The Story of Madras

by Glyn Barlow

The initial enterprise was small indeed. The first school in Madras was the little "public school for children, several of whom are English", which the French Capuchin priest, Father Ephraim, opened in his own house in White Town very soon after Madras came into being. His pupils were mostly Portuguese or Portuguese Eurasians, the children of Portuguese subjects who had come from Mylapore and who, for purposes of trade or commerce, had settled down within the English Company's domain. His English pupils must have been children of the very few of the Company's civil or military employees that were married, or of the still fewer English free settlers. Father Ephraim, who according to accounts was a really learned man, charged no fees, yet was deeply interested in the welfare of his scholars; and the little school must have supplied a great want in those far-off days. It is interesting indeed to think of that little 'public school;' for the room in the priest's house was the scene of the very first beginning of what are now the mighty educational activities of Madras—an earnest, moreover, of the great things that the Roman Catholic Church was going to do in the way of education, both for boys and for girls, in South India.

Father Ephraim's school continued to prosper under his successors, and in the seventeenth century it was transferred, as a poor-school, to a building in the grounds of what is now the Roman Catholic Cathedral in Armenian Street; and in 1875 it was put under the control of the brothers of St. Patrick, an Irish order of educational monks, and it became St. Patrick's orphanage. Later the brothers transferred themselves and their orphanage to the spacious park—Elphinstone Park—on the southern bank of the Adyar River, the premises which they occupy still.

For some thirty years the Company took no part in educational work, and the children of Madras were left entirely to Father Ephraim's care. Then for two years a certain Master Patrick Warner was the Company's temporary chaplain of Madras—a conscientious and uncompromising Protestant minister who wrote some long letters to the Directors in England denouncing the laxity of the conduct of the Company's employees and deploring the influence that Roman Catholic priests had been allowed to obtain in Fort St. George. Finally, he went back to England, with the threat that he was going to interview the Directors on various matters pertaining to Madras; and that he succeeded in making himself heard is to be seen in the fact that in the following year the Directors sent a Protestant schoolmaster out to Madras. The letter in which they notified the appointment to the Governor in Council at Fort St. George was assuredly inspired by Master Patrick Warner's undoubtedly high-minded representations. They wrote that, as there were now in Fort St. George 'so many married families,' they were sending out 'one Mr. Ralph Orde to be schoolmaster at the Fort ... who is to teach all the Children to read English and to write and Cypher gratis, and if any of the other Natives, as Portuguez, Gentues (Telugus),[4] or others will send their Children to School, we require they be also taught gratis ... and he is likewise to instruct them in the Principles of the Protestant religion.' Mr. Ralph Orde arrived by the same ship which brought the letter, and his arrival (1677) is another notable event in the history of education in Madras. It was the first beginning of Government education—the laying of the first stone in what is now such a vast edifice.

[4] In modern Madras the great majority of the Hindu residents are Tamils; but in the beginning there were very few Tamil immigrants, and the Hindu residents were nearly all of them Telugus (Gentoos).

In appointing a schoolmaster, the Directors meant to do their best for education in their rising city; for they had engaged no mean dominie on a menial's pay. In choosing Mr. Ralph Orde they chose a good man, and they paid him accordingly. He was to dine at the General Table, and his salary was to be £50 a year, which in those days was no small sum—more than the salary of some of the Members of Council. Perhaps, indeed, they got too good a man for the post; for after five years of educational work in Madras, Mr. Orde complained that his schoolmastering had been 'much prejudicial to my health,' and he asked to be relieved of his duties and to be appointed to a post in the Company's civil service instead. His request was granted. A new schoolmaster was appointed; and as a 'Civilian' Mr. Orde worked with such success that in two or three years he was sent to Sumatra to be the Chief of a factory that he was to found on the west coast of the island. The ex-schoolmaster would, perhaps, have risen to be Governor of Madras, but it would seem that life in the East had really been 'much prejudicial to his health,' for he died in Sumatra ten years after his first arrival in Madras.

In 1688, by virtue of the Company's Royal Charter, a Corporation of the City of Madras came into being, and it was among their delegated duties that they should build a school in Black Town for the purpose of teaching 'Native children to speak, read, and write the English Tongue, and to understand Arithmetic and Merchants' Accompts.' Three years later, however, Elihu Yale, Governor of Madras, complained to the Corporation that, although they had been empowered to levy taxes on the citizens, they had not so much as thought about building a school, and had neglected various other civic responsibilities. The Company—rightly or wrongly—sought to justify their inaction with the excuse which the Corporation of Madras has—rightly or wrongly—made for civic inaction so many times since, namely that 'no funds' had been assigned to them by Government for the works that they were called upon to undertake. As for taxation, they remarked that the people in Black Town had not been schooled to civic taxation; and it is true that any ruthless collection of taxes might have meant wholesale departures from the city, or at any rate a serious check to further immigration. So the municipal school for Native children never came into being.

Meanwhile the Company's free school in White Town, started by Mr. Orde, continued its work under Mr. Orde's successors; and elementary instruction was imparted therein to a heterogeneous crowd of children—English, Eurasians, and Indians—Christians and Hindus. Eventually the school was put in charge of the chaplain of St. Mary's Church in the Fort, and the chaplain and his churchwardens agreed in thinking that such education was not of the kind that a Church should control, and that it was rather their duty to institute in Madras a residential free-school for poor Protestant children of British descent, which should be conducted on the lines of the many 'charity schools' in England; and in 1715, with the approval of the Directors, 'St. Mary's Church Charity School' was founded. The event is of particular interest; for St. Mary's Church Charity School developed later into the 'Male Asylum'—the institution which has done so much for boys and girls for so many years, and which, after changing its habitation on various occasions, is now comfortably housed in spacious premises in the Poonamallee road.

The year 1715 is noteworthy on another account. St. Mary's School having been founded solely for the benefit of children of European descent, the native children who had attended the Company's day-school were deprived of education. The Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge undertook to supply the want, by establishing schools in Madras for the special benefit of Indian children; and the year 1715, therefore, is the date which marks the first beginning of the educational work that English Protestant missionary societies have done in India. The Society found themselves unable to take up the work immediately themselves; so they applied to the vigorous Danish Lutheran Mission at Tranquebar, which was then a Danish settlement; and a Danish minister was sent to Madras to set things going.

In the course of time Madras had become a much more habitable city than it had been in its first beginnings, and a much more possible place of residence for European women. The Company's employees, therefore, were more and more disposed to matrimony; and, as already related, the Directors, believing that married men made steadier employees, had from early times encouraged the nuptial humour by sending out from England periodical batches of well-connected young women as prospective brides for employees who lacked either the means or the inclination to take a trip home to choose partners for themselves. The number of European fathers and mothers, therefore, in Madras was continually increasing; and for the education of their children, as also for that of children of well-to-do Eurasians, there was need of a different kind of education than the various free-schools supplied. Home education, with or without paid tutors and governesses, probably served its turn with some, but it was certain that sooner or later the private school would come into being.

We are unable to say when the first private school in Madras was started; but an advertisement in one of the issues of the Madras Courier, in 1790, shows that a private school for boys was started in that year; and it was probably the first. The enterprising educationist was Mr. John Holmes, m.a., who opened the 'Madras Academy' in Black Town for the instruction of boys in 'Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, History, the use of the Globes, French, Greek, and Latin.' Other towns in the Madras Presidency had their English residents, so Mr. Holmes offered to accommodate 'a few Boarders;' and the offer was found so convenient that certain parents wanted accommodation for their girls as well as for their boys. Mr. Holmes was willing to receive all the pupils that he could get; for in an advertisement two months later he announced that he was going to move to a larger house in which 'apartments will be allotted for the Young Ladies entirely removed and separate from the Young Gentlemen.'