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.