“An uncommon man in the age of the Common Man”

(Excerpted from Render unto Caesar – Memoirs of Bradman Weerakoon)

Two highly personal life-defining events occurred in 1956. One was my marriage in August to Damayanthi and the other the death of my father in late September.

Damayanthi Gunasekera was the third daughter of a friend of my father’s who joined the colonial police at about the same time as Station House Officers. They both served for 35 years before retiring as superintendent in charge of districts. But more than that, Damayanthi’s mother was a Weerakoon from the same village as my father – Payagala in the Kalutara district – and a second or third cousin as well.

Damayanthi’s mother who wed at the age of 14 was said to be a beauty and it was rumoured in family circles that my father. as a young police officer, was seriously interested in her. Be that as it may my parents were really pleased when the proposal from the Gunasekera side came along.

We were married on August 10, 1956 at the Galle Face Hotel and as decided by the two of us, Sir John, my former boss who we knew me quite well by then and Sir Oliver Goonetilleke, the governor-general who had been at school together with our two fathers at Wesley College, and the prime minister and his wife were to be the chief guests. Our marriage had been registered earlier and the witnesses had been my father and Damayanthi’s maternal uncle. The prime minister was busy that afternoon with the budget debate in Parliament but his wife, Sirimavo Bandaranaike, came and stayed for a long while.

The other event, the death of my father, a month after the wedding built a special bond of appreciation and obligation to the Bandaranaike family. My father died suddenly two days after surgery by Dr P R Anthonis, the famous surgeon, for a tumour in the urinary tract. The funeral was fixed for a Sunday morning. It was to be a police funeral as befitted his rank, attended by a bugler or two and the blue flag draping the coffin, but it remained by and large a personal affair.

It was therefore a surprise to learn from the police, as we arrived at Kanatte, that the prime minister, who had been out of Colombo at a swearing-in parade at Diyatalawa, for newly-commissioned officers in his capacity as minister of defence and external affairs was making his presence in a few minutes having cut short his weekend stay in the hills. He was accompanied by Gunasena de Soyza, the permanent secretary. They had booked two sleeping-berths and taken an overnight train to be in Colombo on time. I have never forgotten this extreme act of caring, by a person so highly placed, towards one of his officials and the personal inconvenience he must have accepted to be on time at the funeral.

Of course, the honour paid was to my father who had had a long and distinguished service record in the police force, as it was then called. A C Dep, a DIG of Police who wrote a classic History of the Ceylon Police’ provides an interesting account of the role and purpose of the Station House Officer in those days:

The Station House Officers did not disappoint those who were responsible for the creation of this rank. At first they had a very risky time. “Every one of the SHO in the Tangalle District was either shot or knifed at the beginning of the establishment of the Stations but they stuck to their work most pluckily. They often acted aggressively themselves. But they proved a valuable asset to the Force.” (IGP Dowbiggin)
A full appraisal of their value was given thus by another superior offcer, “They are rather vain, have not that strict sense of discipline that a man who has worked his way through the ranks has, are too fond of strutting about in plainclothes and won’t stand too vigorous a talking off on parade or any similar treatment. They are inclined to sulk and resign in a huff if ill treated. It is an incontrovertible fact that as a class the SHO have been respectable and respected. Their great asset and one which will never be fully appreciated until it is lost, is that as a class they are honest. They are not given to taking petty bribes in petty cases, to do so would be beneath their dignity.”

Among those who lived up to the expectations of Longden and proved that they could fill any high post with credit and dignity were: A Peries ( appointed 1905), P P Wickramasuriya (1905), I Deheragoda (1906), C V Gooneratne (1906), R J Weerasinghe (1906), M D M Gunasekara (1907), P R Krishnaratne (1908), VT Dickman (1908), A W Dambawinne (1908) and E R Weerakoon (1910).

M D M Gunasekera who joined in (1907) was Damayanthi’s father and E R Weerakoon (1910) was mine. I could not help thinking that the references to being “rather vain”, “strutting about”, being “inclined to sulk and resign” and it being “beneath their dignity to take bribes” were exceedingly accurate about my father, as I knew him.

An Uncommon Man in the Age of the Common Man

My interest in S W R D Bandaranaike, this uncommon and complex man, who was now poised to be the harbinger of the age of the common man, led me to read as much as I could on him. Who was this uncommon man whom nobody really quite understood?

If one looked at the family background he was even more alienated from the common man and of the West, more so than Sir John with his formal dress codes and his KCMG.

It was well known that S W R D Bandaranaike was the son of Sir Solomon Dias Bandaranaike, Maha Mudaliyar of the Governors Gate and one of the leading lights of the colonial bourgeoisie and Lady Daisy Dias Bandaranaike of the Obeysekera family. In 1902, when Mr Bandaranaike was two years old his father had been accorded the CMG (Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George) while on a visit to London. The family was one of the richest in the Siyane Korale, (now most of the Gampaha district) owning large extents’ of coconut land and valuable urban property.

Even the very name ‘Solomon West Ridgeway’ which Sir Solomon gave his son was redolent of the family’s association with the British Raj and the then Governor Sir Joseph West Ridgeway had been SWRD’s godfather. As was common at the time in this class of society, the family was Christian and of the Anglican fraternity.

Sir Solomon had tried strenuously to mould his only son in his own image. The boy was kept at home on the country estate at Horagolla and tutored by English teachers until he was 15. The private tuition was not a success as Henry Young, the first master had a ‘fondness for the bottle’ and was soon got rid of while the second, A C Radford, a graduate of Cambridge, was resisted by the young Soloman who disliked the tutor’s attempt to turn him into an English schoolboy of the times.

As Mr Bandaranaike himself had written when he was 18, “Mr Radford never realized my peculiar position and the necessity to use suitable methods in dealing with me. He spent his time in an attempt to destroy my ideals and foist his own upon me.”
The release came when the First World War broke out and the tutor went back to England and Solomon was sent to school for the first time. The secondary school that Sir Solomon chose for his son was St Thomas’s College at Mutwal. But even here, where the sons of the elite studied, young Bandaranaike was treated differently.

He did not live in the boarding like the other boarders but in the house of the Warden and according to his contemporaries had special privileges. Prestige at STC went to those who excelled at team sports like cricket and Bandaranaike who favoured more individval activities such as tennis and debating was not among the most highly respected. However he was remembered for his first class at the Senior Cambridge, his articulate writings and his debating skills.

Warden Stone, a firm and reserved man who was a Classics scholar and a teacher of Greek, won young Solomon’s respect. “Warden Stone is able to appreciate a boy’s point of view’, he was to write. ‘He never tries to force his ideas on a boy against his wishes. He has often told me ‘Stick to your own opinion’.”

Oxford and reading classics, with Stone’s advice and tutelage, was the way forward but this had been delayed until the end of the War by the difficulty of finding a berth on a ship. In his “Memories of Oxford ” Bandaranaike had spoken of the ordeal that awaited the ‘darkie’ who had the temerity to read for the Honour School of Classics. He wrote, “My first year at Oxford I recollect as a period of disappointment and frustration. In all directions I found myself opposed by barriers, which, though invisible and impalpable, were nonetheless very real.”

But this feeling of rejection had not lasted too long. The solution to his problem was as he puts it in ‘memories’ the realization that “before I am their equal I must be their superior”.
Reading Memories was an enlightening experience for me because it opened many doors into Mr Bandaranaike’s personality and his likes and aversions. One of his three ambitions at Oxford had been to be the president of the Union, a position that usually went with oratorical skills of the highest order. As a lad of 18, standing in the outer ring of the vast crowd around the Independence Hall on February 4, 1948, I had, like many others, been mesmerized by his eloquence.

As leader of the House he had outlined his vision of a new order, freedom from ignorance, disease, want and fear. And he exhorted all of us to join him “in fanning the flickering flame of democracy”. It was heady stuff in the mould of Nehru’s ‘tryst with destiny’ at the ‘dawn of the midnight hour’. In “Memories” he had explained the exultation he felt when orating and the power of holding an audience in thrall by his words.

This is how he put it after making “the best speech I ever delivered at Oxford”: Soon the House hung breathless on my words; there was dead silence among the audience which was too absorbed even to applaud. I was conscious of such power over my fellow men as I had never known before. For a few moments I was master of the bodies and souls of the majority of my listeners.”

Mr Bandaranaike’s achievements at the Union were such that he had a right to believe that his ambition to be the president might be fulfilled. But fate intervened in the way of a serious illness that he developed during the autumn term of 1923 which kept him away from the Union and from serious canvassing. It would have been an uphill task since there was also at that time at Oxford a palpable feeling that it was undesirable that the Union should have a president who was not white.

He had earlier tried for the post of junior treasurer in March of 1924 and won, but his quest for the presidency in June was of no avail. He ended third to HJS Wedderburn, the heir to the Earldom of Dundee. Bandaranaike was reportedly deeply hurt at the bloc vote against him – possibly on racial grounds – and this is said to have left him skeptical of the sincerity of the British, especially politicians of the Conservative kind. This stayed with him during the rest of his political life.

I was also moved by the manner in which Bandaranaike had grappled with the problem of authority throughout his early days in relations with his father, his tutors, at STC, at Oxford and so on. Many years later, in perhaps the definitive biography of SWRD Bandaranaike, the political scientist James Manor described this dilemma which Bandaranaike faced throughout his life in the following way
Each time he moved into a wider arena this problem arose in a new form. His childhood was dominated by his difficulties with the authority first of his father whom he mocked, resented and feared, and then of a tutor who acted as his father’s surrogate. At school and at Oxford he was intensely preoccupied with what he saw as his struggle to establish his superiority and his authority among his fellow students.

Throughout his adult life he was unable to accept the authority of any superior. He denied the legitimacy of British rule in Ceylon – a posture which helped him reject his father’s public role as a pillar of the British regime – although for long periods he maintained an uneasy truce with colonial officialdom. As a young politician he could not accept the authority of the leading Ceylonese nationalists who were suspicious of a young man whose father and grandfather had scorned them.

The result was two decades of alternating cooperation and strife, even when (after 1936) he served in a team of ministers led by a senior nationalist – D S Senanayake the architect of the island’s independence in 1948. That phase ended in 1951 when Senanayake with his allies and kinsmen drove Bandaranaike out of Ceylon’s first post-independence Cabinet.

In his early days after assuming office, Mr Bandaranaike was to refer somewhat grandly to the world, to the country and indeed to all of us, as living in a period of transition, caught between two worlds – one dying and the other struggling to be born. He liked to portray himself as the midwife assisting in the birth of the new world which his period of intense labour and change would help produce.

Like Jawaharlal Nehru, with whom he had established a firm friendship, Mr Bandaranaike, too, was a man caught between two cultures. His upbringing and education had been wholly in English and he had a command of the language to become one of the finest speakers in the Oxford Union. On his return to Ceylon after five years abroad he could hardly speak a sentence in Sinhala. Yet, in adulthood he acquired a clear understanding of the hopes and fears of the mass of the Sinhalese for their language and culture and for Buddhism.