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| Don Richard Wijewardene |
June 13 is D. R. Wijewardene Day – the day Sri Lanka's newspaper magnate passed away 58 years ago.
The first Sri Lankan to create a prosperous newspaper business, Don Richard Wijewardene played a significant role in the country's struggle for political freedom. When he launched the 'Daily News' in 1918, the country was a Crown Colony in the British Empire. When he died 32 years later, she had become an independent nation.
After graduating from Cambridge University and being called to the Bar of the Inner Temple in London, he returned to his mother country in 1912 and embarked on a legal career. Looking for something more challenging, he bought a bankrupt newspaper and gradually established a group of journals, in English, Sinhalese and Tamil which were among the best in their kind.
His biographer, renowned journalist H. A. J. Hulugalle says in 'The Life and Times of D. R. Wijewardene': "By any reckoning Wijewardene was among the leading newspaper proprietors in the Commonwealth, yet his name was not known outside a small circle of newspaper men. The public knew next to nothing of the Press magnate.
His photograph did not appear in his own newspapers or in other journals. He was a man of few words and unassuming ways. Yet his influence on the events of his time in Ceylon was greater than that of most politicians. He was a type of man new to Ceylon or, for that matter, to Asia: a rich man's son who, after an English education, starts a newspaper, not as the mouth-piece of any political party but primarily as a medium of information and vehicle of progressive views." |
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