Peradeniya, President of the Students Council and kidnapping Sir. Ivor Jennings

(Excerpted from The Jetwing Story and the life of Herbert Cooray by Shiromal Cooray)

Herbert Cooray joined the University of Ceylon in 1946. The university, then graduating its second generation of students, had had a slow start. Approved by the colonial government in 1912, it had not opened its doors until 1921, and still operated as a single college in Colombo. Herbert was among the first batch of students to be transferred to its new campus, recently opened at Peradeniya, by Queen Elizabeth II.

The schoolboy rebel found in the open atmosphere of university life a more appropriate theatre for his periodic confrontations with authority. Students, unlike schoolboys, are nominal adults whose right to speak out on matters of adult concern is assumed. Herbert, who had always chafed under the restraints of authority and convention, was quickly swept up by the nationalist, anti-imperial feeling then prevalent among young Ceylonese intellectuals.

His natural aversion to colonial customs and traditions flourished in this friendly soil. Soon, he was a highly visible campus activist and a candidate for president of the Students’ Council. He was also a member of the Lanka Sama Samaja Party, a Trotskyite movement which he joined in 1952.

The election campaign for the presidency was Herbert Cooray’s baptism into the public eye.

It was an era of firebrands – A.E. Goonasinha, the trade-union boss and populist demagogue, set the pattern and Herbert soon showed himself as incendiary as any that came before him. By then it was 1948, and Ceylon had already gained its independence, yet nationalist sentiment was, if anything, more fervent than ever. Education and education policy became battlegrounds of ideology, and university intellectuals saw themselves as being in the forefront of the struggle. Yet the pace of change was too slow for young Herbert Cooray; his presidential campaign was founded on a platform of ‘out with the old, in with the new’.

He and his supporters worked hard, even frantically, to get him elected. While the committees he appointed set about the tasks of manifesto writing, canvassing and propaganda, Herby talked himself hoarse on platforms and in lecture halls. His funds were scanty, and he could only afford to serve tea without milk a brew whose astringency complemented his fiery speechmaking at his meetings. But people came anyway, and when the election was held and the results tallied, Herbert Cooray was found to have won the presidency of the Student’s Council of the University of Ceylon.

Thus began a difficult time for Sir Ivor Jennings, Vice-Chancellor, a man who might be thought to have had enough on his plate already. In addition to cajoling politicians, acting as a peacemaker between wrangling bureaucrats and fielding brickbats from the popular press, Sir Ivor now became the hapless object of Herbert’s unionist demands and protest campaigns. On one occasion, he was actually taken hostage by the youthful unionist and his colleagues.

Doubtless the incident was memorable for all concerned; certainly Herbert loved to regale his friends in later years with stories of how he waited in ambush with his fellow activists, followed the VC’s car down the drive, intercepted the poor man as he alighted from the vehicle and escorted him to the room where he was to be (albeit briefly) incarcerated.

Herbert also took great pride in having organized the first student strike at the university. The action earned him the wrath of his father, but by this time Herbert was well accustomed to the rebukes of his elders. His father often worried what new scrape his son would get into. In his own mind Herbert was certain of the rightness of his cause; moreover, his fellow activists and students admired and looked up to him. Many remained his firm friends for life, even as they built their own eminent and influential careers in business, politics and public service.

Amidst all this revolutionary ferment, Herbert Cooray never forgot the lesson he had learnt, many years before, from a caustic Christian Brother. He remained a dedicated student of sociology, displaying a talent for the subject that led one of his professors, James Bryce, to enlist his assistance in researching material for a monograph on the Ceylonese caste system. The book, when it appeared, carried a generous acknowledgment of Herbert’s contribution. The experience also sparked an interest in Herbert himself, who would continue to be intrigued by caste for the rest of his life.

He then dropped out of University, just before his final exams. This was followed by a brief spell at Law College, notable mostly in that it was here he first met the Perera family consisting of three brothers and a sister, with whom he forged lifelong friendships. Fellow Catholics hailing from Kotahena, the Pereras treated Herbert as a member of their own family. The second-oldest brother, Lucien, would later become his lawyer, confidante and business partner.

Uncertain about what career to follow, Herbert left Law College and took up a position teaching English at Gurukula Vidyalaya, Kelaniya. But the job lacked stimulation, so he decided to give the mercantile sector a try. Along with two similarly-placed friends, he joined Harrison & Crossfield’s as an Insurance Executive- essentially a salesman who received an inadequate salary eked out with commissions on the policies he sold.

He enjoyed the work and the freedom of having an income of his own, but what impressed him most was the clear link between effort and reward – the better and harder you worked, the more you earned. An instinctive meritocrat from childhood onward, Herbert had found his metier. The year was 1956, and the transformation from student socialist to successful entrepreneurial capitalist had begun.

With his first salary and commission Herbert bought a Rolex watch, which he lovingly wore for over 40 years before handing it on to his son Hiran. The watch, which cost him Rs.750, was recently valued in Switzerland; the appreciation in it was phenomenal. It was the first of many canny investments by the former campus radical.

To his parents, eager to see their restless son settle down, even a salesman’s job must have seemed like relative stability. At any rate, the job made their gainfully employed son a suitable marital prospect. In those days, Sri Lankans usually married by arrangement, and Herbert had already received several proposals. One of these bore fruit just before his 28th birthday, at All Saint’s Church, Borella, on January 17, 1957, Herbert Cooray wed Josephine Perera, a pretty 21-year old, whose father was a landowner and businessman with interests that included a bus company, coir milling and brick manufacturing. An appropriate match for the son of a building contractor!

The wedding was followed by a reception at Galle Face Hotel, after which the newlyweds began their life together at Herbert’s parents’ home in Ragama. By this time Neville- the sedate, steady elder brother who had graduated as a doctor, was married and had left the family home, leaving his parents and his younger sister Lilian. However, the family was soon to be augmented by the birth of Herbert’s first daughter, Shiromal. Needing more space, the couple moved into a house of their own at Dankotuwa in 1959, a gift from Josephine’s father. There they would stay until Herbert built his own home at Mattumagala, Welisera in 1962.

Gone were the days of rebellion and confrontation. Newly settled, Herbert now channeled his restless spirit into a penchant for travel and adventure. As a member of the LSSP, he had already visited Moscow as a youth delegate to the Annual Party Conference in 1956. Now he wanted to see more of the world. His wife, newly delivered of a baby girl, could not travel with him; instead, his traveling companions were two former university colleagues, Bandu Manukulasuriya and Sanath Saparamadu. They, too, were newly married with young families, but the prospect of a Grand World Tour was irresistible.

The trio bought one-way tickets to the UK, arriving there in early 1959. They toured the British Isles, afterwards taking the ferry to France. In Paris Herbert bought himself a brand new Peugeot 203, which became their conveyance for the rest of the tour. The doughty Peugeot carried them faithfully through many adventures and escapades along a route that took in Eastern Europe, the USSR, Afghanistan and finally India, whence a second ferry carried them to Jaffna and home.

The long journey forged a lasting bond between car and driver; though he owned many other cars (Peugeots, mainly!), the old 203 was used occasionally until the late 1980s. It even helped him start his first business, being offered as collateral to secure a bank loan in order to fulfill a building contract, in 1963.

Whatever the make of Herbert’s cars, they tended to be red. His fondness for the colour was a memento of his Bolshevik years perhaps- and also, perhaps a private, ironic comment on how far he had traveled in life since those early, idealistic days.

His father continued to worry about his younger son and wished he would settle down soon. He confided to a friend, “One day he will do me proud!”. Unfortunately his father passed away in 1964, just two years after Herbert had set up his first company, N J Cooray Builders Ltd. Herbert’s mother, a woman of great substance and courage, whom he adored and took great care of until her death, just two months prior to his own demise, believed in her son and was a constant support throughout his life. Herbert would recall the many escapades that got him into trouble with his father and then the mother coming into rescue him from further wrath.