Builders of bowstring bridges

Keeping on the trail of Napier Bridge (Miscellany, November 3) has been reader V.Viswanathan and he has come up with the fact that work on the first bowstring bridge began during the governorship of Lord Erskine and that the bridge was declared open by Governor Sir Arthur Hope. 

The bridge was constructed by Gannon Dunkerley & Co, a major construction company at the time, and the work was supervised by the Madras Port Trust. Who built its clone, inaugurated in 2000, reader Viswanathan is still trying to find out.

Henry Gannon and J H Dunkerley had separate trading establishments in India from 1895. Whether these were in Bombay or Delhi is not very clear, but they were merged in 1918 to become Gannon Dunkerley & Co. (GDC). 

The firm was incorporated as a private limited company in 1924. It passed into Indian hands in 1946 and two years later become a public limited company headquartered in Bombay.

It was in the early 1930s that GDC moved from trading into civil engineering and was particularly active in the South. There it became known for the RCC bowstring bridges it built to its in-house design. 

It also built several other bridges, aqueducts, and civil requirements for irrigation and hydroelectric projects, besides numerous factory buildings. One of the firm’s best known projects was the first ghat road from Tirupati to Tirumalai. During World War II it built several airstrips and runways. 

Then, in the 1950s, it constructed numerous bridges for the Western and Central Railways.

Today, its branch offices in Delhi, Bombay, Hyderabad and Calcutta handle assignments in their respective regions. But there was in the 1950s a Gannon Dunkerley (Madras).

S . Muthiah, H: 24 Nov 2014

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

Chennai City Chronicler S. Muthiah

 

The pieces of your favourite column, Madras Miscellany, are set to be compiled into a book this month. Bishwanath Ghosh meets the man who has been writing them — without a single week's break — for over 11 years now

Colombo's loss turned out to be Chennai's gain. In 1968, S. Muthiah nearly became a citizen of Sri Lanka when the government fell and the new regime abolished the annual practice of granting ‘distinguished citizenship' to select foreigners who had spent a number of years in the island nation. His file, waiting on the foreign secretary's desk for clearance, went in the bin.

Muthiah, who was 38 then, had spent almost all his life in that country and had risen to occupy the number two position in Times of Ceylon, heading its Sunday paper. Since he had to be a Lankan citizen in order to become the overall editor, he saw no future for himself and decided to leave the island. The fact that he was still a bachelor made it easier for him to pack up.

“When you are young, you are ambitious. You want to run a paper. But without citizenship, I would have remained the number two forever,” says Muthiah, who turned 81 last Wednesday and who, in the last 42 years that he has lived in Chennai, has written, edited and ghosted nearly 30 books about the city. His latest book, A Madras Miscellany – People, Places and Potpourri, is due for release later this month. It's a compilation of the ‘Madras Miscellany' column he has been writing for The Hindu MetroPlus since November 15, 1999 — a column that continues to gently grab the reader by his arm every Monday morning and take him down heritage lane.

Thanks to the column, which made him a household name, Muthiah is commonly referred to as a historian — a title he disapproves of. “I am a chronicler, I am not a historian,” he says, rightly so. Muthiah is only a journalist — this year he completes 60 years in the profession — who has been demystifying history and historical practices for the reader. Even while in Ceylon, where he wrote a sports column, ‘By the Corner Flag', for 13 years, he relentlessly campaigned for taking cricket and rugby out of elitist institutions to the masses. “Today you can see the results. Except Kumar Sangakkara, almost all other players in the Sri Lanka cricket team are from the rural areas,” says Muthiah.

Chennai, by chance

For the Chettinad-born and Colombo-bred Muthiah, Chennai became home quite by chance. His parents were already living in the city when he came down from Sri Lanka and applied for a job in some of the best-known newspapers across the country. He was waiting for a reply when TTK, in collaboration with a German firm, happened to be launching TT Maps in Madras and was looking for a person to head the division. Muthiah grabbed the opportunity so that he could stay on with his parents. One of his first assignments in TT Maps was to bring out a booklet on Madras, and that kindled his interest in the city. The rest, as they say, is history.

Today, Muthiah's book Madras Discovered, first published in 1981 and subsequently renamed Madras Rediscovered, is considered the last word on the city's heritage. The book, whose seventh edition is due in December, gets thicker with every reprint. “The discoveries are not original; they cannot be original. There is always somebody who already knows — it's just that he does not know the value. For example, when I went looking for the Jewish cemetery after reading about it in the records, I found that it is being looked after by a family from Madras. Obviously, the family did not think this was something that should be publicised or known. And right next to the Jewish cemetery I found a Chinese cemetery, whose existence wasn't even known,” says Muthiah.

Chennai is notorious for neglect of its heritage, and if in the recent years there has been awareness about the need to preserve it, a chunk of the credit goes to Muthiah, ‘Madras Miscellany' and to Madras Musings, the subscription-based, heritage-centric tabloid he has been editing for the last two decades. The sustained campaign for preserving the past earned him an MBE in 2002.

Muthiah is also one of the architects of the Madras Day celebrations that take place now every August — an event that reiterates to the Chennaiite that his city dates back to August 1639 and is therefore modern India's oldest city. He is, however, not very happy with present-day Madras: he finds it “overbuilt, congested and dirty” and would any day prefer to live in Colombo, his first love. “But the big question is: would I like to live in the Colombo of today? The friends I grew up with are all gone,” he says.

Meanwhile, he soldiers on for Chennai. At 81, he is busier than most men half his age, maintaining an eight-hour working day. “Work keeps me going, so does good life. I still love my drink, I still love to gossip,” Muthiah smiles mischievously. “And I have a young energetic wife (she is a company secretary) who makes sure I don't have to worry about anything other than my work.”

After spending most of the day at his desk — ‘Madras Miscellany' is perhaps the only column in the country to be composed on a typewriter — Muthiah arrives at the Madras Club at five in the evening for his daily walk. The walk is invariably followed by a session of gossip with fellow elderly members of the club.

Back home, he has a couple of drinks before dinner. “It's a habit I got from my father,” says Muthiah, “He always had two drinks before dinner and lived up to 97. The only difference is that while he drank only Scotch, I drink only Indian whisky. The best thing about Indian whisky is that no matter what brand you drink, it tastes the same.”

Bishwanath Gosh April 14,2011 The Hindu

History :The Landing in Madras

Disembarkation

As the 375th anniversary of the founding of Madras that is Chennai draws near, an oft-asked question keeps cropping up again and again. 

With no safe landing place anywhere on the three-mile long stretch of coast that was the eastern boundary of the sandy spit Venkatadri Nayak granted Francis Day in 1639, why did he accept the grant on behalf of the East India Company, realising full well what the ship-to-shore problems would be, given the rough surf and dangerous swell every landing had to contend with?

 I’ve in years of searching for an answer never been able to find a satisfactory one, but I keep finding descriptions time and again of that ship-to-shore passage. 

The latest I’ve found was a narration by a Maria Graham who travelled in India from 1809 to 1811 and had her recollections of that sojourn published in Edinburgh in 1831 under the titleJournal of a Residence in India.

 Recording her words here is a reminder of how far we have come from the early days of the city.

Stating that a friend who had seen her ship enter Madras Roads had sent out a boat — presumably what was called a masula boat — to bring her ashore (about a mile from where the ship had anchored), she continues, “While I was observing its structure and its rowers, they suddenly set up a song, as they called it but I do not know that I ever heard so wild and plaintive a cry. 

We were getting into the surf: the cockswain now stood up, and with his voice and his foot kept time vehemently, while the men worked their oars backwards, till a violent surf came, struck the boat, and carried it along with a frightful violence; then every oar was plied to prevent the wave from taking us back as it receded, and this was repeated five or six times, the song of the boatmen rising and falling with the waves, till we were dashed high and dry on the beach.

“The boats used for crossing the surf are large and light, made of very thin planks sewed together, with straw in the seams, for caulking would make them too stiff; and the great object is, that they should be flexible, and give to the water like leather, otherwise they would be dashed to pieces.

 Across the very edge of the boat are the bars on which the rowers sit; and two or more men are employed in the bottom of the boat to bail out the water… At one end of the boat is a bench with cushions and a curtain, for passengers, so that they are kept dry while the surf is breaking round the boat.

“We were hardly ashore when we were surrounded by above a hundred Dubashis and servants of all kinds, pushing for employment. The Dubashis undertake to interpret, to buy all you want, to change money, to provide you with servants, tradesmen, and palankeens, and, in short, to do everything that a stranger finds it irksome to do for himself…”

Later during her stay in Madras, Graham visits Mahabalipuram and makes two perceptive observations. She points out that the “head-dress on the gods and principal persons represented in the sculpture rocks at this place, have not the smallest likeness to any used in this part of India, but they extremely resemble those of the countries bordering upon Tartary, and those represented in the cave of Elephanta. The figures of the Brahmins and pilgrims are (on the other hand) precisely as seen every day at present…..”

 Her contention would appear to be that the sculptors came from somewhere in northern India. She then goes on to state something that fellow conservationists like your columnist are saying 200 years later: “I am sorry to observe, that the Madras government has let the rocks of Mahvellipoor by way of stone quarries, and they are digging the stone so near some of the best executed caves, as to threaten them with destruction…” Nothing, it would seem has changed; the biggest threat to heritage would appear to be governments!

S Muthiah  Metro plus 4 Aug 2014