by W.E.F. Ward
Alec Garden Fraser was a legendary headmaster at Trinity College, Kandy, an elite boy’s school run by the Church Mission Society in colonial Ceylon. Founded in 1872, it had fared poorly until Fraser was appointed head in 1904. He served there until 1924, though with many long absences in England and India as he pursued other work for the CMS and the Church of England. His Trinity phase formed only part of his career; earlier, he had been a lay missionary in British East Africa and his later working life, as an educationist and a priest of the Church, was pursued in Ghana, then known as Gold Coast.
I did not read the whole book; my interest was in Fraser as head of Trinity and a contemporary of William Stone, another legendary Ceylon headmaster and a key figure in Thomia, my own history of St Thomas’s College, a competing elite school founded and supported by the CMS’s High Church rival, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The two men did not approve of each other or of their respective educational ideas (Stone once disparagingly described Trinity, which is built on a hillside, as ‘all steps and drains but no brains,' but were each firm supporters of Ceylonese independence, something that most Britons involved with Ceylon (as well as nearly all Ceylonese who had a say in the matter) had barely contemplated at the time.
I read the account of Fraser’s youth, skimmed the East African period and concentrated my attention on the chapters dealing with his years at Trinity, after which I set the book aside.
Written in typical CMS missionary style – circumlocutive, bland and deeply reluctant to call a spade a spade – it is not a good read, although it brings out the driven, contentious nature of the man very well. The Society valued him highly – in spite of his remoteness from London, he played a substantial role in their counsels – but had to put up with a great deal from him. His colleagues at Trinity were ridden hard and often resented it; it is remarkable how many of them he quarrelled with and caused to leave, although he himself admitted their value to the school. The boys, of course, adored and feared him. All this aside, he was the saviour of an institution whose continuance was in doubt when he took it on, and he began the process of making it the great school it is today. He is a revered figure at Trinity, though one suspects that he must have been rather less generally loved there in his own time.
