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SLBC
I used to walk down to the SLBC in the early eighties for my programmes. The sleepiness of the streets round ‘Lakmahal’ had diminished with the construction of Duplication Road, but Colombo was still pretty much a quiet place. Though it was a longer route, I preferred to go down Queen’s Road, which in those days did not have the schools that have now made its upper reaches a mess, first Sujata Vidyalaya which Goobai Gunasekara started in emulation of the great days of the national schools her mother had presided over, later Wycherley when International Schools became the vogue.
On the right, after Duplication Road, and the built up areas that had once been the gardens of Maalyn Dias and his sister, Ira Fernando, were what we always knew as Bank Houses. They were ensconced behind bright red brick walls, which I think I have only penetrated once, for a wedding, if I am right in thinking that Ranmali Pathirana’s reception was held in one of those, her aunt’s husband then heading the Commercial Bank.
On the left were old mansions that were open to sight, including the grand edifice that had belonged to Sir Marcus Fernando. Fascinated as I was by the early electoral politics of Sri Lanka, I knew the name well. It was Sir Marcus who had lost to Sir Ponnambalam Ramanathan in the first election in which Ceylonese took part, that for the Educated Ceylonese seat on the 1912 Legislative Council, constituted under the McCallum Reforms. Ramanathan had got a great preponderance of Sinhalese votes to win, and one reason advanced was the caste factor, the Goigama Sinhalese preferring a Vellala Tamil to a representative of the Karawas.
That may have been a reason, but more important I think was the fact that Ramanathan had been an outstanding legislator before, deeply committed to Ceylonese as a whole, as his championing of a holiday for Vesak had shown. He was easily the most active legislator in the days in which all representatives were nominated by the Governor, which was perhaps the reason he was tempted away with an official position in 1893. He gave that up in 1906 and went off to India to meditate, but was summoned back by a multi-ethnic deputation when finally Ceylonese were given a chance to elect someone. He was undoubtedly the better man, of the two who came forward, and his eloquence in standing up for the Sinhalese who were persecuted by the British during the 1915 Sinhala Muslim riots eminently justifies the decision of the electorate.
In addition to my work at the University, I did a lot of media work, for various newspapers as well as the SLBC. In those days the media was entirely owned by government, or else strongly supportive of it, an inevitable situation I suppose when the opposition is identified with socialism. I used to wonder therefore why JR continued to cling onto Lake House, contrary to his commitment before the election to reverse the previous government’s nationalization.
That move one could understand, given the relentless animosity Lake House had displayed towards Mrs Bandaranaike’s government, but it was foolish. I have always believed that control of the media is quite useless, at least for the purposes of propaganda, because the vast majority of people do not believe what government owned media outlets say. They therefore become simply instruments of pandering to those in power and, in becoming effusive, they do not bother to be credible. That is why governments that seek to control the media to ensure the results they want at elections end up controlling the elections too.
I was carried away last week, while describing the architecture of Lakmahal, by some of the dogs who had inhabited the house. This was inevitable because I had wanted, in celebrating the place, to revive memories of its denizens too. And since it was because of my pleas as a little boy that dogs, just six of them in the seventy year history of the house, were finally allowed to reside inside the house, to sleep in a bedroom, usually mine, and join us at meals, I feel a personal obligation to enter them too into the record.
But in those days, when I was young and gregarious, I welcomed people too, and was delighted when the guest rooms were occupied. There were two of them, a long large room that lay behind the piano room extension of the drawing room, and a tiny room that lay behind the larger one, at the south west corner of the house. Originally this had had a door that led out into the tiny yard between the main house and the servants’ quarters, but when I came back from university I found this closed up, doubtless as security questions became more worrying.
These Readers were produced by the English Association of Sri Lanka in the nineties, and were made available at Rs 5 – Rs 10. They sold out rapidly, but now it has been possible to reprint some of them through the Parliamentarians’ Decentralized Budget. They will be distributed free of charge to schools in the Sabaragamuwa and Northern Provinces, but the publisher, International Book House, has been requested also to make low cost copies available nationwide.
The initial distribution to schools will take place at the Provincial Council offices in Ratnapura on April 7th, under the patronage of the Hon Maheepala Herath, Chief Minister of the Sabaragamuwa Province. This follows on workshops to train teachers of Primary English conducted by the English Language Teaching Department of Sabaragamuwa University at Eheliyagoda and Balangoda with the support of the Regional English Support Centres and Provincial English Administrators.
It is hoped to follow up on these with training in the Jaffna, Kilinochchi and Vavuniya Districts.
The entrance hall at Lakmahal
Cyril and Esme Wickremesinghe moved into Lakmahal in January 1937. The Parsi architect Billimoria was responsible for the final design and construction, but the inspiration for the layout was Cyril’s.
It was an unusual design, with a long narrow front verandah giving onto three doors, two of them double, one quadruple. The main doors led into a hallway, while parallel to these was the set of four that gave onto a long dining room that was really an extension of the hall through a wide arch. It contained a table at which twelve could sit comfortably, with a wide bay containing five windows opposite the hall. Opposite the quadruple doorway was a small pantry which, by the time of my childhood, contained an electric cooker in a recent concession to the modern world.
The new restaurants in Colombo were quite expensive so visiting them could be only an occasional pastime on an Asst Lecturer’s salary. The nightclubs which the bright young things of Colombo had begun to frequent were of course even more expensive, and in any case I found them loud and distastefully smoky. The mainstay of my social life then, at least as far as going out went, was the Arts Centre Club, above the Lionel Wendt Theatre, where Richard invariably turned up each night.
Though he could get quite sentimental about the lackadaisical nature of the place, where old Tissera measured out arrack as and how he pleased, he decided with a few other habitués that the place had to be made more elegant and more efficient. They claimed indeed that the Wendt survived only because Peggy Pieris sold a George Keyt painting when creditors pressed. Peggy was Keyt’s sister, and the wife of Harold Pieris, who lived next door to us in Alfred House and had been the patron of several Sri Lankan artists. He had built the theatre in memory of his friend Lionel Wendt, and it had continued for years, despite splendidly amateur management, as the most sophisticated venue in town for English plays and concerts. The Club above had been immensely daring in its time, though for some years now it had attracted very few patrons.
Cyril and Esme Wickremesinghe when he served in Puttlam
Cyril Wickremesinghe and Esme Goonewardene married in 1919, and were stationed in various places in the country over the next seventeen years, before finally settling down in Lakmahal at the beginning of 1937. Their eldest son, Cyril Esmond Lucien, was born in 1920. Interestingly, they moved thereafter to Ceylonese names, Tissa in 1923, Lakshman in 1927, and in between their only daughter Mukta, named in memory of the pearl fisheries Cyril had supervised when he was stationed in Puttalam.
He had risen rapidly in the service, becoming the first Ceylonese Government Agent in 1930. This was in Sabaragamuwa, and there is a wonderful portrait of him and his wife seated in state along with the Sabaragamuwa chiefs in their traditional costumes, headed by old Maduwanwala Dissawa with his flowing white beard. But even more evocative for me of that bygone age is a photograph of a much younger couple, stunningly attractive both of them, taken it seems in Puttalam, which would make it the early twenties. They are surrounded by young men in studiedly casual European sports clothes. The womenfolk are much more formal, staid almost, with my grandmother looking almost ethereal in the middle.
I had nowhere to stay at Peradeniya, and I did not do much to overcome this problem. At first I had stayed in the University Guesthouse, high on the hill above the Arts Faculty, with beautiful views westward, but little in the way of food or even coffee. Ashley Halpe then put me up once or twice, with his usual generosity, but he was in effect camping out himself, for his wife had stayed on in Colombo with the children, after he got himself sent back to Peradeniya with the re-establishment of several universities.
The SLFP led government of the early seventies had engaged in what they termed rationalization, setting up one university with several campuses, with high level English becoming the responsibility of Kelaniya alone. Ashley had had to move there, while his erstwhile rival for the Chair, Yasmine Gooneratne, had gone away to Australia. Peradeniya had been left then to those whose speciality was Linguistics, that esoteric discipline that bright youngsters had engaged in when, a decade previously, it had been realized that language teaching was the urgent need of the hour.
Ashley also introduced me to Tissa Jayatilaka, whose first love was teaching, though he was not on the staff but instead had the far more prestigious post of Director of the Kandy American Centre. He came to us for Visiting Lectures and, apart from in the end marrying one of the brightest of our third years, he also took me under his wing and let me stay at the delightful flat he ran in Kandy. He used to take me regularly to the Faculty Club, where the opposition to the government held court in a haze of alcohol, Shelton Kodikara the brightest and most articulate amongst them. The government supporters, I should note, also attended, and relations were friendly enough, the Vice-Chancellor Leslie Panditharatne being particularly good natured. It was held however that he did not really exercise power, since Kingsely de Silva, considered his eminence grise, suitably enough given his splendid head of white hair, sat in his office daily and was thought to give him instructions.
Things got worse with the General Strike of 1980, which was dealt with brutally by the government. There were efforts to discipline government supporters, most shamefully if I recollect aright Anuruddha Seneviratne, an utterly decent if somewhat emotional scholar, on the grounds that his doctorate was from an Eastern bloc university that was not in the league of better known names. The opposition then struck back with a vote of No Confidence against the Dean of Arts, C R de Silva, a very distinguished scholar who however had some personal problems that made him vulnerable to criticism.
He ended up leaving the country a few years later, though in between he contributed actively to the work of the Council for Liberal Democracy that Chanaka Amaratunga had set up. This rapidly became the main source of criticism of the government from a non-socialist perspective, and it is a tribute to scholars like CR as well as Ministers such as Gamini Dissanayake and Ronnie de Mel that they realized that things were going wrong and that reforms were needed.
I soon settled into a fairly easy routine, travelling up to lecture for two or three very full days, with one or two very convivial evenings arranged by Tissa. Occasionally there were special lectures at the American Centre or the British Council. One I gave was a comprehensive critique of Leonard Woolf’s ‘Village in the Jungle’, at which the other speaker was Ranjith Goonewardene from Kelaniya University, who thought the book a masterpiece. He thanked me after the discussion, in that I had not been personal. When I expressed surprise at this, he told me that academic disputes in Sri Lanka were always personal which, though an exaggeration, I found was not entirely off the mark. Ashley indeed, when thinking of his sabbatical, asked if I would act as Head of Department, because the second and third most senior members of the Department loathed each other and hardly spoke. I thought the idea excessive, and fortunately I was no longer there when he went. As it turned out Thiru Kandiah managed perfectly well, though sadly he went off to Singapore a few years later – though retiring from there in time to succeed Ashley as Professor around the turn of the century.
More than half the week then I usually spent in Colombo, which I think my parents liked, for the house was indeed empty after the fullness caused by two teenagers and their friends in the previous decade. The garden however continued to be made use of by the children of the neighbourhood, a whole host of unfamiliar youngsters, the most prominent sportsmen being the Gunasekara family which lived in the main part of the old Alfred House property, and which had a host of boys who all looked the same, a phenomenon repeated a decade later by the Muzammil boys from opposite. There was too Faris Uvais next door, the middle one of five brothers, and the two younger Pathmanathans from down the road, though they were now young executives in the burgeoning business life of Colombo. The Selvanathans opposite, two amiable boys who were not at all interested in school though they had provided me with a lift early on before their lateness proved impossible, were meanwhile turning into extraordinarily distinguished and successful businessmen in the new economic climate the UNP government had engendered.
My mainstay though of the old family connections was Sharya de Soysa, who like me had come back from a postgraduate degree, and was lecturing in the Colombo Law Faculty, where she now occupies the Chair. We were particularly struck by what was a new phenomenon then in Colombo, good restaurants, the species having been confined previously to expensive hotels. We took then to exploring these occasionally, beginning with the Eastern Palace, the first real Chinese restaurant in the country. Those we had been used to in our childhood, the Modern Chinese Café, the Great Wall, the Park View Restaurant, served Chinese food adapted to Sri Lankan taste, but the Eastern Palace purported to be the real thing, and seemed to justify the claim.
Later there came the Flower Drum, in the house where my dentist had practiced when I was a child, and many others, but I still remember vividly the Eastern Palace, as I do Chez Amano, the first proper Italian Restaurant, down Turret Road. Interestingly enough, it was not just Colombo that was suddenly filling with restaurants. The same thing had happened in Oxford, which when I went up had a couple of very expensive restaurants and then nothing but several cheap and cheerful Chinese and Indian eateries. By 1980 however the place was full of posh restaurants of all types, beginning with the Opium Den, which I was delighted to return to a few years back. The Eastern Palace however vanished long ago, as did Chez Amano.
Sunday Observer 20 March 2011 – Colombo Changes: Colombo was suddenly filling with restaurants …
Cyril Leonard Wickremesinghe was the fifth son in his family, the sixth child. The eldest was the only girl, Maud, who married a Wijesinghe in a practice that was to be repeated over three generations.
All the children survived into at least middle-age, though only one went on into the sixties so that I can actually remember seeing him. This was Basil, the Public Works Department Inspector, who had two wives and eight children. The Wickremesinghes were all prolific breeders, so that my mother had 33 cousins on her father’s side, in addition to her three brothers. On the other, the Goonewardene side, she had just one, Lakshmi, the daughter of Leo, the favourite uncle of my childhood. He had dutifully left the police when his father and his brother Hugh died, to look after for nearly half a century the estates and the Old Place in Kurunagala.
The pictures of my grandparents in the dining room downstairs
My grandparents moved into Lakmahal some seventeen years after they were married. Till then they had not had a house of their own. He was a member of the Ceylon Civil Service, and had served for quarter of a century in different areas of the country.
Having joined the CCS in 1912, when he was twenty two, Cyril Wickremesinghe had risen rapidly. By 1920 he was Asst Revenue Officer in Mannar, the first Ceylonese to be appointed to such a position of responsibility, The year before that he had married the eighteen year old Esme Goonewardene, in what she always indicated was a deeply romantic affair.
The origin of the marriage was in reality somewhat different. Cyril came from Galle, as did Esme’s father, E G Goonewardene, described in 20th Century Impressions of Ceylon as the first gentleman from the low country to marry into the Kandyan aristocracy. This is an extravagant claim, which I don’t think is true, except in a sense that is not quite so exalting. Rather, what the snooty editors of that book were suggesting was that he was the first low country gentleman, ie not of the aristocracy or squirearchy, to marry into the land owning classes.
