The Hundredth Royal-Thomian

 

The Thomian First XI of 1979

The 1979 Royal-Thomian cricket match may not actually have been the hundredth in the series, as it was proclaimed to be, but was certainly regarded, at the time, as the most important Royal-Thomian ever played. Richard Simon’s forthcoming book, STC: The Unauthorised History, captures not only the game itself but also much of the behind-the-scenes competition, lobbying, manoeuvring and occasional skulduggery that accompanied the selection of coaches, team members and other important participants. Below is part of Simon’s description of the match.

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Royal College, who had enjoyed a good 1979 season, were favoured to win – though the fisherfolk and market-workers of Mount Lavinia, who often ran informal books on the performance of the College First XI and First XV, loyally bet on St Thomas’s. The Royal captain, Ranjan Madugalle, was an outstanding cricketer: a star batsman with over a thousand runs already to his credit and a future Sri Lanka captain who would later serve as chief of the ICC’s panel of international match referees. Many of his teammates would also play for their country in the near future. The Thomian cohort, too, was talented, but not to the same degree; Royal, after all, was in the enviable position of being able to take its pick of gifted young players from any school within the state system. The advantage became painfully obvious when STC’s batting order suffered an embarrassing collapse with only 154 runs on the board, and by teatime on the second day Royal were able to close their innings sportingly, with two wickets still in hand, having scored 321. 

St Thomas’s batted grimly all through the last day, but before teatime they were down to their tail-enders, Mahinda Halangoda and C.P. Richards, with thirty runs yet to make. Little was expected of either player. Richards was a bowler, not a batsman; Halangoda, an able bat from a cricketing family (his grandfather had coached St Thomas’s in the Thirties), was young and fairly green. Anticipation of an imminent Royal victory brought the President and half his cabinet back to the pavilion; the Royal tents were in an uproar. Richards, joining Halangoda in the middle after Umesh Iddipily was dismissed for 29, walked out to no poetic ‘breathless hush’ but to an ear-splitting din that already had in it the audible timbre of Royalist triumph. The Royal team, Halangoda noticed, had all put on their caps…

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.

Beginnings of the Battle of the Blues

Spectators at an early Royal-Thomian
(though most probably not the first)

Adapted from STC: The Unauthorised History 

by Richard Simon (forthcoming)

The origins of Lanka’s oldest public sporting fixture are surprisingly obscure. The Colombo Academy had, in fact, met St Thomas’s College at cricket several times during the late 1870s, but these were irregular matches in which the respective teams were captained by masters rather than boys. Thomas Keble, the great official historian of STC, preferred to call the 1880 match, the earliest to be played by all-schoolboy teams, the ‘first Royal-Thomian’.

His opinion was eventually overruled; today, ‘the first Royal-Thomian’ is generally held to have been played in 1879. The convention is justified by a contemporary Ceylon Observer article, in which it was reported that the match ‘was instituted as an annual fixture on 15 July’ that year. By preferring the earlier date, historians of Royal may claim that the series began with a hat-trick of victories by their side. 

But the teams at the 1879 game, too, were captained by masters: Ashley Walker led the Academy while the Thomian First XI was skippered by its founder, Sub-Warden Rev. Thomas Felton Falkner. It was an important fixture for the Academy, for of the two schools, St Thomas’s had, it seems, much the more formidable cricketing reputation. Academy pupils were given three half-holidays to watch the game, which their side won by a margin of 56 runs. Thomians, sadly, did not get even one afternoon off; Warden Miller, struggling to keep the College from bankruptcy in the wake of the coffee crash, had more important things on his mind than cricket.

Rev. T.F. Falkner, DSO,
captained St Thomas’s in 1879

The 1880 fixture, in which the teams comprised boys only, was played, like the previous year’s, on Galle Face Green, although the precise site is disputed. It is known that the teams arrived from their respective schools by boat across the Beira Lake – then a common mode of transport in Colombo and its suburbs, which were still clustered mainly about the lake. First in to bat for the Academy, which won the toss, was Benjamin ‘Benny’ Bawa, who would later become an eminent lawyer and father of the renowned architect Geoffrey Bawa. Young Benny was given out for three runs, but despite such an inauspicious beginning, the Academy again won the game, this time with 62 runs in hand.

Much to Thomian chagrin, the boys from San Sebastian went on to repeat their winning play the following year as well. Happily, this embarrassing hat-trick was immediately matched by their Mutwal rivals, who promptly won the next three matches in a row. Then, in 1885, came the infamous Nine Runs Match, over which Royalists and Thomians have argued ever since...

©2023 by Richard Simon. All rights reserved.