AN INDIAN ENGLISHMAN AN INDIAN ENGLISHMAN MEMOIRS OF JACK GIBSON IN INDIA 1937–1969 Edited by Brij Sharma Copyright © 2008 Jack Gibson All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law. ISBN: 978-1-4357-3461-6 Book available at http://www.lulu.com/content/2872821 CONTENTS Preface vii Introduction 1 To The Doon School 5 Bandarpunch-Gangotri-Badrinath 17 Gulmarg to the Kumbh Mela 39 Kulu and Lahul 49 Kathiawar and the South 65 War in Europe 81 Swat-Chitral-Gilgit 93 Wartime in India 101 Joining the R.I.N.V.R. 113 Afloat and Ashore 121 Kitchener College 133 Back to the Doon School 143 Nineteen-Fortyseven 153 Trekking 163 From School to Services Academy 175 Early Days at Clement Town 187 My Last Year at the J.S.W. 205 Back Again to the Doon School 223 Attempt on ‘Black Peak’ 239 vi An Indian Englishman To Mayo College 251 A Headmaster’s Year 265 Growth of Mayo College 273 The Baspa Valley 289 A Half-Century 299 A Crowded Programme 309 Chini 325 East and West 339 The Year of the Dragon 357 I Buy a Farm-House 367 Uncertainties 377 My Last Year at Mayo College 385 Appendix 409 PREFACE ohn Travers Mends (Jack) Gibson was born on March 3, 1908 and J died on October 23, 1994. In some ways, Jack was the last Englishman in India. He came ten years before independence and stayed on 47 years after it, rendering dedicated service to the country of his adoption. Jack was the last English Principal of Mayo College; he was the last English President of the Himalayan Club. He was the last, and for most of the time the only English resident of Ajmer, formerly a very British enclave in the heart of Rajasthan. He was the last Englishman to be accepted completely as a friend by almost all the former ruling houses of that chivalric region. He must have been just about the last Englishman to have been honored by both the British and Indian Governments. Jack's life exemplified the good; he lives on in the hearts and minds of thousands of Indians whose lives touched his. As his students at Mayo College we are privileged to have known him and on his 100th birthday we celebrate his life by publishing this book, and recording the many fond memories his students and colleagues had of him at http://www.jtmgibson.com Gibson's collection of letters As I Saw It published in 1976 covers more than 700 pages and he found it difficult to find a publisher for it in the UK. Eventually he had to underwrite its publishing costs and it was issued by a Delhi publisher who had also issued a Geography textbook by Gibson. He had little secretarial help at the time he put it together and had to go through the proofs which were full of errors. Many still remained. We were fortunate to find Brij Sharma, a journalist based in Bahrain to help us edit As I Saw It. Sharma belongs to Dehra Dun where much of his childhood and youth was spent. And while not a product of Doon School, he has known its campus, the surroundings of the city and much of the mountainous terrain described in Gibson's letters. viii An Indian Englishman In preparing this condensed version most of the material which would sound dated has been deleted – Gibson's efforts in relation to the various examination boards, his annual letters to parents except for relevant extracts which have been retained here and there, his comments on immediate political events, his accounts of various cricket and other sports matches with other schools, the reviews of Shakespeare performances at the school, and his sometimes tedious and repetitious accounts of his successive skiing, mountaineering and hiking diaries. But nothing which vividly narrates an event or incident, and no cameo of an important visitor, friend or servant, and nothing that shows Gibson's love of nature, animals and birds has been left out. Nor his accounts of India's fairs, festivals, marriage ceremonies that he attended or hunting expeditions he went on. What emerges is an account of a life lived to the full. Anvar Alikhan Yogen Dalal Amitabha Sen March 2008 INTRODUCTION eachers in the mould of Jack Gibson are not to be found any more. T Certainly not in India. He was an adventurer who wanted his students to share his multifarious interests and made sure they did. He was no less concerned with their academic excellence and character- building which every teacher ought to. Above all he was fair, just, kind and liberal, with not a hint and not a trace of racism in his thoughts and actions. And this at a time when Indians, in their surge for independence which seemed to be almost within reach, were beginning to dislike Englishmen. He made friends with many of the Indian politicians we know as greats today – Nehru, Shastri, Dr Rajendra Prasad, Zakir Hussain and Abul Kalam Azad among others. He had little patience with the majority of politicians of India, though, and with the corruption he had begun to notice in public life. Yet he loved India and after reading this collection of letters one is not surprised he was honoured both by his Queen with an OBE and by the President of the country he had adopted as his own with a Padma Shri. Jack Gibson was 29 when he arrived as a housemaster and geography teacher at Doon School in 1937, three years after the school was opened. And from the beginning plunged himself into all the activities which he had enjoyed during his own schooling and trips to the skiing resorts of Switzerland. Doon School faces the lower ranges of the Himalayas. And apart from hiking, climbing and mountaineering in the snow-bound regions of the higher Himalayan ranges during successive vacations he introduced his students to pursuits which were either novel or in their nascent stages in India of those days – canoeing for instance, or fencing or boxing. He also experimented with Shakespeare performances by schoolboys wearing Indian dresses. In later years, as age caught up with him, his wanderlust found release in scouring Rajasthan in his Jeep – he was welcome at all the princely courts in the state for the simple reason that all of them were Mayo Old Boys! Visits to Sikkim and Bhutan in comparative luxury 2 An Indian Englishman came near the end of his career, a sort of spurious solace that he was still mountaineering. The proximity of the Doon School to the Indian Military Academy opened around the same time as he arrived in India brought him in close touch the military class as well which culminated in his taking leave of absence from the school to start a military training college for the young in a Dehra Dun suburb. This was eventually shifted to Khadakvasla near Pune and renamed the National Defence Academy. During World War II he joined the Royal Navy and even went up to Muscat where his father had been while working as a surveyor in India and that was a nostalgic moment. During this time he also wrote a history of the Royal Navy but we are not told whether it was published. He had a 'girl' back home called Friede, who was two years his senior, and they did consider marriage but nothing came of it when she refused to move to India. By the time, after 17 years with Doon School, Gibson arrived at Mayo College in 1954, he was a confirmed bachelor and this may have prompted him to stay on and, after retirement, settle down in India. He had few family ties in Britain apart from a sister. But he must have wished he had his own children. In the event he had begun to lavish his paternal affection on Deb Burua, a Mayo boy who was doing well in further studies in England, and just before he retired he had taken two Tibetan refugee boys under his wing. While as a Housemaster in Doon School he had only a limited scope to show his administrative abilities. These first came to the fore when he took charge of the nascent NDA and then another similar outfit in Nowgong in central India. By the time he arrived at Mayo as Principal, it was an institution on the verge of closure, with few students and saddled with debts. It is to his credit that he put the school back on its feet within a space of two years, supervised the building of new wings and blocks, began to invite school-leavers from Britain on short stints as teachers, slogged to improve academic standards and finally oversaw the rise in applicants to the point that by 1960 he considered it necessary to introduce a system of entrance tests which was to be copied by the Doon. Till the end he looked for a balance in the number of candidates who came from the rich and the business classes and those who came from the middle class. He also acted as a true ambassador for the college by not only writing features on it in the Indian Press but also making contacts with big business houses to have Memoirs of Jack Gibson in India 1937-1969 3 his boys placed at a time when the era of institutions with specialist courses, from where these houses could draw prospective employees, had not yet dawned.