St George’s Cathedral and Cemetery, Chennai

Built to a design by Colonel James Lilyman Caldwell, senior EIC engineer at the Madras Presidency, St George’s Cathedral, Madras, was consecrated in 1816. Its location on the Choultry Plain reflected the needs of the growing European population of Madras, for whom the much earlier Church of St Mary’s, at Fort St George, was no longer convenient.

Construction of the Cathedral was supervised by Captain Thomas De Havilland. The cemetery was to be in the southeast corner of the grounds, in an area which, according to Rev Francis V N Paul in his brief history The Cross over Coromandel (2004), was fenced with ‘spears captured in the wars with the Sultans of Mysore’. Over the years, he tells us, ‘the spears have all but disappeared, due to thievery’, and been replaced by a compound wall round the cemetery.

Poignantly, the first person to be buried in St George’s Cemetery was the Captain’s wife Elizabeth de Havilland (née Saumarez), who died, aged 35, on 14 March 1818, ‘leaving an afflicted husband and four children to mourn her loss and to emulate her example’.

James Anderson, Physician General and botanist, had died in 1809, and been buried at St Mary’s Cemetery, where his nephew had erected a substantial memorial to him (the subject of a recent BACSA conservation project, per the post published on 9 August 2024). Such was Anderson’s reputation, however, that 11 years after his death his erstwhile Madras Medical Department colleagues commissioned Chantry to make a sculpture of him, and arranged for the ‘wonderfully lifelike and natural’ work, complete with a lengthy Latin inscription, to be installed by the west doorway of St George’s Cathedral in 1820.

The inscription below the sculpture reads:

Translated into English by BACSA Member Stephen Schaw Miller, this becomes:

By the mid-19th century St George’s Cemetery had made its way into Victorian fiction. In his 1848 novel Vanity Fair William Makepeace Thackeray (who had spent his early years in Calcutta) alluded to the significance of the ‘the burying-ground of St George’s’ in army life, as the place where ‘many a gallant officer lies far away from his home’. (Having travelled day and night in his haste to reach his friend’s house in Madras, the fictional Major Dobbin arrives in such a state of high fever and delirium that his next stop is assumed to be the Cemetery, where ‘the troops would fire a salvo over his grave’).

One such gallant officer lying ‘far from home’ was Lieutenant-Colonel John Monckton Coombs, of the 10th Regiment N.I. who was mortally wounded in 1833 while returning from ‘ball practice with his brigade’. Aged 58, he was buried in Line 29, where the inscription on his tombstone records that a Havildar from the 5th Regiment, ‘infuriated by passion and blinded by intoxicating drugs’ mistook him for his ‘intended victim’, and inadvertently killed ‘his best Friend and Protector’. An item in Chowkidar Vol 11-04 (Autumn 2007) by BACSA member Fergus Patterson, a great-nephew of Colonel Coombs’ wife, reviews the background to this tragic episode.

Julian James Cotton, the classics scholar, civil servant and historian whose selected List of Inscriptions on Tombs or Monuments in Madras was first published in 1905, died in 1927 and was himself buried at St George’s Cemetery. (In a reversal of the procedure for commemorating James Anderson, Cotton’s ICS colleagues arranged for a memorial tablet to him to be placed in St Mary’s Church). A brief report in Chowkidar Vol 16-06 (Autumn 2023) by Cotton’s great grandson describes a family visit to the ‘light grey and white streaked marble gravestone’, on which they placed a small bouquet of early spring flowers from London – ‘arguably the first snowdrops ever seen in Chennai!’

One of the longest lives commemorated at St George’s is that of Mr G Winter, Master Tailor, who died on 18 June 1872, aged ‘95 years and 3 months’. One of the shortest must be Matilda Lavie, the ninth child of Captain Tudor Lavie ‘of the Artillery, Superintendent Gunpowder Manufactory’ and his wife Emma Maria, who died ‘aged 6 hours’ on 25 June 1851.

BACSA member Andrew Cumine, who visited St George’s Cathedral and the Cemetery in 2024, reported that – ‘apart from the inevitable weeds everywhere (which are apparently regularly cleared in time for All Souls Day), and a couple of energetic trees which have almost completely engulfed a handful of standing tombs, the cemetery seems reasonably well maintained’.

As Elizabeth de Havilland’s epitaph tells us ‘She stands first in the awful Book and gives a date to the Register’. The Burial Registers are held in the cathedral office; Andrew found them ‘in reasonable condition, but clearly deteriorating’. He was very pleased to learn of the existence of a Graves Register, which enabled the Sexton on duty to determine the location of individual graves and direct him to the ones he was looking for.

All BACSA members (and, indeed, non-members too) visiting Cemeteries in South Asia are encouraged to submit Cemetery Visit reports online. These are invaluable in helping us keep track of a cemetery’s condition over time, and assist us in triaging candidates for BACSA projects.

Rachel Magowan
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Diary Dates

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