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The postman knocks
S. MUTHIAH
Reader Balu Alaganan didn’t wait for the postman; he told me in person that I had missed a pathbreaking achievement in the career of his friend Leonard G. Banks (Miscellany, January 28) and asked me to refer to my history of the Madras Cricket Club. And sure enough I found the reference to Banks being the first to break a Club tradition. The MCC had a practice that only a cricket-playing member, even if only for the ‘B’ team, could be elected President of the Club. Banks never played cricket; he was a dedicated tennis and bridge player. In the early 1950s, he was Secretary of the Club and was hoping to become President. But tradition went against him. However, in 1955, the Club decided to break tradition and tread a new path and Banks was elected President.
* Reader K.R.A. Narasiah, referring to my tales about the Emden (Miscellany, September 17), wonders whether I knew that Rukmini Lakshmipathy, that early Madras feminist and legislator, had named her son Emden Srinivasa Rao because he was born on the day the Emden shelled Madras. Sadly, Rao died young.
* Four things happened quite coincidentally in the last couple of weeks. I read that Mills & Boon, that most popular of publishers of romantic fiction, was celebrating its centenary. Next, there was the advertisement I saw in a leading news magazine that it was publishing the Mills & Boon Harlequin titles in India and that there would be new titles every month. The third thing was a news item that Harlequin was launching in India in a big way its Romance and Modern Heat series which would each provide new titles every month. And then there came word from Harry MacLure, Editor of Anglos in the Wind, that one of M & B’s as well as Harlequin’s most successful recent authors was a young woman whose roots are in Madras. Allwyn and Marina Marsh (née Last) were a couple from Madras who migrated to Australia when their daughter Nicola was two months old. Nicola Marsh, now in her early thirties, has written 15 Mills & Boon titles to date, been translated into 25 languages, and has half a dozen Harlequin titles coming out in the next few months. Now she’s looking at writing a couple of India-centred novels. Perhaps she’ll even get around to doing a Madras-based one recalling her roots.
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