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The player from Pallavaram

It's that time when the NRIs home in to catch up with family and cultural roots. It's also a time when several of the British with old Madras connections come on annual holidays and spend their time catching up with old friends, old haunts and old memories. And there are those others from around the world who take advantage of Madras' weather at this time of the year and come to search for roots. For one reason or another, but mainly due to this column, I get to meet not a few of them who come seeking information about old Madras of another day.

Among those I met this year was Lord Balfour of Burleigh, and we soon found common ground in Pallavaram. He had come out there in 1957 to set up English Electric, one of the first major engineering industries in the country, and spent the next seven years in the suburb. We missed each other by a few years; four years after he left, I arrived in Pallavaram to nurture another institution and several people at English Electric were of great help as I tried to get a hang of things in an India that was not the easiest of places to set up a factory in at the time.

All that the area had at the time were leather factories, the best known of them being Gordon Woodroffe's and Ida Chambers' Chrome Leather. So why did English Electric choose Pallavaram? "Because compared to labour militancy in Avadi, Ambattur, Perambur and Tiruvottriyur, little-developed Pallavaram-Chromepet was a haven of peace," explained Lord Balfour. "It also gave us a chance to experiment with labour practices," he recalled. "We were among the first to use women-dominated engineering assembly lines and the work the girls did on our fuses was marvellous, the best I was to see anywhere in the world."

Lord Balfour also recalled that the success of English Electric was due to a livewire who joined the company after a stint with the Birla Group. M. N. Rajagopal charmed many a State Electricity Board into awarding contracts to English Electric — and it was on those contracts that the company was built. When it was time for Rajagopal to retire, Lord Balfour had wondered whether he planned to join any other company. "Oh, no," Rajagopal had replied, "I'm going to my village and will spend my time in religious disputations." Knowing Rajagopal, the Gods would have enjoyed those discussions every bit as much as Rajagopal, Lord Balfour chuckled at the memory.

Lord Balfour, the 8th Baron after the title was revived in 1868, was, however, just plain Robert Bruce during the time he was in Pallavaram, as his father was still alive at the time. And it was as a young bachelor in his late 20s that Robert Bruce helped to found the Madras Players and became its president. He still remembers the Group's first production, "Twelfth Night", directed by Peter Coe who the British Council brought out to train Indian actors.

"I've never forgotten Rita Saldanha refusing to slap one of the men, though the play called for it, and how Peter Coe coaxed her into doing it. When suddenly she responded with a thundering slap that surprised even her, you should have seen the expression on her face. `Now that's the expression I want when you slap him during the performance,' a thrilled Peter told a shocked Rita."

I asked Lord Balfour the two obvious questions. Any connection with the Balfour of the Declaration? "My God, no; nothing at all to do with that twit Arthur Balfour." Any connection with Robert Bruce (King of Scotland 1274-1329)? "Oh, yes. One of the only three bronzes cast using his skull — when his remains were found by chance and identified by the cavity in his chest made when his heart was removed and taken to the Crusades — is on my mantelpiece. And visitors are constantly struck by the similar structures of our faces."

With Lord Balfour in Madras was his wife, a slip of a thing belying a heavyweight record. Better known as Janet Morgan — under which name she's been grabbing the local headlines and talk show circuit — she's been an academic, worked in the Cabinet office, was an adviser to the BBC and Granada TV, served on the British Council Board, is a successful author, and a non-executive director of several major business organisations. Her literary successes include biographies of Edwina Mountbatten and Agatha Christie and the Diaries of Richard Crossman, which she edited. The diaries of that Left-leaning Labour Minister were the basis for that television success, "Yes, Minister". Her latest book is based on the exploits of her father-in-law as a spy during World War I and is titled The Secrets of Rue St. Roch. Edinburgh-based Morgan and her husband Robert Balfour share a love of books; it was he who made it possible for books to be sold on the pavements below Edinburgh Castle during the Edinburgh Festival by campaigning against an archaic law that permitted the sale of everything but books on Edinburgh's pavements during the festivities.

S. MUTHIAH

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