Know Your City: When the boys of Bengaluru's Bishop Cotton went to war

Indian Express

4 days ago

On the night of September 2, 1916, Britain faced a menace that it had seen over its skies for two years of World War I—the high-flying German Zeppelin. While the bombings by these airships did not impact the war effort, they did cause considerable property damage and instil fear across the country. Until then, Zeppelins had been destroyed in Europe, but not over Britain. That night, this would change.
William Leefe Robinson, emptying three drums of ammunition before the airship exploded, became the first to achieve this feat. Robinson soon became an overnight celebrity. The Victoria Cross followed, and he was a household name across the United Kingdom. Back in India, another group had reason to cheer him on—the students and teachers of his alma mater in Bengaluru, Bishop Cotton Boys' School.
More than a century later, Robinson and other alumni of Bishop Cotton were the topic of a talk by senior lawyer and author Aditya Sondhi at The Bangalore Room in Indira Nagar on Sunday.
In his 2014 book, The Order of The Crest, Sondhi had documented the prominent alumni of Bishop Cotton, and had noted that over 175 Cottonians had volunteered for service in World War I. At the time, the students were mostly of European descent. The terrible, grinding trench warfare took its toll on these volunteers, and 23 of them were killed in action.
Noel Saunders, who wrote the music for the famous school song, died in battle, as did a teacher, Cyril Walter Wallace, who had only weeks before written about the gallant death of one of his students leading an attack.
Brothers Captain Robert and Lt Col Kenelm McCloughlin died fighting in France. So did Harold, Robinson's brother, who died just months before his brother achieved his great feat. Weakened by a stint in German captivity, Robinson himself would not live to see the inter-war years, dying in 1918 of the Spanish Flu.
'He had written to the warden a few months earlier (before his death in Mesopotamia) offering to join the staff of the school, pending his commission. He was remembered by many Bangaloreans for his role as Portia in the school's production of The Merchant of Venice in 1909,' Sondhi noted in his book.
From Sondhi's accounts, it seems that Cottonians did not let the privations of warfare daunt them. Even as late as 1917, Sondhi quotes a Reverend Bazley, who notes that several students hoped that the war would continue until they graduated, so they too could volunteer. The sort of officer that the school sent to the war is perhaps exemplified by Lt Col Terence Claud Crichton, who went so far as to climb onto his men's shoulders to shoot at enemy soldiers defending a wall opposite him.
A glance at the school's history in World War II throws up Indian names in the records. One of the earliest of these, and arguably the most well-known, was General K S Thimayya. Sondhi's research shows that Thimayya had a fighter's spirit from the early days—a fellow British student who tried to rag him for being an Indian found himself on the wrong end of a punch from Thimayya.
Thimayya was one of the only Indians assigned a major battlefield command in World War II, and Sondhi records that he took a point known as Hill 109 in a morning attack after a climb up the hillside. This enabled the British forces to link up near Imphal, a crucial moment in breaking the siege of the town. An anecdote shared by Sondhi revealed that in the later years, Thimayya would, without ceremony, visit one of his old teachers at the school, who still knew him as 'Timmy'. 'I found a reference to one of his masters at school, Sergeant Burgess, who said to him – Like the princes of the states, you can earn your commission and be an officer, see the world and be a hero -. What a prophetic call….' Sondhi said at the talk.
The number of brigadiers, generals, and senior air force officers from Bishop Cotton Boys' School in this period forms an exhaustive list. When the Partition split the country, it did not spare the school alumni either. Brigadier Mirza 'Hesky' Beg was one such former student who later went on to be known as one of the finest polo players in Pakistan.