Review: Simon’s Thomia: For School and Country

‘ames Chapman set sail for Ceylon from England in 1845, to become the first Anglican Bishop of Colombo. He was studying Sinhala on board the Malabar. Chapman was determined to embark on the greatest mission of his life, to create S.Thomas’ College, to resemble his alma mater Eton and his King’s College Cambridge.

- BY SHAVINDRA FERNANDO

Chapel of the Transfiguration of Gothic architecture Cricketers on the War Memorial Grounds

THOMIA by Richard Simon. 2 Volumes, 81Chapters, 896 pages. Published by Lazari Press, Colombo (2025). Dedicated to the memory of his classmate, Richard de Zoysa.

Simon’s epic rendering spans two hundred years of British colonial Ceylon and post-independent Sri Lanka’s political history, told as “The entangled histories of Lanka and her greatest public school”.

This work creates a living atmosphere for events that influenced the greater British colonial process in Ceylon. In the author's bid to intertwine the complex relationship of church and state of those times, he unravels fascinating sociopolitical insights of elite formation in Ceylon.

In 1851, opposite the Port of Colombo in Mutwal, forty-five boys drawn exclusively from the upper ranks of Ceylonese society sat for lessons in a Cadjan hut under a massive Banyan tree, and S. Thomas’ was founded.

They were taught Latin and Greek and English, fed on Etonian roast beef and plum pudding, and learnt to play cricket. Ceylonese who could afford it, were only too eager to educate their sons, after the manner of the British upper classes.

The motto of the school was the same as Eton, Esto Perpetua, be thou forever.

Despite the belief that the divinely ordained purpose of the empire was to bring Christian salvation to the ‘heathen’, just three years before the school was founded, in 1848 the Kandyan Sinhalese in the highlands had rebelled. They were asking the colonial government to uphold the Kandyan Convention to protect Buddhism.

Kandy was the last Sri Lankan kingdom to fall to the British in 1815, when the Kandyan Sinhala aristocracy betrayed the country's last king, a minority Tamil to the British, and signed the Kandyan convention. The island became Ceylon, with English as its official language.