Michael Roberts
Born and bred within the Fort of Galle, I passed the War Memorial on the way to St Aloysius college in Kaluwella every day and thence in the evening for sport at the Galle Esplanade in front of this huge edifice. Therefore, I passed the war memorial umpteen times…. and never gave it a thought [even though I was absorbing the history of World War Two in the Illustrated News magazines in the Aloysian library and seeing many a war film in the late 1940s and the 1950s]. It has fallen on Captain Kumar Kirinde’s initiative for my awakening to a monument of significance in world history — one that is also significant for my own research and Thuppahi-publishing activities.
It is also notworthy that one of the dead heores marked within this moument is a member of the Kale lineage. That is a name familiar to anyone born and bred in the Fort and its environs in the mid-twentieth century. Thus a “Miss Rita Kale” features aomn those captured in a 1928 photograph of the personnel racing the Burgher Tennis Club within the fort — see https://thuppahis.com/2017/06/29/burgher-tennis-club-in-galle-circa.
