The Sister from Madras

Sister Eucharia nee Julia Gunnigan

This week, it’s the New Yorker that’s noticed Madras, I’m told by reader Kiran Rao. And it’s the journal’s food columnist, John Lanchester, who has been responsible.

His article ‘Shut up and eat’ begins with his remembering the first recipe his mother, Julia Gunnigan Lanchester, wrote for him, the one for spaghetti Bolognese, ‘spag bol’ as he calls it. And that takes him to his mother and she leads to this item today.

Born in a rural home in County Mayo, West Ireland, in 1920, Julia Gunnigan was the eldest of seven girls and a boy. The church was a haven for many a girl from a large, poor Irish family at the time and Julia became a nun as did three of her sisters. She joined the Union of the Sisters of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, better known as the Presentation Order founded by Nano Nagle in 1771 in County Cork, Ireland. Nano Nagle, from a well-to-do family, had also sought the Church – but with a mission: 

To provide a good Catholic education to the poor children of Ireland. From these beginnings, the Order established schools around the world, arriving in Madras in January 1842 to establish the first Presentation Convent and School in India.

Over the next 75 years, the Order established half a dozen schools in Madras. One of them, which opened its doors in 1909, was the Sacred Heart School, better known as Church Park, near the Horticultural Society gardens. It was to this school that Julia Gunnigan came after her ordination when she took the name Sister Eucharia. 

She was to serve the School from 1943 to 1957 when, while heading its teacher-training college after she had done her London University B.A. and M.A. by correspondence, she suddenly resigned and sought to leave the Order. It was a step that quite scandalised Madras at the time.

Sister Eucharia, says the New Yorker writer, “left (Madras) wearing her nun’s habit, with no possessions apart from a plane ticket to London, a city she had never visited, and ten pounds in cash.” It was to be October 1958 before she could formally shed her robes.

 She was nearly forty when she met her husband-to-be, William Lanchester, in London, where she was a teacher. He was with the Hong Kong & Shanghai Bank, and she moved with him to his various postings, to Hamburg, Calcutta, Borneo, Burma and Hong Kong. And over all those years, she became a mother, learnt cooking and began to enjoy it. Writes her son, “She’s the only person I know who learned to make beef Stroganoff as part of the decompression process after working in a convent school in Madras.”

Julia Lanchester might have learnt to make beef Stroganoff, but her son will always remember her for her spag bol. He writes, “I’m making spag bol for the zillionth time. Through the years I’ve experimented with all sorts of variations… (But) the one I always come back to is the simplest and best of all, my mother’s: onion, ground beef, tomato paste, canned tomatoes, wine, thyme, salt, a minimum of three hours’ cooking. My kids love it. Cooking it reminds me of my mother: it always does…. And she knew that …. was part of the process by which she saved herself.”

About why she needed to save herself was in a book John Lanchester wrote, Family Romance, that came out some years ago (Miscellany, April 7, 2008)

. I read it, but have forgotten what it said about why she felt she had to give up the robes while at Church Park. I don’t think jogging memories is necessary in this case.

S Muthiah, H : 24 Nov 2014