The Matale Rebellion, Ceylon, 1848

Edmund Sampson Waring, Ceylon Civil Service
The Old Garrison Cemetery, Kandy, Sri Lanka

The Background

Edmund Sampson Waring was not killed in the Matale Rebellion, but his is still an interesting story. In the words of the sexton at the Old Garrison Cemetery in Kandy, "He may have betrayed his country, but he never betrayed his church".

1848 was the year of revolutions. Across Europe, from Sicily to Saxony, Hungary to Holland, the masses rose in revolt against the established order; and in Kandy, in the centre of Ceylon, the peasants rebelled.

To keep things in perspective, to give the Matale Rebellion such an epithet is rather hyperbolic, but given the context of what was happening in Europe it is probably understandable. The Governor of Ceylon, George Byng, 7th Viscount Torrington, stated that "without a doubt for a time we should have lost the country". That is doubtful, but it indicates the sense of unease that pervaded the ruling elites of the time.

Britain had been in full control of Ceylon since 1815. Prior to that the centre of the island was the independent Kingdom of Kandy, with the British controlling all the coastal provinces surrounding the kingdom, having 'inherited' from the Dutch in 1795. By 1815, however, the Kandyan king had managed to alienate many of his chiefs and nobles, and the British administration exploited this. They were invited by the chiefs to dethrone the king and assume control, and this they did, despite it being against the specific instructions of the War and Colonial Office in London.

During the twenty years they had been governing the maritime provinces the British had altered traditional practices involving land and labour, and now that they had full control of the island, particularly following the Uva Rebellion of 1818, they began to put into effect a series of fundamental changes.

Changing the System

Ceylon was, and still is, a fertile country, with the cultivated land identified as either wet land or dry land, the former being paddy fields and the latter everything else. The peasantry's staple crop was rice, and much of their labour was expended on its production. The deliberate destruction of many of the paddy irrigation systems in the Uva Rebellion, therefore, with the aim of starving the population into submission, had a major impact, as they were never really re-established, especially as the chiefs previously responsible for organising the maintenance had been displaced after the quashing of the rebellion.

Between 1824 and 1829, into a system that had never had an established cash economy,  the Government introduced a series of direct taxes on land, but with exemptions for specified commercial crops - coffee, cinnamon, opium, silk and sugar. The notable exceptions were the main subsistence crops, coconut and rice. Obviously this hit the poorest cultivators hard, but also affected land structure and use.

Why? Firstly, because land with cash crops now had a value that previous subsistence-farming land had not. There was a cash market for it. With a lot of capital available within the British community, and with land the only available outlet for that capital on the island, there was pressure on getting the peasants off the land so that investors could occupy it - and failure to pay taxes could drive such dispossession. Secondly, in the past peasants had share-cropped chiefs' lands in exchange for service; now it was to the chiefs' financial advantage to get the peasants off their lands so that they could either plant cash crops or sell the land on. Thirdly, the peasants themselves now had an incentive to stop cultivating rice and replace it with a commercial crop, usually coffee. This pulled the peasantry into the cash economy, but also led to less rice being grown.

In addition, converting to the cultivation of commercial crops meant that a farmer would not be summoned to compulsory labour on public works. Under the old Kandyan system all peasants had worked for 15-30 days a year on public works, usually involving creation and maintenance of lcoal irrigation systems. Under the British the emphasis changed, with workers being used for the construction of roads, and for supplying support as bearers, servants and guides for colonial officials as they travelled around. The servile nature of this latter work caused resentment, and the road construction instigated real hardship, taking men away from their fields for extended periods, often months at a time. Any peasant who failed to pay his tax had to do this labour, manifestly disadvantaging a people who were not part of the cash economy. This disadvantage was enhanced by a system which paid the local officials who gathered the taxes a percentage of what they collected, thus encouraging them to over-estimate the tax owed, which was based only on a predicted harvest.

One can see why the peasantry were unhappy, and their situation progressively worsened. In 1840 the Crown Lands Encroachment Ordnance was exacted, Ceylon's equivalent of Britain's Enclosure Laws. Under this law all land was declared Crown Land unless ownership could be proved, and that meant producing documentary evidence. Many peasants lost lands they had been farming for generations, and lost rights to graze and forage on what had previously been regarded as common land. This was then followed by a rise in the number and size of plantations, especially coffee, with peasants being dispossessed and villages moved.

The Revolt

The 1848 trigger came on July 1st. From that date the already struggling peasantry had to pay a licence fee, another tax, on all guns, carts and dogs, and in addition had to pay a further tax if they wished to avoid forced labour on the roads. On the 6th a protest marched through the old capital of Kandy, led by an ex-policeman called Gongalegoda Banda. The protests gathered enough force and organisation for Gongalegoda to be crowned King three weeks later, the crowning performed by the chief priest of the Dambulla Temple, seventy miles north of Kandy. Another leader, Puren Appu, was appointed his sword-bearer, or equivalent of Prime Minister. The rebels clearly had aspirations, but they were not to last long.

On the 28th July the rebels mounted two attacks. One, under Gongalegoda's brother, Dinas, was aimed at the Waryapola coffee estate near Kurunegala, 42 miles west of Kandy. British troops reacted quickly, a number of rebels were shot, and the leaders arrested. On the same day Gongalegoda and Puren Appu led an assault on government and mercantile buildings at Matale, 16 miles north of Kandy. A coffee storehouse was burnt down, government offices ransacked, and tax records destroyed, but the next day the army arrived from Waryapola and dispersed the rebels. Gongalegoda fled into hiding, and Puren Appu was arrested.

On August 8th Puren Appu was executed by firing squad. It was his last words claim that "if there had been half a dozen men such as me to lead there would not be a white man living in Kandy Province" that prompted Viscount Torrington to talk of losing the country. Both men were talking arrant nonsense; Britain had well-armed, professional soldiers to call on, whereas the rebels were farmers relying on machetes and spears.

On September 21st Gongalegoda was captured, and on 27th November he was sentenced to death for high treason. Although up to eighteen had already been executed Gongalegoda's sentence was commuted to one hundred lashes and exile to Malacca in Malaysia, where he died the following year. He was the last victim of a rebellion which was, if one ignores the coronation, really just a series of riots. No British lives were lost, with rebel deaths ranging, depending upon the source one consults, between twenty-five and two hundred. Certainly the insurrection was put down with a degree of brutality, enough for one House of Commons debate to refer to "acts of atrocity more suitable for the destruction of mad dogs" - they were talking about the British response, not the peasants' uprising.

And what has all this to do with Edmund Sampson Waring?

The Man

He was a career civil servant, born around 1796, the son of Sampson Waring, a Board of Ordnance storekeeper (the Board was responsible for supplying arms and ammunition to both Army and Navy) who arrived in Trincomalee, on Ceylon's eastern coast, in 1816. Sampson and his wife both died there in 1818, but Edmund stayed on to join the Ceylon Civil Service, working his way up to being appointed District Judge at Matale in 1841. His position there also had tax collection responsibilities, and it was his office in Matale that was sacked by Gongalegoda and Puren Appu's men. When the attack came Waring ran away, abandoning office and records, and for this he was publicly criticised and accused of cowardice. According to Mr. Carmichael, who tends the Old Garrison Cemetery in Kandy, Waring was forced to resign in October, and was snubbed by society. When he died in 1856, however, he was interred at the cemetery, with the Church saying, "He may have been a traitor to his country, but he was never a traitor to his church". How a civil servant in his fifties was supposed to fight off a machete-wielding mob I am not sure; one gets the impression, as one surveys the build-up to, and the aftermath of, this rebellion, that the colonial elite of Ceylon were an unpleasantly arrogant bunch.

The Warings recovered respectability though. Their son, Edmund Charles, became Superintendent of the Horakele Estate in North-west Ceylon, and all five daughters had respectable marriages - Eliza and Henrietta to army officers, Anne to Kandy's Principal Medical Officer, and Maria and Cecilia to planters. Cecilia had a daughter, Alice Marie Freckleton, in 1852, and she married into the aristocracy. In 1876, at St. Michael and All Angels in Paddington, she wed Major Charles James Bromhead, of the 24th Regiment, second son of the 3rd Baronet (the family still resides at its ancestral home, Thurlby Hall, between Lincoln and Newark). The irony is that through the marriage the alleged traitor's granddaughter became sister-in-law to one of Victorian Britain's most celebrated heroes. Charles' brother was Gonville Bromhead, defender of Rorke's Drift, the Michael Caine character in Zulu. I suspect Edmund Sampson Waring would have been proud, and like to think that George Byng, the 7th Viscount Torrington, Lord in Waiting to Queen Victoria, former Governor of Ceylon, was left gnashing his teeth.

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Sources
Edmund Sampson Waring's gravestone, Old Garrison Cemetery, Kandy - author
Temple of the Tooth relic, Kandy - Wikimedia Commons

Military
http://digitalcommons.mcmaster.ca/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6608&context=opendissertations - this is an online dissertation
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006s5sf
http://www.landsettledept.gov.lk/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=96&Itemid=53&lang=en
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gongalegoda_Banda
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matale_Rebellion

Geneology
Tombstones and Memorials of Ceylon - J. Lewis Parry, Colombo, 1913
www.ancestry.co.uk



© Jonathan Dewhirst, January 2014