Nick van der Hoeven, ... with highlighting imposed by The Editor Thuppahi
Over the decades, many have discussed Lorenz’s legacy, with one article confirming that hundreds of people were named after him.
A minor Colombo street still carries his surname and Royal College, his old school, has handed out a Lorenz Scholarship in his memory since 1876.
But some of the boys carried more than the prize. Eustace “Lollo” Lorenz Pereira, an Old Royalist from the late 1950s, is remembered as one of the best all-round schoolboy sportsmen the college ever turned out — five College Colours, captain of cricket, rugby (where he represented Sri Lanka) and tennis, before heading off to play for Cambridge. Whether his parents named him for the newspaperman or just liked the sound of it, I am not sure.
Then there was Francis Lorenz Beven, born 1872, who went on to become Archdeacon first of Jaffna and then of Colombo, and edited the standard history of the Anglican Church here. That middle name wasn’t decorative. His father, Francis Beven, had been co-proprietor of the Examiner alongside Lorenz himself — bought into the paper with him and Leopold Ludovici — a partnership close enough, evidently, to end up in the next generation’s christening.
The name shows up more than once in the pre-eminent De Silva family too, and here it’s actual family rather than borrowed admiration — Lorenz’s wife’s people, the Nells, married into the De Silvas. Edmund Fredrick Lorenz de Silva carried it first: Mayor of Kandy, an MP, Ceylon’s Ambassador to France, and eventually Chancellor of the University of Peradeniya. He then passed it straight on to his own son, Sir Desmond Lorenz de Silva QC who went on to become the United Nations’ chief war crimes prosecutor in Sierra Leone. Two generations of a seriously accomplished family, still quietly carrying a nineteenth-century Burgher lawyer’s name around the world.
Then there’s the Lorenz Tutory, which might be my favourite find. It was founded on Skinners Road in Maradana by a member of the Perera family, as a crammer for boys from well-off households sitting their matriculation exams. After the founder’s death it was renamed Lorenz College and even opened a branch out in Gampaha. One of its early teachers was a young Edwin Wijeyeratne, before he went on to a proper political and diplomatic career. And — on 21 December 1935, three days after the Lanka Sama Samaja Party was founded, the LSSP held its first ever public meeting inside the old Lorenz Tutory building. Ceylon’s first Marxist party, launched under the name of Lorenz. Wonder how he and his father would have felt about that?
Finally I want to discuss an annoyance with the spelling of his surname. In the important ‘Lorenz files’ at the Royal Asiatic Society there is a letter written by Lorenz’s father, Johan Frederick, to young Charles — from Belligam, dated Tuesday 29 November 1842. It’s nearly two hundred years old and it’s wonderful. Johan is annoyed, mid-letter, about a printed circular that’s registered his son as “Lourensz” instead of “Lorenz,” and he doesn’t hold back:
“For heaven’s sake beg your good Brother John to have that abominable error rectified… Your name is Lorenz — not Lourensz. The latter is a Dutch name but the former is a German one, and for the whole Island of Ceylon I would not be mistaken for a Dutchman.”
So. Charles Ambrose Lorenz’s Wikipedia page is currently titled “Charles Ambrose Lorensz.”
Johan is presumably still turning in his grave. If anyone reading this happens to know their way around Wikipedia, please help Johann rest in peace.
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