When the noble speeches and solemn ceremonies were concluded, masters and boys found themselves faced with the uncompromising reality of dislocation. They found it deeply unpleasant, as migrants usually do. Overcrowded and coal-smutted though it had been, the old school at Mutwal was yet well suited to its purpose. More than this, it possessed the familiar attachments and emotional comforts of home. Fine as the buildings at Mount Lavinia were, they had acquired no such character as yet – and besides, could meet only a few of the requirements of an institution like St Thomas’s. Various shifts had to be made to supply the rest.

       There were, for instance, no purpose-built dormitories. Stone had been unwilling to plunge the College into debt by building any; instead, a number of houses in the neighbourhood were rented to provide accommodation for the boarders. Most of these were large ‘estate bungalows’ dotted here and there among the rows of coconut-palms marching down to the sea. Three houses stood within the school compound itself; one became the little boys’ dormitory or ‘Winchester’, while another housed the sickrooms and matron’s quarters and a third became Claughton House, a middle-school dormitory. The senior dormitories were all at some distance from the school: nearest was Miller House, which occupied the ‘de Mel bungalow’ south of the College compound along the ‘military road’ that would later come to be known as De Saram Road. A second big house to the north of the campus was owned by Copleston Dias Bandaranaike, another member of the great Bandaranaike-Obeyesekere clan that had produced Sir Christoffel Obeyesekere, the Maha Mudaliyar and Sunny Bandaranaike. It came to be known by the boys as Copleston House – a name originally derived from that of its landlord but later (and understandably) linked with the second Bishop of Colombo, after whom the owner of the house had, in fact, been named. Copleston House lay a considerable distance from the school, but E.G. Wikramanayake remembered that there was yet another boarding-house, possibly named Read House, ‘across the road that is now Barnes Avenue.’ The distance and isolation of these buildings obliged their inmates to make their daily pre-dawn trek to the College lavatories through ‘a noisome jungle’.

       Wikramanayake remembered those times well.

 

In the Boarding House there were definitely more than five times as many boys as there were lavatories. Every morning we would have to get up at the rising bell at 5.30 and walk, sometimes in the dark, over a mile to the lavatories. Once there, we would have to ‘book’ our turn – ‘after you’ – and also ‘book’ again our turn to a

bucket of water. Sleeping late would be disastrous because, after all the walking and delay at the lavatories,

when we got back to the dormitory to brush our teeth and wash our faces, it was again a question of ‘booking’

a basin. Water had to be drawn by ourselves from the well. The bigger boys drew the water for those who were

too small to do so themselves…

 

C.E.A. Dias had provided the well and some basic infrastructure, but there was neither piped water nor sewerage; the school privies worked on a ‘bucket system’ of mediaeval design. Hygiene, if such it could be called, was maintained by a squad of ‘lavatory coolies’ who used lashings of a ferocious disinfectant called Jeyes Fluid, the scent of which was nearly as mephitic as the odours it was employed to banish.

       Besides the dormitories, other houses near by also featured in the arrangements of the College. One, not far from the sea and still standing today, was chosen by Stone as his residence; Thomian legend holds that its name, Bertram House, honours the warden’s eldest son. Another building became, c.1920, the home of the Divinity School. Almost on the seashore and also still in use today is Thalassa, which would only come into the hands of the College years later. In 1918 it was Sir Christoffel Obeyesekere’s beach house. S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike’s mother Daisy was, apparently, ‘convalescing’ there at about this time.

       As the boarders settled into their new quarters, work began on the parcel of ground set aside for the Big Club. Even after the stumps left by the tree-fellers had been uprooted, the resulting waste, pocked with holes and riddled with the burrows of sand-crabs, bore scant resemblance to a cricket-ground. To effect the necessary transformation, a thick layer of compacted earth had to be laid over the sand. Fortunately, an abundant source of material lay near at hand – directly before the College entrance, in fact – in the form of a thickly overgrown hillside separating the track down to Mount Lavinia from the Galle Road, which ran along the crest of the hill. Once the vegetation had been cleared, all that was needed was to dig up the hillside (which also belonged to the Obeyesekere family) and transfer it by wheelbarrow to the Big Club, where it could be spread, tamped down and rolled flat, much later to be covered with gravel and planted with grass. An onerous manual task – but one that could be accomplished, under suitable direction, by unskilled labour. And of labour there was no shortage: the boys themselves were pressed into service, and over an indeterminate period of time part of the hillside was quarried flat and its fabric transferred to the opposite side of the campus. A tennis court – one of several scattered about the campus – was made out of the level ground left behind.