and 1870s, Mohottivatte Gunananda, who ran the pre-Olcott Buddhist revivalist Lankopakara Press (est. 1862) from Galle Fort, used a printing machine that had previously belonged to the Wesleyan Mission! More substantively, Powell frequently refers to what he and other (Sri Lankan) historians term “Protestant Buddhism”: a heavily “laicised”, proselytising (“missionary”), Victorian morality-driven, essentially puritanical “revivalist” movement. For example, the Buddhist Theosophists placed great emphasis on education through English-medium schools – just like the Methodists and other missionary groups. Olcott devised a Buddhist Catechism that ran to over 40 editions – in arrangement modelled closely on its Christian equivalent. The Buddhist Theosophy movement under the master-propagandist Olcott also recognized the power of the printed word, hence their emphasis on prolific pamphleteering and other publication methods – just like the Christian missionaries. Protestantism stressed minimal ritualism and individualized, lay-person access to scriptural works rather than dependence on a hierarchy of priests for spiritual guidance – so did Buddhist Revivalism as brought into Ceylon by the European Theosophists, and eagerly adopted by the indigenous Buddhist up-and-coming classes who realized its usefulness in the push against traditional boundaries. (Interestingly, the Colombo newspaper The Island on April 29, 2001 published an article under the title “Buddhist pressure against Christian evangelism mounts” in which there appears this passage: “The Ven. Wimalajothi of the Buddhist Cultural Centre, Dehiwala referred to the threats posed to Buddhism in this country. He spoke of threats from within where a new sect, a kind of Buddhist Evangelism is going around distorting the teachings of the Buddha, demoralising the Buddhists and urging them to distance themselves from the temples and the bhikkus.”) Woodward eventually persuaded the colonial educational authorities to include Pali in the Cambridge Entrance Exams, and taught it at Mahinda: Pali hitherto had been the near-exclusive preserve of the Sangha, as Latin had once been the preserve of the mediaeval Roman Church. Powell points out a most curious irony here: the educated Buddhist laity relied mainly on English translations, as produced by the Pali Text Society at Oxford, for access to the Buddhist Canon, whereas the Christian Gospel was widely available in Sinhala translation. (For instance, Joseph Small produced a Sinhala Concordance of the Bible).

Perhaps these similarities are less surprising when viewed against the common background of those “outsiders” involved. I have already mentioned the not-dissimilar backgrounds of men like Woodward and Small – Woodward the grandson of a hatter, Small the son of a merchant, both men brought up in the classical education of the times, including Oxbridge, and so on. Powell refers to the “tidal effect” of new ideas that swept Britain in the 1880s onwards – socialism, anarchism, feminism, suffragism, trade unionism, Theosophism, and all the new currents in art, drama, music and art. In many ways the later Victorian world that Woodward and Small grew up in was undergoing greater and far more fundamental changes than the world of the later 20^th century. It is a staggering thought that the last three decades of the 19^th Century in Britain brought such an education revolution that the proportion of Army recruits who could read and write, passably at least, increased from 5% to 85%! Publishing and journalism exploded in these years once the steam-powered rotary press had replaced the much-slower flatbed press. These radical changes produced an upsurge of “alternative” movements that more than rivals anything the “New Age” movement of the modern world can offer in the eternal human quest for psychological certainty. There was a distinct reaction by many against the sterile scientific positivism of the “modern” 19^th century, that found its expression in various types of religious and other emotive expression. (The English historian Hugh Trevor-Roper has referred to the 1890s fashion for “non-conformity” as a kind of “refuge” for some from the all-pervasive materialism, even philistinism of later Victorian England, socially dominated as it had become by the greatly broadened urban middle class. Perhaps the character Lededyev in Dostoyevsky’s 1866 novel The Idiot best captures this growing sense of revulsion against certain aspects of modernism when he declares that “the whole tendency of the last few centuries in its general, scientific and materialistic entirety is perhaps really accursed”). Buddhism – as “re-shaped” by earnest Western interpreters – became fashionable, as did the writings of the ancient Roman Stoic, Marcus Aurelius. Like “Western” Christianity, “Western” Buddhism was perceived largely through the textually-based prism of the ancient Greek philosophy that formed an essential part of the classical education of the late Victorian middle class intelligentsia. Naturally, indeed inescapably, Western Buddhists and Christians alike had a “eurocentric” view of outside societies and cultures, shaping and interpreting what they perceived in order to find satisfying resonances. In the case of the Buddhist Theosophists, including Frank Woodward, this resulted in what psycho-analysts call “reaction-formation” – in which the individual seeks a new form of expression but at core retains the source of the “precipitating reaction”, and so continues to move to the same underlying “music” or “syntax” even though the outer expression of the “words” or “lexicon” and the “accent” may appear very different. In an era (the 1880s) when British church attendance dropped noticeably, rationalism provided a secular expression for the Victorian social conscience; Charles Booth published his multi-volume enquiry into London poverty, and the Webbs brought out their history of trade unionism. Frank Woodward, raised the son of a low-church, evangelical Anglican minister, displayed this “reaction-formation” when he abandoned Christianity and experienced a prolonged period of “distress”, then joined the Theosophical Society in 1901, became officially Buddhist (western-style) in 1908, and retained a passionate lifelong belief in the Metteyya Buddha – the Buddha-to-be, strikingly parallel to the second Coming of Christ. At a deeper level, Woodward adopted “oriental” (but really westernized) Buddhism, but as Powell points out he could not escape to some degree unconsciously retaining the Victorian view of Empire as representing progress versus decline and decay. Hence his assumption, shared with all Theosophists of the time (and conveniently taken up by up-and-coming local elements in Ceylon itself) that Buddhism in Ceylon, rather than simply having made a healthy adaptation to ever-changing social reality, had entered into a “degenerate” phase in the hands of a largely “ignorant” clergy.

Powell does not mince words when he alludes to the extremist, violently anti-missionary, anti-colonial and anti-Christian polemics of the more “radical” Sinhala nationalists like Anagarika Dharmapala, originally closely allied to the Buddhist Theosophical Society in Ceylon but later to break with them completely. While recognizing that such polemics met a distinct need within emergent nationalism, he regrets the irony that they locked into Buddhist nationalist discourse a “bigotry sourced in the very imperialism it sought to oppose”. This “bigotry” appeared strongly in the inflammatory statements of Dharmapala against the Ceylonese Moslems in 1915, that I have quoted in an earlier end note. It brings to mind the post-Independence speech that Prime Minister D. S. Senanayake gave at Wesley College, which I have also quoted earlier, sincerely complimenting the total absence of, and indeed deliberate avoidance of, ethnic or religious communalism in the teaching of the Christian missionary schools. Unfortunately his hope that this non-sectarian approach would set the pattern for future nationalist discourse, has proved to be misplaced in the light of the subsequent history of Sinhala nationalism, starting with the Sinhala-only official language law in 1956. Woodward must have watched these developments with some dismay from his Tasmanian retreat before his death in 1952. Small certainly did, to my personal knowledge, right up until his own passing in 1978.

Victor Ivan, the Sri Lankan journalist and editor of the Sinhala-language newspaper Ravaya, who was a leader in the bloody Marxist-JVP insurgency of 1971, of Podi Athula fame, offers an interesting critique of the effect of the colonial-era educational system on post-independence Ceylon/Sri Lanka. Ivan’s analysis is that post-independence Ceylon inherited a narrow educational system inherited from the British, designed to meet certain imperial objectives. Specifically, the British needed to train an administrative class to fill a gap that they were unable to fill with their own personnel, there being in fact very few British civil servants in the colony. The missionary (and Buddhist) English-medium schools met this “white collar” need admirably. This echoes Nehru’s comment that the colonial masters supported a policy of “education for clerks” and the 1851 warning by Radha Kanta Dev, a progressive Calcutta merchant, that the educational system there meant that “with a smattering knowledge of English, youths are weaned from the plough, the axe and the loom, to render them ambitious only for the clerkships for which hosts would besiege the government and mercantile offices”.

(In a similar vein, H. A. I. Gonnetilleke’s introduction to Images of Sri Lanka Through American Eyes refers critically to the “native elite, who were busily engaged in mating a caricature of Europe with a parody of Asia, wearing, with increasing aplomb, the restricting and alien pith-helmet of an English education against the glare of their home-grown culture”. As early as 1928, none other than the Rt. Hon. W. G. A. Ormsby-Gore, M.P., Under-Secretary of State for the Colonies, reporting to Parliament on his tour of the British colonies of Ceylon, Malaya and Java earlier that year, criticised “the denaturalising, de-ruralising and intellectually and socially cramping results of the system of education, and the tyranny of an external and distant examination wholly out of touch with the needs, traditions, mental gifts and aptitudes of the people.” He castigated the “anglicizing and denationalizing tendencies of academic or clerical education in the colonial schools”. [Quoted by Noel Crusz in his book The Cocos Islands Mutiny, published in 2001.] Ormsby-Gore appears to have been of a different stripe compared to his earlier predecessor in office, W.A.S. Hewins, M.P., dismissively referred to by Leonard Woolf in his account of the rather frosty meeting with Hewins of himself, Don Baron Jayatilaka, E.W. Perera et al in 1917, described in an earlier endnote).

Ivan’s thesis continues along these lines: 19^th century British imperialism, with its tea-exporting and rice-importing economy, destroyed the old world in which Ceylon’s rural population had lived for centuries, without building a place for the majority in the new world that it created. The local elite who did gain admission to the “new economy” through the educational system, the so-called “brown sahibs”, eventually succeeded their colonial masters as administrators of the new world that was confined to themselves. They recognized the huge gap between themselves and the rest of the population, but by neither training nor temperament were the privileged members this new governing elite equipped to understand the need to either admit to their new world the masses still outside, or to re-organize it sufficiently to suit real and pressing national needs.

Ivan contrasts the independence movement in India with that in neighbouring Ceylon. He points out that in India, the driving impulse for British imperialism was material greed – a carry-over from the old “John Company” days. Consequently, the Indian national movement for freedom reflected the intensity of the repression suffered under British rule, when the wealth of India was a major source of raw material for the 19^th century industrial revolution. Ceylon on the other hand, had been acquired from the Dutch in the mid-1790s for primarily strategic reasons, mainly to prevent it falling into the hands of the Napoleonic French, who had recently overrun Holland, and being used as a staging-post against British India. Indians saw the British as mainly commercial plunderers, whereas – after a brief and unhappy period when the Island was run by harsh tax-collectors and other officials under the control of the East India Company’s Madras Presidency before Ceylon became a separate Crown Colony in 1802, hence the Sri Lankan use of the Indian word kachcheri to refer to local government administrative offices - Ceylonese generally saw them as upright civil administrators (even though Ceylon also supplied much wealth to Britain in the form of tea exports). The national movements in the two countries differed enormously because of this historical dissimilarity. Indian national leaders shunned the language, dress, customs and attitudes of the British, whereas Ceylonese national leaders generally spoke and wrote in English, wore English clothes, and “aped” English customs and attitudes. (The contrast actually is not that absolute: Nehru remained in many ways a Harrow and Cambridge man to the end of his life, and as the authors of Tournament of Shadows suggest, in his aggressively “forward school” Indo-Chinese frontier policy he appears to have succumbed to the British imperial theses that geography is destiny and territorial dominion measures a nation’s vitality and importance, to his and India’s ultimate cost when the Chinese hit back decisively in 1962). A three-day Christmas holiday picnic social event in 1885 formed the nucleus for what soon became the Indian National Congress; in time however the Indian national movement (whose leaders were partly inspired by the liberalism of their teachers at English public schools and universities, as well as by English constitutionalism) took the form of a gigantic mass liberation movement, whereas in Ceylon it was more or less confined to a middle class minority lacking grass roots among the relatively indifferent masses. In India, the colonial mentality and social system was consciously purged and replaced by a new national consciousness; in Ceylon, the new leaders simply carried on the old colonial socio-economic and political structure they inherited from the British.

Ivan’s thesis is much more subtle and detailed than it is possible to convey in a brief summary, but his conclusion is that the continuing gap between Sri Lanka’s governing classes and the mass population, and the failure of the former to adjust the economy to suit the needs of the latter, created the crisis that was to erupt in the form of the bloody 1971 insurgency, and again in the renewed JVP civil disruption of the later 1980s.

Whatever the defects of the “system” that Joseph Small, Frank Woodward and others like them lived and worked within, in the Sinhala context they are measured less by their deeds than by their innate goodness and service (dana) to others – which generated much merit. Such individuals, however divergent their beliefs, essentially held values that set boundaries beyond the Self, that encompassed others and found value in societies constructed to promote community ideals. In a very real sense, Joseph Small, Frank Woodward, Henry Highfield and their ilk transcended the content of their beliefs to live lives of (to quote Michael Powell) “affirmation and resonance”, to touch the “unseen world”, and to inspire others by offering them a glimpse of that “possibility and experience”. In doing so, they left a legacy of what Powell rightly calls “unqualified goodness and contribution”. Any impact they left of historical significance, therefore, was simply an unintended by-product of their efforts. Truly, to borrow from George Eliot, they “lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs” – but because of them, “things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been”.

[xlv] E. C. B. Wijeyesinghe wrote a moving tribute to Walter Joseph Tombleson Small that appeared in Colombo’s Sunday Observer in early January 1979, just over a week after Small’s death at the age of 95. In his piece, Wijeyesinghe mentions P. de S. Kuleratne, who was plain Patrick de Silva of Ambalangoda in his schooldays at Richmond under Principal Small. Like Small, Kuleratne had a highly developed mathematical brain, or as E.C.B. so pithily put it: “[W]hen Mr. Small explained to him the Binomial Theorem it was like deep calling unto deep. The sines and cosines of Trigonometry became their common language, and the complexities of the calculus and the Conic sections were as simple to them as the square of the hypotenuse in the hands of Euclid. They marched forward together arm-in-arm and when Kuleratne left Richmond College he was so imbued with his Christian teacher’s sense of dedication that he was ready to assume the mantle of a Moses among his own [Buddhist] co-religionists.” It was Kuleratne who 70 years later was to describe so vividly his schoolboy recollection of the tall young man in cap and gown descending the hill to the School Hall for the very first time on that far off morning in November 1906. The brilliant boy mathematician became Principal of the Buddhists’ Ananda College, Colombo and took that school to new heights just as his beloved Christian mentor had done with Methodist Richmond College earlier in the century.

[xlvi] My friend Rubasinghe’s description of Rev. Small is not only deeply-felt and movingly poetic, but also especially apt since the Morning Star has symbolic significance in both Buddhist and Christian tradition. When the 5^th century B.C. wanderer Sakyamuni (Gautama) was renounced by his disciples after giving up the rigours of the yogi and embracing the “Middle Path” in his thirties, he sat himself at dusk beneath a pipul (fig) tree at a place in the Himalayan foothills later known as Bodh Gaya, vowing not to leave this spot until he had attained Supreme Enlightenment. All night long he sat in meditation, beset by demons, and in the golden daybreak the Buddha, the Self-Awakened One, truly perceived the Morning Star as if seeing it for the first time in his life. In the Old Testament Book of Job, Jehovah demands: “Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? Declare, if thou hath understanding! Who laid the cornerstones thereof, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?” In answer to which the Buddhist (and modern physicist) of course would say, “I was there!” since most of the atoms in our transient bodies have existed since the beginning of Creation. (I am indebted to Peter Mattheisen’s The Snow Leopard for these insights). And of course Joseph Small delighted to observe the stars through his telescope, and the Richmond crest that – so School lore has it – appeared to James Darrell one night in a dream, contains three stars shining brightly against a morning sky. Interestingly, “Morning Star” was the name that Florence Baker, who was the redoubtable Hungarian-born second wife of the Victorian explorer (and one-time Ceylon resident) Sir Samuel Baker, was remembered by for several generations among certain remote Central African tribes, a lasting tribute to her shining friendliness and humanity towards them – in rather stark contrast to her formidable husband’s authoritarian, often harsh treatment of the “natives”. A rather more controversial figure associated with the “Morning Star” epithet was the Russian-born Theosophist, Nicholas Konstantinovich Roerich, an early Madame Blavatsky adherent with a complicated past as artist, occultist and rhapsodic Shambala-seeker, Central Asian adventurer and one-time propagandist for Tsarist eastward expansion before becoming vaguely associated for a time with the Bolsheviks. “Professor” Roerich’s chequered career is vividly described in the book Tournament of Shadows referred to elsewhere in this monograph, but here it is interesting to note that he called the alternative-medicine research station that he founded in the Indian Himalaya at the end of the 1920s, Urusvati – meaning “Light of the Morning Star”. After his death in 1947, his home in the Kulu Valley became a shrine for Indian nationalists, among them Pandith Nehru. When Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, who incidentally visited Galle the year after his 1960 pioneering space voyage, was asked what Earth looked like from his tiny capsule, he replied that it resembled very much the paintings of Nicholas Roerich.