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When the postman knocked
MY REFERENCE to Noel's Hotel (Miscellany, December 15) has had several readers locating it on Mount Road, opposite Anand Theatre. It was popular with the British and American servicemen during World War II because of its daily dances, one reader tells me. Another, Jyothi Rama Rao, remembers her father, the late A.C. Naidu, "running the hotel" where, in 1944, he hosted a large dinner party for senior Army officers at which the Governor, Sir Arthur Hope, was the chief guest. Tracing its subsequent history, she narrates that it passed on to the hands of Neelakanta Mehta, who found it difficult to run it once Prohibition was introduced. It was then taken over by a R. Kapanipathi, who got permission to convert the dance floor into additional rooms and it became a `boarding and lodging house', called Hotel India, serving only vegetarian fare. In the early 1960s, it became Hotel Gokul, which closed in the late 1960s and the commercial complex that stands on the site today developed.
* Rolls Royces continue to fascinate readers. I'm told that Thiruvengathanam Chetty (Miscellany, December 8) had not one but two Rolls Royces, the smaller one for his wife. Another reader Ramprasad writes that his father had more than one Rolls Royce in the 1930s. His father, Shanmuga Rajeswara Sethupathy, the Raja of Ramnad and a minister in Rajaji's cabinet, had a successful stable of over 50 horses in Calcutta and almost as big a garage of cars in Madras, including the Rolls Royces and a Bentley bought from the Maharaja of Mysore in the late 1950s. He adds that before his father moved to his new home, Ramnad House, in Cenotaph Road (Madrascapes, December 10), set in 50 grounds, the family's Madras palace was in the 100 grounds in Royapettah called `Woodlands' that in 1938 became the first property of the hotel group that took the name. Another acquisition from the Maharaja of Mysore around 1970 was by Geoffrey Bawa, the famed Sri Lankan architect who passed away recently and who had, in one of his worst efforts, redone the Connemara at the time. He would be seen at the site in the Rolls Royce he had bought from Mysore. This vehicle, MSQ 1000, I'm told by reader Sunil Kumar Soni, is still in Madras, owned by Rajesh Malhotra.
* A researcher from Trivandrum is looking for information on Madras/Travancore Raman Pillai, who in the early 1900s edited the Madras Standard. The paper was an Anglo-Indian tri-weekly founded in 1877 and was Indianised and made a daily by the 21-year-old G. Parameswaran Pillai who acquired it in 1892. On his death, G. Subramania Aiyar became its editor in 1898. During his travails in 1908, Subramania Aiyar sold it to Raman Pillai. Annie Besant in 1914 bought the paper from Raman Pillai, who then seems to vanish from any recorded scene. As for the paper, Besant renamed it New India and it had a short but stirring innings.
S. MUTHIAH
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