Eastern and Western Castlets of de Havilland

During the years that the Madras Bulwark was being constructed (early 1800s), the English had begun moving out of the Fort and the need arose for a church close to the Great Choultry Plain. Bishop Middleton had thundered from Calcutta about the ugliness of buildings being erected as churches and so there was pressure to create something classical. Designed by Chief Engineer Col. James Caldwell and supervised by de Havilland, the St George’s Cathedral was completed in 1816, the consecration being done by a much-pleased Middleton. de Havilland’s reputation was made. No doubt in order to be close to this great project, he purchased land in Poodoopauk (present day Pudupet abutting Mount Road) and built his residence. This was an unusual construction for it comprised what was later described by Love (Vestiges of Old Madras) as two castellated circular towers, standing on the opposite ends of a vast garden. These became the Eastern and Western Castlets. The intervening garden would be put to good use by de Havilland when he was entrusted with his next project – the building of St Andrew’s Kirk in 1816.

de Havilland decided that the new structure would be circular in plan and topped with a dome. In order to closely study the native technique of dome building, he had a team build a dome in the garden of his house, just as the arch had been built in Mysore. Having observed them closely, he gained confidence and went ahead with the construction of the kirk. The story of the foundations of the kirk needing terracotta wells to support them (again a native technique that de Havilland borrowed) is too well-known to merit repetition. The kirk when completed was (and is) magnificent but the dome resulted in poor acoustics. When questioned about this de Havilland blamed it all on the “voice of the reverend!” He went on to write An Account of St Andrews Church in 1821, which later was included in a more detailed paper by him – Delineations and Descriptions of Public Edifices in and near Madras (1826).

According to the Rev A Westcott (Our Oldest Indian Mission, A Brief History of the Vepery (Madras) Mission, Madras Diocesan Press, 1897), de Havilland was asked to take a look at the possibility of restoring the St Mathias Church in Vepery. He reported it to be beyond repair and bids were invited for a new building. The quote of John Law, a graduate of the Male Orphan Asylum was the lowest. Work began and de Havilland, greatly offended at losing the bid, waited till the church was completed in 1825, complete with a magnificent steeple. Then in his capacity as Chief Engineer of the Presidency, he inspected the building and declared that the steeple was a security risk for guns could be trained on the Fort from its pinnacle! Fully aware that kirk’s steeple was just as high he declared that unlike the St Mathias steeple, the former “yielded no facility for the mounting of mortars and howitzers.” His word was taken and the St Mathias steeple was demolished at great expense and replaced with a diminutive tower which according to Westcott was a lasting testimony to de Havilland’s spite.

This colourful character appears to have retired to his native Guernsey in 1825 where he built Havilland Hall in the classical style. He entered public life and was elected Justice of the Royal Court. He died at the age of 90 in 1866.

What of his residence in Madras? It is very likely that he sold his property before he left though it is unclear as to who purchased it from him. The property was probably divided into two, for by 1887, when Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee was celebrated, Eastern Castlet was home to Addison’s Press. In his Narrative of the Celebrations of the Golden Jubilee of Queen Victoria in the Presidency of Madras, Charles Lawson (Madras, 1887) mentions that Addison had placed a large flag on the Eastern Castlet. It would appear that this castlet was subsequently demolished when Addison got into the retailing of cars and built their magnificent showroom on Mount Road. Today that showroom is one of the offices of Amalgamations Limited, which acquired Addison in the 1940s.

Western Castlet appears to have survived for much longer, though its exact location is even more difficult to identify. Considering that most accounts say it was off Mount Road, it is very likely that de Havilland’s property extended from east to west with Eastern Castlet being on Mount Road itself and Western Castlet in the rear. After they were divided it is probable that Western Castlet was accessed by a service lane from Mount Road.

Western Castlet became Western Castle in the 1920s. At around this time, Lady Willingdon (then First Lady of Madras) founded the South Indian Nursing Association whose members were trained Anglo-Indian and European nurses almost all of them working at the Lady Willingdon Nursing Home. The nursing home functioned from 1931 at Western Castle and remained there till it shifted in 1951 to Pycrofts Garden Road. In the 1990s, this facility became a branch of the Sankara Netralaya. The Nursing Association merged with the Lady Ampthill Nurses Institute (founded in 1904) in 1998 and formed the nucleus of the Chennai Willingdon Corporate Foundation, focusing on public service programmes.

But what happened to Western Castlet/Castle is a mystery. Was it demolished? What is even more intriguing is that not a single photograph of either Castlet has survived. There is however an early aquatint in the British Library that shows how the two structures looked in de Havilland’s time. Love was clearly not entirely accurate when he described them as two circular towers. The two comprised a central tower each with three or four smaller circular towers surrounding it, each of them connected to the main building. By the time of the British Library aquatint a compound wall had come up between the two castlets, thereby indicating that the property had been divided into two. Another garden house can be seen in the distance but without knowing the coordinates from which the painting has been executed it is difficult to identify as to which building that is. And so the exact location of the two castlets remains a mystery.

But if the space that answers to the description of where Eastern Castlet stood is indeed the present Addison showroom, then certain possibilities emerge. As you walk to the rear, down the lane running beside Addison, and which is rather grandiosely referred to as TNEB Avenue, you come to a vast compound which now houses the Electricity Board offices. Old-timers recall an old bungalow with a pedimented portico supported by columns standing here which was demolished to make way for the TNEB’s ghastly creations. Was this where the Lady Willingdon Nursing Home was housed? If so, this garden house must have been a successor to Western Castlet for its description in no way matches what is shown in the British Library picture. The name of the older building must have been carried forward and applied to the later structure as well. What is interesting is that this lane still houses a couple of heritage buildings. There is the TNEB Club, which must clearly be at least a 100 years old. And adjacent to this, in a separate compound, stands an old bungalow now occupied by a senior army officer. But were they also once part of de Havilland’s property? If only stones could speak.

de Havilland and The Madras Bulwark

The de Havilland family of England was one that could trace its ancestry to the times of William the Conqueror, a Sieur de Havilland having accompanied him in his conquest of England. Since then, de Havillands had distinguished themselves in the service of the Crown and made their home on the island of Guernsey, off the English coast. From this family came Thomas Fiott de Havilland who, according to Henry Davison Love in his Vestiges of Old Madras, joined the Madras Engineers in 1793 and became a Lieutenant-Colonel in 1824. In 1808 he married Elizabeth de Saumarez in Madras.

A Biographical Dictionary of Civil Engineers in Great Britain and Ireland by Sir Alec W Skempton (ICE and Thomas Telford Limited, London, 2002), gives further details of his life. Born on 10th April 1775 to Sir Peter and Lady Cartarette de Havilland, he joined the Madras Engineers in 1792 (and not 1793 as Love has it). In 1793 he was involved in the siege of Pondicherry and between 1795 and 1796 he was serving in Colombo. Having seen active service at the siege of Seringapatam in 1799, de Havilland sufficiently impressed Arthur Wellesley (later the Duke of Wellington) to be invited to become the Field Engineer during the Egyptian campaign of 1801/02. Survey had always been a passion for him, he having been an understudy to Colin Mackenzie between 1798 and 1800 with the latter regarding him as “an active enterprising man.” Under Mackenzie, de Havilland ‘amused himself’ (according to Skelton) by preparing maps of Coimbatore, Dindigul and the surrounding areas. In Egypt he undertook survey work too, identifying sources of water in the Cairo-Suez area.

After his return from Egypt, on which journey he was captured by the French and later released, he was assigned to the Nizam’s Subsidiary Force to survey the Deccan. He appears to have been called increasingly for civilian work from then on. Involved as he was in the engineering side of the army, de Havilland made a name for himself in scientific observations and constructions, the latter being both military and civil in nature. This was, according to Shanti Jayawardene Pillai (Imperial Conversations, Indo_Britons and the Architecture of South India, Yoda Press, 2007), probably due to the patronage extended by Sir John Malcolm, the Resident of Mysore, who in 1807 gave him his first architectural contract – the task of building a magnificent banqueting hall in the Mysore Residency, a unique structure that would have a roof entirely free of column support. When this was done, de Havilland submitted a proposal to build a bridge across the Cauvery in Mysore with just five arches. To demonstrate his skill in building it, de Havilland erected a great arch in his garden, with a hundred-foot span. The structure became a local landmark and stood till 1937 when it collapsed. The remains of the de Havilland arch are a tourist attraction in Seringapatam even now. The brick bridge over the Cauvery was completed in 1810 in which year de Havilland joined a group of officers who mutinied, protesting against the appalling conditions of the army in Mysore. He was dismissed and returned to Guersney where he was commissioned to construct a barracks. Reinstated in service in 1812, he returned to Madras and became civil engineer and architect of the Presidency in 1814.

It would be no exaggeration to say that he is one of the earliest engineers of the city whose works can be identified with any certainty. According to Skelton, he ‘built Mount Road’ which probably means he gave the northern half of the road its present contours. Among his earliest commissions in the city was the construction of a protecting bulwark all along the sea front to prevent the notorious Madras surf from causing any damage to the Town and Fort. This he did after a detailed study of the tides by means of installing a tide gauge at the northeastern angle of the Fort’s glacis. In 1821 he published a memorandum on Madras tides, perhaps the first serious study on the subject, and this was later reproduced in the Madras Journal of Literature and Science in 1834. A stone, later named de Havilland’s benchmark, was let into the bulwark of the Fort and all tide levels were subsequently measured against it, till the construction of the harbour in the 1890s caused the sea to recede.

The Madras Bulwark, when completed in 1820, extended for two and a half miles from the Fort to Black Town and was completed “well within its estimate and to the complete satisfaction of the local government and the Court of Directors at home and having answered its stated purpose these thirty years past, without addition or repair” (A Visitation of the seats and arms of the Noblemen and Gentlemen by Sir Bernard Burke, 1853, Hurst and Blackett, London). Sir Thomas Munro, Governor of Madras, thought highly of de Havilland and wrote as follows: “I have a high opinion of his talents and of his public services, and have expressed my sense of them on several occasions. In the case of the bulwark in particular, I recommended his claims to the Honourable Court, because I was convinced that he had shown great skill in the plan of tile work, and that he had by his extraordinary exertions completed it at a much smaller expense than it could, perhaps, have been done by any other person.” (The Military History of Madras Engineers and Pioneers from 1743 up to the present time, by Major HM Vibart, WH Allen and Company, London, 1883). In 1823, an iron railing was put up on top of the bulwark (A Popular History of British India, WC Taylor, 1851), overseen by de Havilland.

The Madras Bulwark was clearly something of a wonder for it was taken up as a subject of study when the Great North Holland Canal was being contemplated in Europe in 1849 to prevent the sea from entering the Low Countries. It was noted that prior to the bulwark, inroads “of up to 100 yards in extent had been made in the beach” by the sea. “A protecting bulwark was constructed of about a mile and three quarters in length along the ordinary line of the beach, just beyond the point where the surf waves broke and in hurricanes it was subject to the full action of the waves. It was composed simply of rough stones, resting against a retaining wall of brick and chunam. The stones have been allowed to take their natural slope… and although the bulwark was not carried above the ordinary level of the coast which was 18 feet above high water, it might be said that scarcely a stone had been displaced since it was first erected in 1821.” (Description of the Great North Holland Canal and of the works at Niewediep by George Briant Wheeler Jackson, Institution of Civil Engineers, W Clowes & Sons, London,1849).

And yet, when it was first taken up, the bulwark was scoffed at. We have details of this from the writings of another formidable engineer of the Madras Presidency – Sir Arthur Cotton. “So much doubt existed as to the success of any work on the protection of the beach and so strongly was every proposition on the subject opposed that probably nothing less than the immediate certain destruction of Black Town, if nothing was done, would have proved a sufficiently powerful incentive, to the execution of such a work, on any plan. Nothing could exceed the confidence with which certainly the majority of persons at Madras predicted that every stone would disappear into the sands or be thrown into the middle of Black Town by the surf and the hurricanes.” But it is evident from Cotton’s writings that a few stones did get displaced. These were evidently the lighter ones. “So perfectly insignificant have been the effect of hurricanes upon it, that not a stone above two or three cwt have been thrown upon the bank by them.” (Letter from Capt. Cotton to the Secretary of the Breakwater Committee, Madras, 11th Nov. 1837 taken from Reports, Correspondence and Original Papers on various professional subjects connected with the duties of the Corps of Engineers, Madras Presidency, Capt. JT Smith, Vepery Mission Press, Madras, 1839). Cotton was writing all this to drum up support for building a breakwater off Madras, the first of many steps that would be taken in a project that culminated with the construction of the Madras Harbour in the 1890s. In this he was to find a warm supporter in de Havilland, who had retired by then to England. Cotton’s ideas were however not implemented.

Where was the Madras Bulwark? It clearly extended from the Fort and ran parallel to the Esplanade, ending somewhere on First Line Beach. What happened to it later? According to the Madras Terecentenary Volume, the structure, known to all as de Havilland’s Bulwark, formed the foundation on which the Beach Road, fronting the Fort runs. So, obviously, with the building of the harbour, the sea receded and the road was built on the bulwark.In 1967, when a subway was built to connect North Beach and South Beach Roads, excavations revealed the Madras Bulwark. More of it surfaced in 1978 when the area near the Beach Station was dug up. No doubt, the ongoing Metro Rail work will throw up some more bits of the Bulwark.

There is more to de Havilland than just the Bulwark. And his residence is one more missing landmark of Madras. More on all that in a later issue…

Where was Kelly’s Drain?

Searching for Kelly’s Scent-Bottle

I first came across the term Kelly’s Drain while researching the history of the Madras Chamber of Commerce and Industry. Hilton Brown in his wonderful book Parrys of Madras (Parry’s, 1954), writes of a director of the company in the 1850s, Henry Nelson (and also Chairman of the Madras Chamber of Commerce for several terms) who kept badgering Sir Charles Trevelyan, Governor of Madras in 1859/60, to do something about Kelly’s Drain. And such was Nelson’s personality that the Government actually got around to doing something about it.

Now where exactly was Kelly’s Drain? Given its name, I assumed that it was somewhere near the area known as Kelly’s, and therefore surmised that it was probably Otteri Nullah. But if so, why was Nelson so perturbed about it considering that at his time, the area was very thinly populated and hardly likely to have had drainage problems? The answer lay in researching it out some more.

Nowadays, with the Tamil Nadu Archives being out of bound for anyone who is not a scholar registered with a University, the only option was to search the web. That august body, if the internet can be assigned corporeal identity, has improved vastly in the past few years as a source of authentic information. This is partly due to Universities in America which are doing a great job of uploading rare and out-of-print books which are out-of-copyright. These as opposed to the policy of our very own Archives, are available free of cost and are accessible to one and all. And it was there that I found enough information on Kelly’s Drain.

According to Reginald Henry Phillimore (Historical Records of the Survey of India, Published by the Survey of India, 1952), Kelly’s Drain, also known as Kelly’s Scent Bottle, commemorates Robert Kelly and was “a channel running through the heart of George Town”. Kelly can in some ways be considered the father of the Survey of India. Henry Davison Love in his Vestiges of Old Madras notes that Kelly joined the army as an Ensign in 1760. Love notes that on 22nd December 1778, Kelly, by then a Major, wrote to Governor Thomas Rumbold that he had in 1770, “determined to put together the few Observations” he had “already made and to Continue Surveying every Road I should have occasion to march in future”. He proposed a “General Map of the Decan and Carnatick, chiefly laid down from actual surveys, corrected by Astronomical Observations, and divided into Squares, or rather Parallelograms, each containing One Degree of Latitude and Longitude…” The matter was referred to the East India Company by the Governor of Madras. The Rev. Philip Mulley, who is a regular contributor to Madras Musings had sent information when we were collating information on streets named after foreigners, that Kelly fell at the battle of Arnee in 1790. Presumably, by the time a decision was taken to go ahead with the survey, he was dead. The rest of the story, concerning William Lambton and the Great Trigonometric Survey of India is well-known. At the time of his death, Kelly was a Colonel and in charge of HM’s 74th regiment, the 4th Madras European Infantry and the 21st and 27th Madras NI according to The History of the Organisation, Equipment and War Service of the Regiment of Bengal Artillery by Francis William Stubbs, published in 1877 by Henry S King & Co, London.

It is still a mystery as to why such as well-decorated officer had to suffer the ignominy of a drain being named after him. Also the exact location of the drain is also unclear though it must have most probably been a successor to the infamous Atta Pallam which had earlier officiated as the drain for the city before undergoing a makeover and emerging as Popham’s Broadway. But wherever it was, it had become notorious, suffering the fate of almost all waterbodies that have had the misfortune to exist in and around the city. Our Chronicle, which was the monthly publication of the 67th (South Hants) Regiment stationed in Madras, in its issue of 1st November 1876, carried a humorous story of a conversation between an army officer and a rat that infested Kelly’s Drain. It claimed that the sewer was “one of the oldest, most time-honoured and most cherished institutions of the city and materially aids in giving to Madras that pre-eminence it holds over the most odorous of cities”. Submitting a proposal for a comprehensive drainage scheme for Madras, Captain Henry Tulloch in 1867, without mentioning the name of the drain states it was a “mere cesspool, from which sewage cannot possibly escape” and that laments of “the abominable stench from the mouth of the sewer at the north-east angle of the Fort, which drains a portion of Black Town only”. No description can convey to the minds of those who have never lived within the influence of the smell of this sewer, its overpowering offensiveness while the outlet is open. The fort would hardly be habitable from October to February, or while the north-east winds prevail, if this outlet were kept open the whole day. Fortunately, the sewer is large enough to hold all the sewage which flows into it, for a day or two, so that it is unnecessary to open the mouth except for about a couple of hours during the night. This is done too, at a time when the wind is blowing from the city in order that the smell may be driven out to sea”.

Topping the mouth of the drain, at the point where it met the sea was apparently a curious structure. This according to Our Chronicle was a Kelly’s Scent Bottle and was “short stoutly built chimney-looking structure, situated on the Esplanade close to the north-east angle of Fort St George, and not so far distant from the beach”. Which probably locates the spot as being close to the present location of Evening Bazaar Road and Annamalai Manram. According to the publication, the structure was the idea of a Dr Kelly (which indicates that it may have been the idea of Robert Kelly who over time may have over time metamorphosed into a Dr much like our present day politicians) who planned it as a ventilating shaft “to carry off the foul atmosphere of the drains of the Town. Unfortunately through want of confidence in the Doctor’s theory or from other causes, the shaft was not carried to the original height it was intended it should, but remains curtailed to one-fourth of its intended dimensions. The consequence of which is that the atmosphere under certain circumstances, in its vicinity, is tainted with the vilest odours in the most concentrated form, it is possible to imagine. Various efforts have been made to remove this nuisance but all have been unavailing. It seems sacrilege to meddle with it or disparage it in anyway”. The article goes on to state that it was the regiment that was in the Fort that suffered the most and one gallant officer decided to bring it to the notice of the Governor in a rather dynamic fashion. He bribed the officer in charge of the scent bottle to open it when the Governor and “his council were transacting business in the Council Chamber in the Fort, whereupon such a stench arose that the Governor broke up the Council with all haste and betook himself away as far as he could”.

Another account, that of Isaac Tyrrell (From England to the Antipodes and India – 1846 to 1902, the ALV Press, Madras 1904), has it that Kelly’s Drain was the main sewer north of the Fort and was also known as Kelly’s Folly. According to him, everyone took good care to remain on the windward side when the drain was opened, except Bishop Fennelly who said “chaffingly that he did not think there was any harm in the smell, but that on the whole he rather enjoyed it”!!

In 1906, Kelly’s Drain appears to have covered itself in glory for it overflowed its banks. The stink figuratively speaking reached Westminster for The House of Commons Report for that year records that “owing to the nuisance caused by the overflow of sewage into the Kelly Drain the matter was given preference to all other drainage proposals and a satisfactory scheme was under active preparation”. It appears that this scheme went the way of several of its predecessors and successors for in 1927, GA Natesan’s Indian Review, Volume 28 was still lamenting that Kelly’s Drain, “familialrly known as Kelly’s Scent-Bottle” was not connecting with the drainage through the Cooum “rightly styled the Cloaca Maxima of Madras”. Evidently by then, using rivers for discharging effluents and sewage was an accepted practice.

What happened subsequently to the structure known as the Scent Bottle is a mystery. Was it demolished or is it still there, hidden behind some structure or covered with posters? And does Kelly’s Drain exist in some form even now? Where does the drain of George Town now go? I for one would not like to know.