The Story of Madras Part 5

In earlier days Madras was verily a city of the sea. Both White Town and Black Town lay directly along the sea-beach, and the coming and going of the Company's ships were momentous events. Surf-boats used to land on the beach outside the 'Sea-Gate' of the wave-splashed Fort, laden with cargo from the Company's ships lying out in the roads; and the bales were carried through the gateway into the Company's warehouses within the Fort-walls. The Sea-Gate is still to be seen, and it still looks towards the sea; but the sea is far away, and the Sea-Gate is now one of the least used of the entrances to the Fort.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE SEA GATE.

The sea has now receded afar.]

In former times the Company had a considerable fleet of first-cla.s.s sailing-ships, and, owing to the frequency of wars with either the French or the Dutch, the Company obtained royal permission to equip their ships as men-of-war armed with serviceable guns, which could be turned against an enemy if occasion required. The voyage from England to India was by way of the Cape of Good Hope, and it lasted at least three or four months, and often very much more. For example, when Robert Clive came out to India for the first time, the vessel was so buffeted by contrary winds that the commander thought it best to run across the Atlantic and let her lie up so long in a South American port that Clive learned to speak Spanish with considerable fluency; and it was not till nearly a year after leaving England that the young writer arrived at Madras.

Furthermore, besides the various adventures that were natural to a sea-voyage, there was the contingency of a sea-fight, and the possibility of being taken to Pondicherry or Batavia as a prisoner of war instead of being landed at Madras as a paid employee of the 'Honourable Company.'

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE COMPANY'S FLAG.]

It was usual for several ships to sail together, for mutual protection; and pa.s.sengers had reason to congratulate themselves when they were eventually landed safe and sound at Madras. It can be readily imagined that the sight of a vessel of the Company approaching in the distance caused a stir of excitement amongst the residents of Fort St. George. There were no telegraphs from other ports to give previous notice of a vessel's prospective arrival; and the fact that a ship was at hand was unknown until her flag[3] or her particular rig was discerned in the distance, or until one of her guns gave notice of her approach. The comparative regularity, however, of the winds in Eastern seas caused 'seasons' in which vessels might be expected; and when a season arrived, the look-out who happened to be on duty on the Fort flagstaff must have been particularly alert. Ay, and there must have been much hurrying to and fro in the streets of White Town when the signal had been given and the news had spread that the sails of a Company's ship had been sighted, and while the vessel, perhaps with several consorts, came nearer and nearer, till at last the anchors were dropped and salutes were exchanged between ship and sh.o.r.e.

[Footnote 3: 'The flag displayed by the Company's ships bore seven horizontal red stripes on a white ground, with a St. George's Cross in the inner top corner.'--_Love_.]

There was good cause for excitement. The ship brought letters from home--perhaps after several months of no news at all. There were the private letters that told the news about near ones and dear ones; there were the official letters that decreed appointments in the Company's service and promotions and penalties, and dealt with the Company's business; and there were the 'news-letters'--the old-fashioned predecessors of the modern newspaper, which were written by paid correspondents, whose duty it was to give their clients news of London and of England and of Europe. The news was often astounding, and was sometimes extraordinarily behind-time. For example, the Company's employees in India were still professing loyalty to the Most High and Mighty King James II nearly a twelvemonth after that monarch had fled to France and had been succeeded by William and Mary; and the employees at Madras were surprised indeed when a ship arrived one day from England with the belated news.

The salutes have been fired, and the vessel has been surrounded by a flotilla of surf-boats and catamarans. The commander and the pa.s.sengers are being rowed ash.o.r.e, and the Governor with his Councillors, dressed all of them in their smartest official attire, are waiting on the beach outside the Sea-Gate of the Fort to bid them a hearty welcome. Amongst the pa.s.sengers there are probably some youths who have been posted to Madras either as apprenticed 'writers'

or as military Cadets; and perhaps there is a senior employee who is returning to India after the rare event of a holiday in England.

Possibly too there are some ladies, either wives of employees who have been willing to accompany or to follow their husbands to the mysterious East--or, as was not infrequently the case, young ladies who, with the consent of the Directors, have been shipped out to India by their parents or guardians or on their own account, in the hope that companionable bachelor employees, pining in their loneliness, will jump at the chance of matrimony.

[Ill.u.s.tration: SURF-BOAT]

The surf-boat comes nearer and nearer; and when it gets among the breakers there are feminine screams of terror. The alarm is not without cause; for at one moment the boat is being balanced on the top of a heaving wave, and the next it is almost lost to sight in a foaming hollow. The excitement in the tossing boat is tremendous; but it is brief; for there are only three or four breakers to be negotiated, and in less than a minute a curling wave has caught the boat in its clutch and hurls it with a thud into the shallows. Naked coolies rush forward and lay hold of its sides, lest the backwash should carry it seaward again; and, with the help of the next wave, they manage to haul the boat a little further on sh.o.r.e, and the pa.s.sengers are able to disembark--splashed, perhaps, but safe and sound.

When the greetings are over, the Governor leads the way into the Fort, where a general meal is served and the news is told and the exclamations of surprise are many. In the evening there is a banquet, and after the banquet, 'when the gentlemen have finished their wine,'

and have rejoined the ladies, the stately dances of the period are 'performed;' and it is not unlikely that before the a.s.sembly breaks up, some, if not all, of the newly-arrived young ladies have received and have accepted offers of matrimony; and it is possible that two or more gallants have had a serious quarrel about this young lady or that, and even possible that, out of the Governor's sight, swords have been drawn in her regard.

On the morrow the unloading begins; and for many days a fleet of surf-boats is busily engaged in bringing ash.o.r.e the broadcloths and other English wares which the Company will be able to sell at a large profit--not forgetting the barrels of canary and madeira and other luxuries that have been imported both for private consumption and also for the general table in the Fort. And when the unloading is over and the ship has been overhauled after her long voyage, the surf-boats will then be engaged in carrying to the ship the calicoes and other Indian wares that are to be exported to England for the Company's profit there.

The sea-trade of Madras is very much greater now than it was in the days of old. Not a day now pa.s.ses but at least one steamship glides into the Madras Harbour, and it is always a much larger vessel than was the very largest of the sailing-ships that in those bygone times tacked laboriously to an anchorage in the Madras roads. But the excitement has disappeared. The steamers come and go with as little stir--or not so much--as when a tramcar leaves a crowded street-corner.

In Madras there are still some reminders of the times when nautical affairs were in more general evidence in Madras than they are now. For example, the 'Naval Hospital Road' is still the name of a thoroughfare which leads from the Poonamallee Road, opposite the School of Arts, to Vepery, and it is a reminder of the fact that there were once upon a time sufficient naval men in Madras to make a hospital for sick seamen a necessity. The buildings of the old Naval Hospital still exist; they are the buildings in the Poonamallee Road opposite the School of Arts.

In the early part of last century the Naval Hospital itself was abolished, and the buildings were converted into a 'Gun Carriage Factory'--and this is now no more. It is a good many years indeed since the Gun Carriage Factory was closed down; and in Madras at this particular time, when there is a very pressing demand for house accommodation, many people wonder that such s.p.a.cious premises in so busy a quarter of the city should have been lying idle for so long and are hoping to see them once more serving some useful purpose.

Another reminder of the nautical conditions of those days is to be found in the existence of an 'Admiralty House.' 'Admiralty House' is a fine residence in San Thome, and is now the property of the Raja of Vizianagram. It was apparently the San Thome residence of the Admiral of the East Indian fleet. That official had another residence within the Fort, which used also to be called 'Admiralty House'--the house which Robert Clive occupied at the time of his marriage, and which is now the Accountant-General's office.

We will glance at one more reminder of the nautical Madras of bygone times. At Royapuram there is a large house which is now styled 'Biden House,' and is used as a harbour-masters' residence, but which until a few years ago was called 'The Biden Home' or 'The Sailors' Home.' It is not an ancient building, but it was nevertheless built in the days of the sailing-ship, and is a reminder of the times when sailing-ships used to lie out in the Madras Roads and the 'Sailors' Home' offered seamen entertainment more physically and morally wholesome than that which was provided in the low-cla.s.s hotels and saloons which laid themselves out for the spoliation of Jack ash.o.r.e--and of the time when the wreck of a sailing-ship on the Coromandel coast was not an uncommon occurrence and parties of distressed seamen were not infrequently to be seen in Madras, for whom a temporary 'Home' had to be provided. The 'Old Salt'--the picturesque sea-dog of sailing-ship days--has disappeared except from story-books--the old-fashioned seaman with earrings in his ears and a villainous 'quid' in his mouth, dressed in a blue jersey and the baggiest of blue trowsers, and lurching as he walked, always 'full of strange oaths', and larding his speech with nautical jargon. On sh.o.r.e, after a long sea-voyage, and with money in his pockets, the 'Old Salt' in an Eastern port was not always a factor for peace and progress. He was not uncommonly too frequent a visitor at what the Madras Records call the 'punch houses,'

and the Records show that he often caused a disturbance. But he was a brave fellow, and at sea he did much for England's trade and for England's greatness. In an Indian seaport he was a picturesque, if troublesome, personage, and nautical Madras has changed with the Old Salt's disappearance.

CHAPTER XIII

THE STORY OF THE SCHOOLS

A tourist who goes the round of Madras must surely be impressed with the numerous signs of its educational activity. Apart from the mult.i.tude of juvenile schools in every part of the crowded city, the number of academic inst.i.tutions is large, and educational buildings are amongst the most prominent of its edifices. Our tourist, putting himself in charge of a guide at the Central Station for a drive along the beautiful Marina, sees a number of academic buildings on his way.

The Medical College is just outside the station yard. The cla.s.sic facade of Pachaiyappa's College for Hindus peeps at him gracefully across the Esplanade. The Law College lifts its Saracenic towers above him as he pa.s.ses by. Across the road he sees the collection of miniature domes and spires and towers that surmount the various buildings that make up the far-famed Christian College. Driving along the Marina he sees the Senate House of the Madras University surmounted by its four squat towers; farther on he sees the staid Engineering College, and the still staider Presidency College, and, beyond, the whitewashed buildings of Queen Mary's residential College for Women; and on his way back by the Mount Road he sees the Muhammedan College, with its little white mosque and its s.p.a.cious playing-fields in the heart of the city. There are yet more colleges in Madras; and there are also numerous large schools, some of which are attended by more than a thousand pupils.

Yes, the educational activity in Madras is great; and it is interesting to reflect that it is a development from very small educational enterprises in the days when Madras was young.

The initial enterprise was small indeed. The first school in Madras was the little "public school for children, several of whom are English", which the French Capuchin priest, Father Ephraim, opened in his own house in White Town very soon after Madras came into being.

His pupils were mostly Portuguese or Portuguese Eurasians, the children of Portuguese subjects who had come from Mylapore and who, for purposes of trade or commerce, had settled down within the English Company's domain. His English pupils must have been children of the very few of the Company's civil or military employees that were married, or of the still fewer English free settlers. Father Ephraim, who according to accounts was a really learned man, charged no fees, yet was deeply interested in the welfare of his scholars; and the little school must have supplied a great want in those far-off days.

It is interesting indeed to think of that little 'public school;' for the room in the priest's house was the scene of the very first beginning of what are now the mighty educational activities of Madras--an earnest, moreover, of the great things that the Roman Catholic Church was going to do in the way of education, both for boys and for girls, in South India.

Father Ephraim's school continued to prosper under his successors, and in the seventeenth century it was transferred, as a poor-school, to a building in the grounds of what is now the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Armenian Street; and in 1875 it was put under the control of the brothers of St. Patrick, an Irish order of educational monks, and it became St. Patrick's orphanage. Later the brothers transferred themselves and their orphanage to the s.p.a.cious park--Elphinstone Park--on the southern bank of the Adyar River, the premises which they occupy still.

For some thirty years the Company took no part in educational work, and the children of Madras were left entirely to Father Ephraim's care. Then for two years a certain Master Patrick Warner was the Company's temporary chaplain of Madras--a conscientious and uncompromising Protestant minister who wrote some long letters to the Directors in England denouncing the laxity of the conduct of the Company's employees and deploring the influence that Roman Catholic priests had been allowed to obtain in Fort St. George. Finally, he went back to England, with the threat that he was going to interview the Directors on various matters pertaining to Madras; and that he succeeded in making himself heard is to be seen in the fact that in the following year the Directors sent a Protestant schoolmaster out to Madras. The letter in which they notified the appointment to the Governor in Council at Fort St. George was a.s.suredly inspired by Master Patrick Warner's undoubtedly high-minded representations. They wrote that, as there were now in Fort St. George 'so many married families,' they were sending out 'one Mr. Ralph Orde to be schoolmaster at the Fort ... who is to teach all the Children to read English and to write and Cypher gratis, and if any of the other Natives, as Portuguez, Gentues (Telugus),[4] or others will send their Children to School, we require they be also taught gratis ... and he is likewise to instruct them in the Principles of the Protestant religion.' Mr. Ralph Orde arrived by the same ship which brought the letter, and his arrival (1677) is another notable event in the history of education in Madras. It was the first beginning of Government education--the laying of the first stone in what is now such a vast edifice.

[Footnote 4: In modern Madras the great majority of the Hindu residents are Tamils; but in the beginning there were very few Tamil immigrants, and the Hindu residents were nearly all of them Telugus (Gentoos).]

In appointing a schoolmaster, the Directors meant to do their best for education in their rising city; for they had [5]engaged no mean dominie on a menial's pay. In choosing Mr. Ralph Orde they chose a good man, and they paid him accordingly. He was to dine at the General Table, and his salary was to be 50 a year, which in those days was no small sum--more than the salary of some of the Members of Council.

Perhaps, indeed, they got too good a man for the post; for after five years of educational work in Madras, Mr. Orde complained that his schoolmastering had been 'much prejudicial to my health,' and he asked to be relieved of his duties and to be appointed to a post in the Company's civil service instead. His request was granted. A new schoolmaster was appointed; and as a 'Civilian' Mr. Orde worked with such success that in two or three years he was sent to Sumatra to be the Chief of a factory that he was to found on the west coast of the island. The ex-schoolmaster would, perhaps, have risen to be Governor of Madras, but it would seem that life in the East had really been 'much prejudicial to his health,' for he died in Sumatra ten years after his first arrival in Madras.

In 1688, by virtue of the Company's Royal Charter, a Corporation of the City of Madras came into being, and it was among their delegated duties that they should build a school in Black Town for the purpose of teaching 'Native children to speak, read, and write the English Tongue, and to understand Arithmetic and Merchants' Accompts.' Three years later, however, Elihu Yale, Governor of Madras, complained to the Corporation that, although they had been empowered to levy taxes on the citizens, they had not so much as thought about building a school, and had neglected various other civic responsibilities. The Company--rightly or wrongly--sought to justify their inaction with the excuse which the Corporation of Madras has--rightly or wrongly--made for civic inaction so many times since, namely that 'no funds' had been a.s.signed to them by Government for the works that they were called upon to undertake. As for taxation, they remarked that the people in Black Town had not been schooled to civic taxation; and it is true that any ruthless collection of taxes might have meant wholesale departures from the city, or at any rate a serious check to further immigration. So the munic.i.p.al school for Native children never came into being.

Meanwhile the Company's free school in White Town, started by Mr.

Orde, continued its work under Mr. Orde's successors; and elementary instruction was imparted therein to a heterogeneous crowd of children--English, Eurasians, and Indians--Christians and Hindus.

Eventually the school was put in charge of the chaplain of St. Mary's Church in the Fort, and the chaplain and his churchwardens agreed in thinking that such education was not of the kind that a Church should control, and that it was rather their duty to inst.i.tute in Madras a residential free-school for poor Protestant children of British descent, which should be conducted on the lines of the many 'charity schools' in England; and in 1715, with the approval of the Directors, 'St. Mary's Church Charity School' was founded. The event is of particular interest; for St. Mary's Church Charity School developed later into the 'Male Asylum'--the inst.i.tution which has done so much for boys and girls for so many years, and which, after changing its habitation on various occasions, is now comfortably housed in s.p.a.cious premises in the Poonamallee road.

The year 1715 is noteworthy on another account. St. Mary's School having been founded solely for the benefit of children of European descent, the native children who had attended the Company's day-school were deprived of education. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge undertook to supply the want, by establishing schools in Madras for the special benefit of Indian children; and the year 1715, therefore, is the date which marks the first beginning of the educational work that English Protestant missionary societies have done in India. The Society found themselves unable to take up the work immediately themselves; so they applied to the vigorous Danish Lutheran Mission at Tranquebar, which was then a Danish settlement; and a Danish minister was sent to Madras to set things going.

In the course of time Madras had become a much more habitable city than it had been in its first beginnings, and a much more possible place of residence for European women. The Company's employees, therefore, were more and more disposed to matrimony; and, as already related, the Directors, believing that married men made steadier employees, had from early times encouraged the nuptial humour by sending out from England periodical batches of well-connected young women as prospective brides for employees who lacked either the means or the inclination to take a trip home to choose partners for themselves. The number of European fathers and mothers, therefore, in Madras was continually increasing; and for the education of their children, as also for that of children of well-to-do Eurasians, there was need of a different kind of education than the various free-schools supplied. Home education, with or without paid tutors and governesses, probably served its turn with some, but it was certain that sooner or later the private school would come into being.

We are unable to say when the first private school in Madras was started; but an advertis.e.m.e.nt in one of the issues of the _Madras Courier_, in 1790, shows that a private school for boys was started in that year; and it was probably the first. The enterprising educationist was Mr. John Holmes, M.A., who opened the 'Madras Academy' in Black Town for the instruction of boys in 'Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, the use of the Globes, French, Greek, and Latin.' Other towns in the Madras Presidency had their English residents, so Mr. Holmes offered to accommodate 'a few Boarders;' and the offer was found so convenient that certain parents wanted accommodation for their girls as well as for their boys. Mr. Holmes was willing to receive all the pupils that he could get; for in an advertis.e.m.e.nt two months later he announced that he was going to move to a larger house in which 'apartments will be allotted for the Young Ladies entirely removed and separate from the Young Gentlemen.'

The Madras Academy was eminently successful; but the mixed boarding school was not its most commendable side; and in the following year an enterprising lady-educationist announced that she was opening in Black Town a 'Female Boarding School,' in which her young ladies would be 'genteelly boarded, tenderly treated, carefully Educated, and the most strict attention paid to their Morals,' and the school was to be conducted as far as possible 'in the manner most approv'd of in England.' The enterprising lady-educationist was a Mrs. Murray, who had been a mistress in the Female Asylum. Her syllabus of education was of a more feminine sort than that which was followed at the Madras Academy; for, as announced in the prospectus, it included 'Reading and Writing, the English language and Arithmetic; Music, French, Drawing and Dancing; with Lace, Tambour, and Embroidery, all sorts of Plain and Flowered needle-work.' The two syllabuses are interesting reminders as to what were the usual subjects of education for European boys and girls a century and a half ago.

Schools, therefore, were available for children of every cla.s.s--European and Indian, rich and poor; but the schools for Indians, conducted either by missionaries or by indigenous teachers, were of an elementary kind; and, apart from Oriental studies in indigenous inst.i.tutions, there was little or nothing in the way of higher education for Indians either in Madras or anywhere else in India. This condition was altered, however, during the governorship of Lord William Bentinck, the magnanimous if not brilliant governor-general whose term of office lasted for seven years, from 1828 to 1835.

During this period everything favoured educational progress in India.

There was peace in England and there was peace in India. It was a time of great educational developments in England, as is manifested by the fact that within this period the London University and Durham University were opened, and the great British a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science was established. Such conditions in England had their influence in India, and the more so because Lord William Bentinck was ardent for progress. The opening of the Madras Medical College in 1835 was one of the signs of the times. During Lord William Bentinck's term of office education in India was reformed. Macaulay, afterwards Lord Macaulay, was an Indian official at the time, and he penned a notable report on education in India, in which he belittled vernacular learning and a.s.serted that the Government of India would do well to discountenance it altogether, and to introduce western learning and the study of English literature into all schools under Government control, and to make it a rule that the English language was to be the only medium of instruction. Whether or not Macaulay's views were correct, they were adopted by the Government of India, and Lord William Bentinck issued in 1835 a resolution in accordance therewith, in which he sought to secure the people's acceptance of English education for their children by notifying that a knowledge of English would in future be necessary for admission into Government service. Government service is particularly coveted in India, and the resolution encouraged the foundation of schools of a good cla.s.s in which special attention would be given to the study of the English language; and within a few years a number of important educational inst.i.tutions had been founded in different parts of India.

In South India the Madras Christian College, called originally 'The General a.s.sembly's Inst.i.tution,' was first in the field. It was founded in 1837, by the Rev. John Anderson, the first missionary that the Church of Scotland sent out to Madras. The name of the founder is preserved in the 'Anderson Hall' in one of the college buildings; but the remarkable progress of the inst.i.tution has been very specially due to the untiring energy of the Rev. Dr. Miller, whose statue stands on the opposite side of the public road. Dr. Miller was Princ.i.p.al for a number of years, and now (1921) at a great age the venerable educationist is living in retirement in Scotland.

In 1839, two years after the foundation of the Christian College, the Roman Catholic Bishop in Madras, Dr. Carew, founded St. Mary's Seminary, which after forty-five years became St. Mary's College, and which is now represented by St. Mary's High School for Europeans and St. Gabriel's High School for Indians.

Two years later, in 1841, the Presidency College had its beginning, in a rented room in Egmore. At its foundation it was not a Government inst.i.tution, but was a public school under the control of governors, who were chosen from among the leading Europeans and Indians in Madras, with the Advocate-General as their first president. It was styled 'The High School of the Madras University,' and it was the founders' intention that when a college department had been added, the inst.i.tution should be called the 'Madras University,' and should apply for a charter. In the sixties, however, the Madras Government was considering a scheme of its own for a University of Madras, whereupon the governors of the 'University High School' transferred their school to the Government, who called it the 'Presidency College.' The Presidency College continued to work in the rented building until 1870, when the building that it now occupies was publicly opened by the Duke of Edinburgh.

[Ill.u.s.tration: UNIVERSITY SENATE HOUSE]

Pachaiyappa's College, a well-known Hindu inst.i.tution, had its first beginning in 1842. Like the other colleges in Madras, it began as a school; the school was called 'Pachaiyappa's Central Inst.i.tution,' and was located in Black Town. The present buildings were opened in 1850 by Sir Henry Pottinger, an ex-governor of Madras, amid a large gathering of leading European and Indian residents; and for a number of years the annual 'Day' at Pachaiyappa's College was an important social event. Pachaiyappa was a rich and religious Hindu, who made his money as a broker in the Company's service, and who died more than a hundred years ago leaving a lakh of paG.o.das--some 3 lakhs of rupees--for temple purposes. The trustees neglected the provisions of the will, whereupon the High Court a.s.sumed control of the funds, which under the Court's control rose to the value of nearly Rs. 7 lakhs. The original amount was set apart for the fulfilment of the terms of the will, and the surplus was a.s.signed to educational purposes in Pachaiyappa's name.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PACHAIYAPPA'S COLLEGE.]

The education of girls shared in the development; for in 1842 the first party of Nuns of the Presentation Order was brought out from Ireland, and a convent, with a boarding school and an orphanage,--the 'Georgetown Convent' of to-day--was established in Black Town. The 'Vepery Convent School' and some of the other successful convent schools in Madras are controlled by nuns of the same Order.