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CRICKETERS & DEBATERS IN THE 1880S

(FROM CHAPTER 16)

The origins of the Royal-Thomian cricket match, Lanka’s oldest public sporting fixture, are surprisingly obscure. The Colombo Academy had, in fact, met St Thomas’s at cricket several times during the late 1870s, but these were irregular matches in which the respective teams were captained by masters rather than boys. Thomas Keble, the great official historian of STC, preferred to call the 1880 match, the earliest in the series to be played by all-schoolboy teams, the ‘first Royal-Thomian’.

       His opinion was eventually overruled; today, ‘the first Royal-Thomian’ is conventionally held to have been played in 1879. The convention is justified by a Ceylon Observer article in which it is reported that the match ‘was instituted as an annual fixture on 15 July’ that year. But the teams at this game, too, were captained by masters: Ashley Walker led the Academy while the Thomian First XI was skippered by its founder, Sub-Warden Falkner. It was an important fixture for the Academy, for of the two schools, St Thomas’s had, it seems, much the more formidable cricketing reputation. Academy pupils were given three half-holidays to watch the game, which their side won by a margin of 56 run; Thomians did not get even an afternoon off. Warden Miller, struggling to keep the College from bankruptcy in the wake of the coffee crash, had more important things on his mind than cricket.

       The 1880 fixture, in which the teams comprised boys only, was played, like the previous year’s, on Galle Face Green, though the precise site is disputed. It is known that the teams arrived from their respective schools by boat across the Beira Lake – then a common mode of transport in Colombo and its suburbs, which were still clustered mainly about the lake. First in to bat for the Academy, which won the toss, was Benjamin ‘Benny’ Bawa, who would later become an eminent lawyer and father of the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. Young Benny was given out for three runs, but despite this inauspicious beginning the Academy again won the game, this time with 62 runs in hand.

       Much to Thomian chagrin, the boys from San Sebastian went on to repeat their winning play the following year as well. Happily, this embarrassing hat-trick was promptly matched by their Mutwal rivals, who proceeded to win the next three matches in a row. Then, in 1885, came the infamous Nine Runs Match, over which Royalists and Thomians have argued ever since.

 

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Older even than the Royal-Thomian is the English Literary & Debating Society, which was founded in October 1878 by A.W. de Mel, then a College Form student. At a time when a legal career was the most popular route to social and financial success for educated Lankans, a forum in which boys could practise public speaking had clear attractions and the Society was immediately popular. The Magazine carried detailed accounts of its early debates, affording us a view of what subjects – both current and perennial – were considered worthy of discussion by Thomians of the era.

       Education was, not unnaturally, high on the list. On 19 January 1884, Society members debated whether ‘the money got by curtailing grants in public schools should be devoted to public pursuits’ – a topic of obvious contemporary interest since the government was, at this time, seeking to transfer the financial and administrative responsibility for English-language education to district bodies. In passing, the debaters made reference to a problem that still plagues educational policy in Sri Lanka:

 

The Secretary, seconding the motion, said that it was a common thing to hear of the success of Ceylon

youths at school; but when they arrived at manhood this tide of success was greatly retarded. They find

no better employment than a clerkship or stationmastership.

 

The suggestion that the national system of education was ill-fitted to the needs of society, tending to produce near-unemployables with unrealistic expectations, will be familiar to many readers today.

       Education was again the topic in February 1888, when it was moved ‘that the recent action of the government is censurable as trying to shirk its responsibility in the education of the country.’  The action referred to was that of cutting by a third the grant-in-aid to which all schools were entitled. Instead, ‘if retrenchment were needed,’ the Proposition suggested ‘curtailing expenditure on institutions of questionable utility in Colombo’ – a needling reference to Royal College. The motion was, of course, carried, but Royal somehow continued to receive its government grant.

       Another subject close to blue-and-black hearts was raised on 23 February 1884 when the Society debated whether corporal punishment should be abolished in schools. The motion was defeated by two votes, suggesting that Thomians under Miller had learnt to love the rod. We may remind ourselves that the members of debating societies tend to be well-behaved in comparison with their schoolfellows and do not, like modern supporters of capital punishment, expect the penalties they advocate ever to be visited upon their own persons.

       Other colonial affairs likewise provided matter for debate. The Coolies’ Wages Bill, which sought to establish minimum wages for manual labourers, was taken up in January 1884; on other occasions, the Club discussed the government’s programme of irrigation-tank renovation, the wisdom of declaring Colombo a ‘free port’ and the ongoing extension of the railway network (a topic much in the news at this time). Foreign affairs were of less pressing interest, though the relief of Khartoum, a topic of worldwide controversy, was debated on 21 February 1885, just four weeks after the siege of the city had been lifted. Extracts from the speeches at these debates, reproduced verbatim in the Magazine, afford a fascinating glimpse into the concerns of Thomian – and, more generally, of upper-class Ceylonese – of the era.

© 2023 / Richard Simon. 

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