(Continued from last fortnight)

The Upper Class here included the upper-level administrators, generals, lawyers, bishops and archdeacons (if of the Anglican Church). An Upper Middle Class included lower-level officials, planters, the retired, chaplains and army officers. A Lower Middle Class was made up of tradesmen and shopkeepers, Protestant missionaries, teachers, and Non-Commissioned Officers in the army. The Upper Lower class consisted of 'British Other Ranks', i.e. army privates, along with Catholic missionaries (who were all Irish or foreign). The Lower Lower Class were Anglo-Indians, i.e. people of mixed ancestry, who in fact did fairly well for themselves in this district, in that they could occupy most urban professions. The post office, hospital, shops and the railway employed Anglo-Indians in fairly large numbers – as did the plantations. A few were so highly qualified that they were doctors, dentists or solicitors.

Curious new insights into the activities of the European population emerge here and there. As Ootacamund had one of the five fox-hunts in India in British times (though they perforce hunted jackals) there was quite an extensive dog business. Foxhounds were imported from packs in England or Ireland, and in addition they were bred in Ootacamund. Spin-offs from this situation led to a permanent volunteer job for several members of an army family, "puppy-walkers". They exercised the puppies every day, for decades, throughout the early 20th Century and thereby kept themselves in shape. Then there was John Sheehan, possibly an Irishman, who conducted a regular business at his taxidermy shop in the same town: what was shot needed to be preserved. A Swiss engineer was for many years in charge of the Ootacamund-Mettupalaiyam track railway, since the steam-engines had been built in Switzerland. A German, Theodor Klein, had a photography business in Madras and Ootacamund. It was actually he who took the dozens of photos that illustrate W.H.R. Rivers's famous book, The Todas (1906). And there was a small army of itinerant European entertainers who circulated around India in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, passing from time to time through Ootacamund, one of many towns that had its own music hall where these people would perform. One of them, a comedian of the 1860s and 1870s, was John Carson – a forerunner of America's famed Johnnie Carson, the ever-popular TV compere of a century later! Amateurism was equally widespread, of course. There was an Ootacamund Philharmonic Orchestra in the 1870s; Gilbert and Sullivan got themselves organised from time to time; Mrs. Maloof gave dance lessons in the Assembly Rooms; and other locals performed their stuff at evening meetings of the Temperance Society or elsewhere. Many, Europeans and Indians from all walks of life, belonged to one of the two Freemasons' Lodges: freemasonry came to Madras in 1752 and was deeply entrenched in urban South India, in part because it provided a valuable network of informal business contacts.

Back in those times, daytime entertainment was by no means confined to the Ooty Hunt. There were many other activities, including several yoked together under the wings of the A.B.C. Club. This had started out in the 1870s as a local club devoted to archery, badminton and croquet, but as tastes changed it became archery, badminton and cricket. Tennis, horse-racing, gymkhanas and golf were popular too: in the earlier part of the 20th Century the district had three golf courses.

Then there was motor-racing. The first car we know of in Ootacamund was a 1904 Franklin air-cooled touring car made in Syracuse, New York. It was also in 1904 that a group of local Europeans formed the Nilgiri Automobile Association "to educate public opinion, to encourage motor traffic, and to assist municipalities, etc. in drafting any necessary local regulations". The following year the first motor-meet was held, with six cars participating. For the next few years intrepid drivers, mostly planters and a few officials or army people, raced around a hair-raising route of 67 miles. For several years before World War I the bemused local inhabitants were witness to such races around the district, with its innumerable hairpin bends, forbidding hills and dubious road surfaces. Facilities quickly appeared in the main towns to supply the need of the motorists: Shell Oil, Addison & Co., and Simpson & Co. For the more sedate, picnics on the Wenlock Downs, combined with walking trips, were a perennial favourite among the British. Some, regarded this a foolhardy activity, in view of tigers and leopards wandering around. If only they could have known about the picnic laid out safely on the garden lawn of an Ootacamund home in the mid-20th Century, at which an unannounced tiger was found tasting the jam.

(To be concluded)