By chance today, I popped into the Guildhall Art Gallery. What a delight! A wonderful range of paintings from the holdings of the Corporation of the City of London, well presented and with free admission. I was astonished to see a group portrait of the first London School Board, elected in 1870. And there on the margins is the great radical, Benjamin Lucraft (1809-1897). So I found myself face-to-face with Ben Lucraft. Quite a thrill!
He was a chair carver who was involved in the final throes of Chartism, turned to temperance, trade unionism and a vibrant tradition of artisan radicalism. He was prominent in the Reform League, campagning for an extension of the franchise. And he was an office-holder in the First International, until he resigned after disagreeing with Marx's lionising of the Paris Commune and the Communards. Lucraft was also a keen proponent of free public education, and the only working man elected to the London School Board in 1870, He was in the Lib-Lab tradition, a radical liberal more than a socialist, and twice stood unsuccessfully for Parliament. And here he is in a detail of the group portrait (he's on the right) and in a photograph taken in his old age.
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Robert Owen was a socialist, a philanthropist, a rationalist (and spiritualist), a cooperator and a textile manufacturer And yes, it is is fairly unusual for all those labels to be applied to the same person. In Kensal Green cemetery in west London, there's an obelisk-style memorial to Owen. He's not buried there - this is a public tribute to him erected in 1879, more than twenty years after his death. Alongside the Owen obelisk, and somewhat in its shadow, is the Reformers' Memorial - erected a few years later in 1885, This too is a non-funerary monument - in a burial ground but not marking a burial. It bears the names of women and men who campaigned to achieve democratic rights and freedom of the press. A few more names were added in 1907. The full list of names on the Reformers' Memorial is given here. It inc;ludes the well known - William Morris, Harriet Martineau, Francis Place. Charles Bradlaugh. Elizabeth Fry, John Ruskin - and some who are a lot more obscure, as well as honouring prominent freethinkers and several of those who campaigned tenaciously for women's suffrage. I've been able to find out very little about Joseph Corfield, who was the main organiser of the Reformers' Memorial, or about his daughter Emma Corfield, who added names almost twenty years after her father's death.
Curiously, Joseph Corfield was not himself interred at Kensal Green but in another of the 'magnificent seven' garden cemeteries around London, Abney Park in Stoke Newington. This was Cliff Richard's first home. It's a modest single-storey, four-room house in Maqbara colony at the heart of Lucknow in North India. The colony is doing quite well - many of the houses are smart and well-kept. 26 Maqbara Colony, as you can see, needs a little love. Harry Rodger Webb was born in Lucknow on 14 October 1940 - not in this house, but in the nearby King George VI Medical College. It's not entirely clear whether he was born into a British family or into one which might be regarded as Anglo-Indian, a distinct community which has both Indian and European heritage. According to the Times of India, in a 2006 article available on line, Harry's parents, Rodger and Dorothy, lived in Dehra Dun. But they moved to Lucknow for the birth because the hospital had a better reputation. They stayed in Maqbara colony in what was Rodger's father's home. Dorothy also seems to have had family links with Lucknow - her mother was apparently the dormitory matron at the city's leading girls' school, La Martiniere. While on the look-out in Maqbara colony for Cliff Richard's old home, we came across Annette (left) and Carol. Annette pointed out no. 26, and said her mum used to play with young Harry back in the day. She mentioned that Cliff's old home has new tenants - a local family have just moved in. The Maqbara colony, about thirty small houses arranged neatly around a Shia imambara and a small park in front of it, has traditionally been home to an Anglo-Indian community. Their numbers are diminishing. But we were told that to this day, quite a few of the local residents are Anglo-Indian Christians. Young Harry doesn't seem to have spent a lot of time in Lucknow. By the time he was six, the family was living in Howrah near Calcutta. And in 1948, after the trauma and bloodletting of Partition, the Webbs boarded a boat to Tilbury and remade their life in England. The Shia imambara which is the main feature of Maqbara colony and from which it gets its name is the burial place of a king of Awadh, Amjad Ali Shah. He ruled from 1842 to 1847, and built Lucknow's main street Hazratganj, which is just a stone's throw away from where he now rests. Amjad Ali Shah's son, Wajid Ali Shah, was the last king of Awadh. The piratical East India Company annexed his kingdom in 1856, and Wajid Ali Shah was exiled to Calcutta where he died thirty years later. On the Hazratganj side of the colony, there's a sumptuous Mughal-style gate which has in part been renovated and looks - from some angles - wonderfully imposing. This seems to be of the same data as the imambara. And there's this curious clash of styles and cultures as the very formal gate meshes with the more modest Anglo-Indian homes on either side. But that's the joy of this part of Lucknow!
At the college in Chennai where I teach, Sahmat - the Safdar Hashmi Memorial Trust - has organised an excellent exhibition 'Hum Sab Sahmat' in which writers, artists and photographers proclaim the importance of secularism and tolerance. A particularly timely venture. Safdar Hashmi was 34 when he was murdered in 1989 while performing street theatre. He was a leftist, activist and writer. Allied to the exhibition, there's a section entitled 'The Light Has Gone Out of Our Lives', about the photojournalism of Gandhi's assassination on 30 January 1948 and his cremation. It's wonderful, and is co-curated by one of India's leading photographers, Ram Rahman, a founding member of Sahmat. Among the images exhibited is the one above of a young boy at Gandhi's cremation. The boy is Gandhi's grandson Gopalkrishna Gandhi, who celebrates his 80th birthday next year. He has had a distinguished career as a diplomat and administrator. Marvellously, Gopalkrishna Gandhi came to the exhibition to see this photo in which he features. He apparently was not aware of it until recently One of the themes of the exhibition is the professional rivalry between two of the leading news photographers of the twentieth century, both of whom happened to be in Delhi when Gandhi was killed. Margaret Bourke-White was American; Henri Cartier-Bresson was French. We are told the story of how Margaret Bourke-White infuriated Gandhi's entourage by using flash photography to capture an image of Gandhi shortly after his death. At the cremation, a third foreign photographer becomes part of the story - an American, Max Desfor. He perhaps deserves the credit for one of the most iconic images of that event. Is that Life photo Desfor's work or Cartier-Bresson's? I'll leave you to decide!
The following snippet of information could really give you the edge in your next pub quiz: Chennai is the only Indian city to have a lighthouse! It's very centrally located, at the southern end of Marina beach (reputed to be the second biggest urban beach in the world, though no one has told me what the biggest is). And Chennai's lighthouse has another national distinction - it's the only lighthouse in India to have a lift. Just as well, as there's a public viewing gallery at the top, on the ninth floor and 185 feet above the ground. And yes, you do get spectacular views. S. Muthiah, the chronicler of Madras, comments slightly acidly that the lighthouse is 'one of the newer horrors in the city'. It's a popular landmark and a well visited spot for weekend family outings. But certainly it doesn't have the distinction of the city's earlier lighthouses. The second of these lighthouses, looking a bit like a classical column, is still standing in the grounds of the High Court.
Strangely the light in the current lighthouse - I'm told - was switched off after Rajiv Gandhi's assassination in Tamil Nadu in 1991 and remained extinguished for a couple of decades. So it maybe that the lighthouse is more valued by landlubbers than by seafarers. Of all the grand Indo-Saracenic buildings still standing in Chennai, the Bharat Building is by some distance the most outlandish - and sadly the most dilapidated. The great historian of Madras/Chennai, S. Muthiah, described this as 'styling run riot'. Here Gothic and Mughal design features are not so much in fusion as in open warfare. The spires and minarets of the Bharat Building loom over Anna Salai, formely Mount Road, Chennai's principal city centre thoughfare. Though these photos are taken from its second, and slightly more imposing, frontage on General Patters Road. This was initially the Kardyl Building - designed by J.H. Stephens of the Madras Public Works Department and opened in 1897. It was described at the time as making 'a far greater show than any other commerical building on Mount Road'. These were the premises of W.E. Smith & Co, pharmacists and wholesale druggists, opticians, dealers in surgical instruments and makers of aerated waters. In it heyday, the building had a first floor showroom measuring 60 feet by 40 as well as a cafe and a beer bar. The building was bought by Bharat Insurance in 1934 and became known as the Bharat Building. It's now owned by the Life Insurance Corporation, which has its own regional HQ in a none-too-pretty high rise building nearby. In 2006, the LIC told the tenants to leave the Bharat Building and began pulling it down. They were stopped by the courts, which placed this Gormenghast of South India on Chennai's heritage list.
The problem is the building is now falling down of its own accord. And the construction of the new metro line which has so upended Anna Salai in recent years hasn't helped. So it would be nice to believe that this Bharat will be rebuilt. But I wouldn't put money on it. What about this for historical continuity! Fort St George in Chennai is one of the oldest fortified British settlements in India, built over the period 1639-1644. It was initially a vast fortfication which enclosed the British garrison and the homes of the small non-military British community. The Fort was military base, seat of government and religious hub all in one. And it still is! Much of the Fort remains under Indian military control; it's where Tamil Nadu's state legislative assembly still meets; and it's home to the oldest Anglican church in India. Happily, the Chief Minister's Special Cell isn't a dungeon; it's a high powered adminstrative team. But the sign feels as if it harks back to an earlier era. Because so much of the Fort is under military control or houses government offices, photography is restricted. But it's still recognisably the same - at least as far as the formidable twenty-feet-high outside walls are concerned - as it was in this drawing of 1754. That's the steeple of St Mary's you can see at the heart of the Fort. And to this day, the moat (now dry) runs round the Fort and there are still cannons on display to discourage the delinquent. St Mary's church first opened in 1680 - though its hallmark white spire is a little later in date. Chennai has some quite astonishingly beautiful churches: the Portuguese Luz church; the Armenian church; the Kirk; St George's Cathedral. But St Mary's must sit at the top of that list. Sadly, not all of the ancient buildings in the Fort are as well cared for as St Mary's
It's amazing what you can come across in the back streets of Chennai. Just poke and prod, and you can uncover magic. Take this - a life-size statue of the remarkable, admirable, Annie Besant. It's in a vestibule slightly concealed from street view, at the New India Building (the title of one of her journals), also known as the Besant Memorial Building. This is in Georgetown, not far from the Gokhale Hall which Besant established in 1915 - and which I recently blogged about. The caretaker here is all too happy to let the curious inspect Annie's statue - a marked contrast to the grumpy, hostile, jobsworth at the Gokhale Hall. I first came across this Besant statue four years ago - it's good to see it clearly cared for, even if its future must be a little precarious. The statue was at some stage moved from the Gokhale Hall. There are several other busts and statues of Besant across Chennai - from a full length gilded statue overlooking Marina beach to a bust and a portrait (and perhaps more) at the international theosophists' headquarters in Adyar.. There's nothing obvious to indicate when this statue was made, or by whom. It's probably from towards the end of Besant's life - she died at Adyar in 1933 aged 85. She is depicted dressed in what I take to be the Indian style, not a sari exactly but certainly not a conventional dress or skirt. And - an interesting detail - she is barefoot. I admire Annie Besant. She got things done and was, at various times, an atheist, freethinker, advocate of women's rights, socialist, trade unionist, theosophist, Indian nationalist, writer and educationalist. Not bad for one lifetime!
And this is the building which houses the statue - the entrance is on the left and she's on the ground floor, take a few steps in and you'll see her. This is a rare glimpse into Chennai's Gokhale Hall. Once one of the city's leading nationalist rallying points, and later an important musical venue, the hall has been shuttered and near derelict for more than a decade. The hall was built in 1915 by Annie Besant, the Indian nationalist and theosophist. It was here that she announced the establishment of the Home Rule League. What a pity that it is now falling apart. The building was at first known as the Young Men's Indian Association Hall. The association was founded by Annie Besant as a 'political gymnasium'. The letters YMIA are prominent on the exterior. The association still controls the building. Its website says the hall is undergoing 'major repairs' - of which there is no sign - but also states that a decision is pending on whether to demolish the hall and rebuild on the site or whether to restore and refurbish, If some repair work isn't carried out urgently, then the structure could well be unsalvageable. That would be unforgivable. This is historically such an important building in a city which values its heritage. The hall used to have a capacity of 1,500. Now the caretaker fends off any sign of interest and shoos away the curious. No one is allowed in.
The YMIA has another building nearby. This remains open, and it boasts a glorious life-size statue of, yes, Annie Besant. That will be the subject of my next Chennai blog. Tamil politics makes a point of celebrating its heroes. And how! In the past week a grandiose memorial has been inaugurated to M. Karunanidhi, who spent almost twenty years over four spells as chief minister of the state of Tamil Nadu. He died in August 2018 at the age of 94. His son, Stalin, is Tamil Nadu's current chief minister. The memorial-cum-resting place-cum-shrine is on a spectacular scale and, as is customary here, is on a large plot alongside Marina beach in the centre of Chennai. The design makes much of Karunanidhi's hallmark - the dark glasses he always wore. The partly translucent white marble is from Vietnam. Stalin, at the inauguration, said the memorial to his father was a 'first wonder' on what he described as the second longest beach in the world. When I visited on Saturday, there was a stready stream of people strolling around - many of them families, and some picnicking in the grounds. Karunanidhi began his career as a scriptwriter in the Tamil film industry. His great rival Jayalalithaa - who spent fourteen years in Tamil Nadu's top job and died in 2016 - started off as an actor. Strikingly, her similarly OTT memorial is on an adjoining plot, again overlooking Marina beach. I suspect, though I can't say for certain, that quite a few of those promenading round Karunanidhi's memorial also paid a call at Jayalalithaa's while they were in town. And then, I'm sure, they made for the beach, which is crammed with food stalls and lots of other excitements. And of course, the new memorial is quite the place for selfies and group photos - a pity I didn't take one myself. Unlike the memorials to national political leaders in Delhi, Chennai's monuments are neither flyblown nor particularly solemn. You go there with a smile on your face not a tear in your eye. And then, of all things, I came across the old man himself on Marina beach - and, yes, I have a photo to prove it.
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