Walter Stace in British Ceylon, 1910-1932

Michael Roberts

 Walter T. Stace was a British citizen born in 1886 and educated in private schools in Wales and Scotland before completing his undergraduate degree at Trinity College, Dublin. He was therefore of middle-upper class background. His philosophical leanings did not deter him from signing up for the Colonial Service. He was sent to Ceylon – reaching the island with his wife … and being posted to the town of Galle*** in 1910.

He wrote  his autobiography at some point and the Sri Lankan chapters have been printed as a book entitled FOOTPRINTS ON WATER under the editorial direction of Bernd Pflug by the Sailfish firm in Colombo marketed by the Perera Hussein Publishing House in a 218-page booklet bearing the ISBN 978-624-5993-02=4

His autobiographical chapters have the following headings: Colombo and Galle; Galle; Chilaw; Gampola and Kandy; Governor Chalmers; Negombo; Land Settlement; Colombo Municipality and British Colonialism. His prose is simple and lucid, his perspective clinical and analytic. This renders his book into a must read — one further enhanced by Bernd Pflug’s review chapter at the end and his initial introduction.

As a pertinent aside, let me note that young Walter Stace arrived in Ceylon with his wife Adelaide. This lady was a widow who was  18 years elder to Walter and the book begins with a refreshingly frank description of their courting relationship and the circumstances surrounding the union.

Around the year 1920, however, the two parted company when Adelaide remained in UK after their furlough and Stace returned to Ceylon to take up a new posting at Negombo. It was during his service at Negombo that he got to know Blanche Beven, the daughter of a prominent Burgher family in the locality. Blanche and Walter eventually married in 1926. Blanche was game enough to face the rigours of district circuits on Stace’s land settlement work where they encountered heat, flies, mosquitoes and what-have-you.

END NOTES

*** It so happens that I was born and bred within the Fort of Galle (1938-1950s) and that I am familiar with what was known as the New Oriental Hotel  on Church Street where Stace and his wife resided [subsequently and recently renamed the “Amangalla”].  This hotel often housed Europeans who disembarked from ships  and also served as an overnight resting place for British public servants on official business …. Leonard Woolf among them.