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The British High Commissioner, Dominick Chilcott recently attended the 200th anniversary of the building of the Mount Lavinia Hotel, excerpts of his speech are given below.

It may sound fanciful to say so, but there is a thread of continuity that links the British Governors of Ceylon of the past to the British High Commissioner to Sri Lanka of today.

Our roles and particularly our powers (sadly I don't command an army or run an administration) are very different. But Governors, in their day, and High Commissioners now are the representatives of the monarch and are the most senior officials of the British government on this island.

We both took our instructions from the Secretary of State before coming here. We are both expected to carry out government policy while we are here. We are both trying to act in the interests of the people of Britain and of this island.

So as I stand here in these magnificent surroundings and in the presence of descendants of two of those early Governors, I sense the ghosts of the past Governors watching me.

To be precise, I sense the presence of the four Governors who are associated with this building - Sir Thomas Maitland, Sir Robert Brownrigg, Sir Edward Paget and Sir Edward Barnes.

They were respectively the second, third, fourth and fifth British governors of Ceylon and their span of office lasted from 1805 - the year of the battle of Trafalgar - to 1831 - the year Charles Darwin set off on his famous voyage of discovery in the Beagle.

Sir Thomas Maitland arrived in Ceylon on July 17, 1805 aged 46 years young. Most of his adult life had been spent as a soldier, where he saw service in India, and as a Member of Parliament.

As Governor, Sir Thomas Maitland was not afraid to use his formidable powers and he earned the nickname 'King Tom' for the way he administered Ceylon. But essentially he was a practical Scot with great common sense and an iron will - the right antidote to the less fortunate governorship of his predecessor, the intellectually brilliant but not very competent, Frederick North.

When Sir Thomas Maitland arrived here, he moved into the house in Colombo, which had belonged to the last Dutch governor. But he wasn't satisfied with that. For shortly afterwards, he built another residence, on this lovely spot jutting out into the Indian Ocean.

Sir Thomas Maitland may have had another motive in building a house here, in addition to the natural beauty of the coast. Popular legend has it that he fell in love with the daughter of the head of a troupe of dancers that formed part of his welcoming party to this island.

This was not a liaison that a British Governor could pursue in the public gaze. But away from Colombo, it was easier for him to rendezvous with Lovina, the object of his affections. It was still, however, necessary to take precautions and it is said that a special passageway was constructed in the building to enable Lovina to come and go without being seen.

She was a girl in a dance troupe, he was the British Governor.

I wonder- did they walk, arm in arm along the beach, listening to the roar of the Indian Ocean's waves? Did their feet, 200 years ago, make prints in the sand, just below this hotel? Did they try to make sense of their love for each other?

The passage of time has smoothed over these details, which are now lost to us, just as their footprints on the beach have been washed away by the waves.

But the Mount Lavinia building, a monument to that forbidden romance, still stands.

The next Governor was Sir Robert Brownrigg who served here from 1812 to 1820. Like Maitland, Sir Robert was a former soldier.

The great achievement of his time in Ceylon was the capture of the Kingdom of Kandy in 1815.

This was achieved without having to fight a battle, such was the unpopularity of Sri Wickrama Rajasingha, the last king, with the other leading Kandyans.

The fall of Kandy brought an end to 2,357 years of Sinhalese independence. It is not surprising then, that there were soon stirrings against the new British rule. In 1818, there was a serious revolt that was only put down with great loss of life.

The fall of Kandy also enabled the British to eventually unite the island, for reasons of administrative convenience, for the first time in its history. Some say that the people of Sri Lanka live with the consequences of that decision today.

Brownrigg was hailed in Britain as 'the conqueror of the kingdom of Kandy' and King George III allowed him to bear the crown, sceptre and banner of the King of Kandy on his coat of arms.

The next two governors were Sir Edward Paget and Sir Edward Barnes.

Barnes and Paget, like Maitland and Brownrigg, were former soldiers. Both Barnes and Paget had both fought under the Duke of Wellington. Paget had lost an arm at the siege of Oporto and Barnes had been badly wounded at Waterloo.

Paget had one of the briefest of governorships, eight months, during which nothing much happened.

Sir Edward Barnes, on the other hand, was the longest serving Governor of Ceylon, holding office twice, from 1820 to 1822 and again from 1824 to 1831. Barnes is remembered chiefly for two things - building roads and starting plantations.

He was a man of great energy. Barnes' new roads connected Colombo to every other town on the island and that linked Kandy to every coastal town. And having built the roads, he decided to develop the countryside to which the roads gave access. He encouraged the plantation of coffee, which gave way later to tea, an industry which continues to bring fame, renown and export earnings to Sri Lanka today.

One of the attractive features of life in modern Sri Lanka, at least for my countrymen and women, is that the 150 year period of British rule, under the thirty British governors who served here, is, on the whole, viewed fairly positively. It was the period in which the island went by stages, through the greatest radical change in its recorded history as it transformed itself from a traditional agrarian society to a modern economy and liberal democracy.

Our governors are seen generally to have done their best for the development of this island and its people, albeit acting according to their own ideas and beliefs that were necessarily a product of the social and political circumstances of their time. A time, I need hardly add, that is very different from multicultural, meritocratic, modern Britain.

It is a tribute to the political maturity of Sri Lankan society and to the vision of the owners and management of the Mount Lavinia hotel that these four governors should be at the centre of the bicentenary of this great building. It is also a great pleasure for me to be part of that commemoration and to be remembering with a certain pride the connection to the British governors who lived here.

As they look down upon us, I think the ghosts of the four governors must be very pleased with what they see.