Sunday Times 2
The gentlemen’s clubs
View(s):By Yomal Senerath-Yapa
We tend to think of “the gentlemen’s club” as a Jeeves-like oddity where the Englishmen retreat to get away from the womenfolk, and attend to more masculine matters in a congenial setting.
But in colonial Ceylon, gentlemen’s clubs served a different purpose. While there were clubs in the capital city, the planters’ clubs upcountry were the real social hubs where the planting fraternity gathered frequently for a ‘whiff of civilization’- riding or driving down from their isolated estates in the hills.
These clubs were a symbol of occidental exclusivity till later times, when the Ceylonese in defiance established their own, or till the Anglo-Saxon bastions simply had to cede to the ‘brown skins’…
The oldest hill clubs included Radella and Darrawella, where the whole family had a rollicking time mostly with the kind of people they would have mingled with back home in England, holding dances, playing billiards, cricket, tennis, rugby and hockey. High spirits ruled, as well as piano playing and practical jokes.
The Colombo Club is one of the oldest in the capital. Today it allows men and women – a membership of about 400 Sri Lankans, to mingle freely in the clubhouse still exuding a palm-lined colonial prestige. It began though, as a viewing platform for British punters. Later admission was by subscription, while unmarried ladies had always to be chaperoned.
To quote from the coffee-table book ‘Colombo Club- 150th Commemorative Edition’:
“Period photographs show a building with a pinnacle shaped roof constructed from cadjan atop a platform functioning as a viewing gallery. This putative ‘grandstand’ of the Galle Face Race Course was later made permanent and used as the Colombo Club’s foundation, courtesy Governor Robinson. While the sporting impulse was a prime mover in the club’s antecedents, less muscular and more social imperatives also shaped the development of its ethos.
As reported in a Ceylon Times article datelined November 30, 1869, in an Assembly Rooms’ memo, it was set up for “providing Colombo with an Assembly Room and Race Stand, and which may be available for Balls, Concerts and Public Meetings, Family Bazaars, Lectures and other like purposes, and letting it out.”
The Hill Club in Nuwara Eliya was barred to locals till 1967, its ivy-clad grey stone walls with crest of a heraldic panther welcoming only planters from Europe. This palatial building with 45 rooms stands near the
Golf Club.
The Kelani Valley Club, much less select today, by the banks of the Sitawaka River was a watering hole for doughty planters around Avissawella where weekends were given to jolly roistering – as evidenced by the club motto ‘Usque Ad Tertium Diem’ (All the way to the Third Day) – signifying that Friday’s bawdy revels led to rugby matches on Saturday and picnics on Sunday.
The Royal Colombo Golf Club is the oldest golf club in Sri Lanka. The British first played on the Galle Face Green alongside polo, cricket, football, hockey, rugby, etc. till they bought the expanse of land then earmarked for a farm by philanthrophist Charles Henry de Soysa.
The Dutch Burgher Union with its dark timbered halls, was begun in British times, in 1908, and membership was only for those with an uninterrupted line of patrilineal descent from a European employee of the Dutch East India Company.
Let’s not forget the Nuwara Eliya Golf Club, which turns 134 this year, the pukka hill station club where the gleaming corridors are still trodden by caddies and valets as if the English gentry still call the tune…