One of the earliest and most outstanding woman-photographers

While visiting Rukmal and Leelananda De Silva recently, I walked into

his library and picked up a photocopy of his article to The Sunday Island of February 13, 2005. Intrigued by its title – The story of Julia Margaret Cameron and Charles Cameron – I borrowed it and have inserted info gathered from it to this article adding what I had in mind and researched. This article too is prompted by my reawakened interest in British colonials who had loved Ceylon. An added bonus was that the more significant of the two to me was the memsahib. Leelananda said that his wife Rukmal and he ferried across from London to visit the old home of the Cameron’s – ‘Dimbola Lodge,’ in Freshwater, Isle of Wight, which is now a museum dedicated to her. He was pleasantly surprised to see his article on the Camerons, mounted on the museum display board.

I also recall spending much time on my way to Bogawantalawa, walking around the graveyard of the very small St Mary’s Anglican Church poised high above the wide blue expanse of the Castlereagh Reservoir, reading the legends on the headstones of some of the few British Colonials who had died in Ceylon. The church was very well maintained and still used for regular services, having been built by the Camerons in 1878. The caretaker who conducted us on our tour within and outside the church pointed out a stained glass window the couple, had brought down from England.

She

Julia Pattle was born in India in 1815, one of ten children, her father holding high office in the East India Company. She was brought up by her maternal grandmother in Versailles and Paris, moving in high society of both France and England; hence her early portraits of British Victorian aristocracy. Her sister’s daughter married Sir Leslie Stephen, Editor of the Dictionary of National Biography, and was the mother of Virginia Woolf.

What is written is that Julia Cameron led a bourgeois life as a housewife and mother until she began photography as a hobby at age 48-years, first in India and England. “With her portraits of the British upper class, she became one of the most important British photographers of the Victorian era.” She is now considered among the greatest of photographers of all time. “Cameron created photographs that are always characterized by a soft focus. There is always a kind of mystical veil over the faces of those portrayed. They show more than just the surface; they also let the viewer see the inside of the person.” Her interest in photography started around 1865 with photography being introduced to the world by Daguerre in 1839 or thereabouts.

Julia married Jurist Charles Hay Cameron in 1838, 20 years her senior. He had just been named the President of the Law Commission in India and in 1843 replaced McCaulay as member of the British Government Supreme Council in India. In retirement they returned to Britain and moved to live in the Isle of Wight with immediate neighbour Alfred Lord Tennyson. In the early 1840s they bought coffee plantations in Ceylon one of which was Dimbola Estate. They moved to live in Ceylon in the 1870s because three of their sons of eight children were settled down here: two planters and the third an Assistant Government Agent. They lived with him in Kalutara. They moved to Balmoral Cottage in Lindula and then to Glencairn Estate, Norwood. Familiar names 60 years ago; maybe retaining their names even after nationalization of British owned tea estates.

He

Husband Charles Hay Cameron cut himself a niche in British colonial history of South Asian colonies – India and Ceylon. He and Major William MacBean George Colebrooke (later knighted) constituted with others the Colebrooke-Cameron Commission appointed in 1833 as a Royal Commission of Eastern Enquiry by the Colonial Office. The others fell by the way so only Colebrooke and Cameron came to Ceylon to assess the administration of the island and make recommendations for better governance, plus financial, economic and judicial reform. The colony within the British Empire was united as one nation in 1815.

Expenses had risen and the government was meeting them, hence the Commission to enquire into matters so it did not have to spend its money. Thus the C-C Commission was certainly not for the benefit of Ceylon. However due to the sagacity or perception or even plain fairness of the two, Ceylon benefited much from their recommendations and drew closer to gaining independence. After all Cameron was an outstanding jurist who had revised the entire Indian judicial system including India’s penal code.

The legal and economic proposals made by the Commission in 1833 were innovative and radical. Many of their proposals were adopted. They signified for Ceylon the first manifestation of constitutional government by establishing an Executive and Legislative Council. They advised the amalgamation of Kandyan and Maritime Provinces as a single unit of governance; the abolition of ‘rajakariya’ (unpaid for service); and initiated modernized economic systems and the beginnings of a uniform state on justice, education and civil administration – setting up a commission to manage education and a public school on British lines.

Thus came into being Royal College, Colombo, in 1835, then named Colombo Academy. Ceylonese were permitted to compete and enter the Ceylon Civil Service, thus far completely limited to Britishers. According to Leelananda De Silva, Cameron particularly did very much good for Ceylon in most spheres, particularly in the judicial. He spelt out the penal code for Ceylon closely following his written first Penal Code of India.

The end

While staying with their son in Glencairn Estate, Julia fell ill with a chill and a recurring bronchial complaint. After six days she died on January 26, 1879. She was comparatively young at 64. Her coffin was conveyed in a cart drawn by two white bulls and then carried by workers to the St Mary’s Church, Bogawantalawa – a considerable distance away from Norwood. All obituaries mention her last word being ‘beautiful’ or ‘beauty’, murmured while gazing out of her room widow. “Julia Cameron was one of the most fascinating and strong willed women to live during the 19^th century. She turned her daughter’s gift of a camera into not only a hobby turned career but she would leave a legacy that few of us would understand or foresee.”

Though two decades older, Charles Cameron outlived his wife, but by just one year. He died on May 8, 1880, and was buried next to where his wife lay in the yard of the church they got built. The story goes that their eccentricity (or was it wise practicality?) prompted them to ship two coffins among other household requisites to Ceylon when they left the Isle of Wight to live with their sons in this island.

I presume there is no lasting memorial here in SL to this outstanding couple who made Ceylon their final home moving so far away from Britain. It surely was love of this country and knowing they would be happy here and not merely the convenience of being able to live with three of their children that brought them over. Is the memorial to them in Sri Lanka only the adjacent headstones in a remote churchyard?

Reasons for this negligence is plain indifference and of course the bias against colonialism and all persons within branded imperialists. Remember how a statue to Ivor Jennings was not allowed to be set up in campus for long by students of the Peradeniya University. Pig headed and probably not knowing nor caring they were enjoying the campus that Jennings strove so hard to build on the site he thought best. He drove himself to Peradeniya every weekend for several years supervising the landscaping and construction.

Need I labour the point further?