Madras History :Remembering the Co-operator

 Sir Frederick Nicholson 

The invitation I received recently read, “On account of 61st All India Co-operative Week Celebrations conducted from November 4, 2014 to November 20, 2014 in commemoration of the architect of the Co-operative Movement in India Sir Frederick Nicholson and the Co-operative Pioneers in Nilgiris such as Thiru H B Ari Gowder, we have programmed a seminar on 15.11.2014 at Nilgiris District Plantation Workers’ Co-operative Society, Coonoor …”

I hadn’t heard of any celebrations in Madras recalling Nicholson, but I can understand the Nilgiris interest in him. After retirement in 1904, Nicholson and his wife Catherine settled in Coonoor, where he played an active role in helping found the Coonoor Urban Co-operative Bank in 1916 and remained associated with it till his death in 1936. He and his wife and their son Major T B Nicholson are buried in the Tiger Hill Cemetery in Coonoor. 

On November 15, wreaths were placed on their graves and a portrait of Sir Frederick was unveiled in the Nilgiri History Museum. Frederick Augustus Nicholson arrived in Madras as a 23-year-old member of the Indian Civil Service in 1869. He was, in time, to serve as Collector of Tinnevelly, Madras and Coimbatore. It was while serving in the last-named post that he fell in love with the Nilgiris.

In the aftermath of the great Madras Famine of 1876 – which killed an estimated ten million people and virtually wiped out farming in the Presidency — the Government in 1892 set up a Famine Commission to study how such a disaster could be prevented in the future. Nicholson’s report was published in 1895 and the Indian National Congress, then in its first flush, insisted on its implementation, but it was to be 1904 before the co-operative movement began getting under way, with such recommendations as the establishing in the districts of co-operative agricultural credit societies and co-operative banks being implemented.

Nicholson, following in the footsteps of Dr. Francis Day of the Madras Medical Service, who is considered the father of India’s fishing industry, now turned his attention to fisheries in the Presidency. 

In July 1905, he presented the Government a report on the need to not only increase fish production in a Presidency that had the longest coastline in India, but also improve fish curing methods (helping inland areas get a hygienically better quality of cured fish) as well as those of making fish manure badly needed by the plantations whose constant complaint at the time was the poor quality of fish guano. 

Requested to investigate how these improvements could be made, Nicholson visited Japanese and European fishery centres and on his return was made the Honorary Director of the Bureau of Fisheries, Madras Presidency, which was established in 1907 on his recommendation. The Bureau, the first in the country, was the nucleus of today’s Departments of Fisheries in all the Southern States. 

One of the first things the Bureau did was to establish in 1908 an experimentation centre, the first in the country, in Ennore. The techniques of fish curing it developed became standard practice not only in India but in all Britain’s tropical territories.

Oxford-educated Nicholson became the First Member of the Board of Revenue in 1889. In 1902, he was appointed to the Madras Legislative Council and was knighted that year. In between, in 1897, he was made a Member of the Imperial Legislative Council. 

Some years later, in 1905, he was to make yet another significant contribution to Madras. Teaming with the Rev. Canon Sell and Sir S Subramania Aiyar, all members of the Syndicate of the University of Madras, they recommended to Government “that there should be for so ancient and important a language, with a classical literature of so unique a character, a dictionary worthy of its subject.” 

The seed was sown for the University of Madras’s Tamil Lexicon (Miscellany, March 28, 2011).

 Even that is a forgotten contribution of a man who dedicated himself to making life better and people more knowledgeable in the Madras Presidency

.S.Muthiah,  H 24 Nov 2014