The Ceylon Civil Service

by Gamini Seneviratne

(continued)

And then, quite suddenly, I was posted to Nuwara Eliya.

Such sudden moves tended to become a part of my stay in the public service. In this case it had been due (truthfully) to ‘exigencies of service’: the headquarters DRO (Divisional Revenue Officer) had been transferred out, the Kachcheri was short of a land officer, the assistant food controller (AFC) had been interdicted – an extra hand was needed and readily available next door in Badulla.

My boss, Nissanka Wijewardena, decided to take me over himself en route to his weekly visit home. He introduced me to the people I should know – the District Judge cum Magistrate, the Police Superintendent (SP), the Secretary of the Tennis Club, a Miss Callender (?). And to the family he (and I) were staying with for the night, friends of his and relatives of the Prime Minister, Mrs. Bandaranaike.

It was a very pleasant place. Conversation at dinner though tended to be about ‘that’ or ‘this’ nice girl from Ladies or Kandy High School or Bishops or – well I don’t recall any mention of goday schools like Visakha. “’She’ wanted to ‘do law’ or something. ‘What’s the point, aney? – it’s not as if they are starving!” At Badulla, despite the protection I had, living with a family, there were some feelers about “that lovely girl who plays tennis – and her father, myee, the best Advocate in all of Uva and rich-when-you-say!”

The next morning, I moved into the Kachcheri – along with Amarawansa Bandara Elkaduwa, the new GA. We walked into a right nasty row between two MPs of the ruling party on how the assets of the Nuwara Eliya/Walapane Cooperative Union were to be divided when they split up. I came to know more about it when my friend at the Archives, Haris de Silva, threatened with the prospect of being ‘floored’ in his own room, found a room for me in the chummery where his senior, A Dewarajah lodged together with P B W Kinigama the ACCD (Assistant Commissioner of Cooperative Development).

I shall return to that scene later; right here I shall dispose of the ‘referees’ I was given. The Tennis Club was not my scene though my father had distinguished himself at that sport. (He defeated the All-Ceylon Champion, Koo de Saram, in an exhibition game a bare week after Koo had defeated Frank Sedgman also in an exhibition game. Sedgman was returning home to Oz after winning Wimbledon and may have been a bit bow-legged after weeks on the ship).

I had never played that game and the only acquaintance we had with each other was when friend Jothilingam, our college Captain, at a loss because his players were late, asked me to serve to him. My first serve spun past him and the second was a spinning slice that took his glasses off and there was Jothi pursuing my bicycle demanding that I come for practices. (That was in the 1950s – yes, long before Evonne Goolagong used them to win Wimbledon: tennis historians, please note).

The District Judge cum Magistrate was not at all like Badulla’s Mr. Swaris. On the second day on the bench with him, the court stenographer being absent, he began recording the proceedings himself in long hand. His mis-recording favoured the guilty party, the plantation manager, and when I suggested that I be excused from court duty he did not lift his head.

As for the SP, Superintendent of Police, I discovered that protocol required him to salute me, as being the next in line to the GA, there being no AGA. The OA, Thomas Ranasinghe, (incidentally a devotee of Black Arrack then at Rs. 5/- and of a quality unobtainable today except at Dankotuwa and Paiyagala) told me that within his district the GA, and in his absence the AGA, out-ranked the heads of the armed forces and the police.

Nissanka departed early that morning. I next met him at my wife’s maternal grandmother’s funeral in Malkaduwawa and discovered that his brother, Aravinda, was married to my wife’s junior first cousin. Aravinda proved to be an unusual entrepreneur – he produced pencils for school children and others entirely from raw material obtainable here. (When I moved to Industries I ‘put the question’ to the Ceylon Pencil Company, an entirely foreign-owned monopoly and, red with embarrassment, they managed to make pencils using local materials – the wood, the graphite, the gum from the cashew.) Nissanka died last year at 95+.

In its early years the Divisional Revenue Officers (DRO) were, in ‘the Kandyan Districts’ an off-shoot of the Sinhala system of Rate Mahattayas. Unlike the others who came in through a competitive examination, the Kandyan DROs were recruited by what might be said to be an interview. They were of or from around the areas they served, knew the MPs, monks, vidanes and others who, consciously or not, commanded such power as was needed for the conduct of affairs. The Kandyan DROs also took part in the election of the Diyawadana Nilame (DN) – and that, in itself conferred a marker of prestige on them. As will be seen below they did a good job on the whole.

To return to the lodging arrangements that followed, the headquarters DRO, George Abeygoonasekera, was in the process of moving out of that bungalow on Lady McCullum’s Drive and his successor, D Ramanayake, did not wish to move in there. I came to know George and his predecessor, T B M Ekanayake (self-styled ‘Te Bona Mudiyanselage’ – TBM) rather well over the next few months. George saw me not long before the general election of 1965 when I was at the Ministry of Finance handling establishment matters for the lower orders of the new Ceylon Administrative Service (CAS).

He looked quite ill, told me that he’d like to retire on medical grounds. I have related that interview in its particulars in these pages a decade or more ago. (I next met him when he was Chairman of COPE – I was head of a State Corporation at the time). His successor at Nuwara Eliya misread the gaetum between public servants and politicians, chose to challenge the MP of Walapane, the Division to which he had himself moved. He lost at every parliamentary election there and J R finally gave him the sinecure that the Land Reform Commission had by then become.

T B M ‘rose’ as is said, in the public service and ten years after we had left Nuwara Eliya he, as a Senior Assistant Secretary at the Ministry of Defense and External Affairs, phoned to tell me that the Prime Minister (Mrs. Bandaranaike again) was looking for an energetic officer to set up a new Department for the Registration of Persons, would I come? I had been moved to the Ministry of Industries a bare month before and suggested he take up that task himself. Which he did and made a marvelous job of it.

Nuwara Eliya also boasted of another DRO who achieved distinction in another field: Wimalaratne Kumaragama, one of the great poets of the Colombo school. He presided over Kotmale from offices and a bungalow in Sankilikpalama. Those two structures need to be mentioned kind of in tandem, one on either side of the road facing each other. Kumaragama worked from home. The Chief Clerk brought up to him such files, letters, petitions as he thought the boss needed to see; he dealt with the rest himself in one way or another.

It was always good to see him – at the Kachcheri or the Public Servants Club or in Kotmale. As happened, my transfer out of Nuwara Eliya coincided with his death. To the next issue of ‘Peradeni Kavi’ / Poetry Peradeniya, I contributed ‘A Salute to Kumaragama’.

Nuwara Eliya was being served at the time by a colourful group of public servants, most of them there on a bachelor basis. Our chummery was always full, well, for the few days each week or fortnight each of them found work in the district. The interstices were occupied by ‘circuits’ to inspect on-going work/problems, usually close to the district boundary in one direction or another, on the way home to Kandy, Colombo or somewhere in between.

Among them were Kinigama, aforementioned, Neil Fernando (Lumpy) the Assistant Commissioner of Agrarian Services (ACAS) and Leslie Herath, Assistant Superintendent of Surveys who stayed at Bernard Goonaratnayake’s. Renowned in his schooldays as a ruggerite, Bernard was a Land Officer. Lokka Dissanaike, Vet Surgeon, lived some distance away with his young family. Sonny Kiridena, Park Superintendent, and his wife offered us pleasant hours and sumptuous meals from time to time.

In due course Sonny became an advisor to ruling Sheikhs, Leslie, whose expertise was in underground surveys, became Chairman of the CEB and also head os an environmental agency based in Bangkok and Neil became head of Public Administration and a UN functionary in Nepal.