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Two differing contributions
Many reasons have been suggested for the House of Binny having fallen to a point where it now needs massive rehabilitation. Management, failure to modernise, the market, the financial institutions, labour and floods have all been blamed. But whatever the reasons — and they probably are a little bit of all of them — the settlement brokered in 1998 was the culmination of a series of formal labour-management talks stretching back to the very first one in India. That negotiation was the result of the formation of the first trade union in the country at Binny's, the Madras Labour Union for Textile Workers, in 1918.
Little remembered are the founders, particularly G. Selvapathi Chettiar, a textile merchant, who had, with his friend Ramanjulu Naidu, been running a religious centre for Binny's workers. When they, one day, heard about a group of workmen who had to cut their lunch break short to meet the production demands of a bullying European supervisor, it was the latest of several tales of workers' woes. This one, however, spurred them to approach Annie Besant and her lieutenant, the lawyer B. P. Wadia, who had moved their New India on from only espousing political freedom to also focussing on the economic and social needs of the workers. Wadia drove the two back to the Mills and an after-hours meeting of the workers was organised. The result was the birth of the Madras Labour Union; Wadia was its first president, Selvapathi Chettiar its secretary. It was to be 15 years of strained relations and violence before the union was recognised by Binny's. Meanwhile, Selvapathi Chettiar and another friend, Tiruvarur Vi Kalyanasundaram, began unionising workers in many other industries and professions, got most of them an eight-hour day instead of the 12 most worked, and gathered them to celebrate May Day. Little remembered today are those pioneers.
At the other end of the Binny's scale were holiday bungalows it owned on Ennore `island' for its executives as early as the 1850s. One of the three was Clive House, which the second Lord Clive (c. 1800) had used as a holiday retreat. Dating to sometime before this is the now long-defunct Ennore Club, which John Binny's uncle, Charles, another retainer of the Nawab of the Carnatic, had helped start. The Club offered rowing, angling and swimming — and these probably survived in the holiday-bungalow days, though competitive rowing very likely gave way to boating once the Boat Club was established.
For many years afterwards, angling at Ennore and Pulicat were favourite pastimes of several expat enthusiasts. I was reminded of this the other day when Josephine Felton, who runs a heritage hotel in the Royal Forest of Dean in Glouscestershire, sent me a picture of her father, Fred Rainsford, who had been with the British Deputy High Commission here in the 1960s, her stepmother Audrey and Rosemary Bourcier (on the right) with their catch.
Writing that it was taken either at Ennore or Pulicat, "where they regularly used to fish", she wonders whether anyone might recognise their "Indian" friend.
S.MUTTIAH
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