In view of his impending depature, Rollo Hayman was afforded the honour of being chief guest at Mount Lavinia on Prize Day, 1962. The former sub-warden and Gurutalawa headmaster sat quietly among the staff on the hall stage while the warden made the official announcement of his coming retirement and squirmed only a little as Bishop Campbell praised his character, his achievements and his apparently endless largesse towards the school. When his own turn came to speak, he was self-deprecatory.

 

You know, the building of the Fives Courts and the Swimming Baths was a form of gross self-indulgence. I just loved doing it, planning how it should be done, working out the details – and if I had not spent the money in

that way I expect I should have spent it in another, and in one which would not have been so much fun.

 

Then, his manner growing serious, he turned from his own career at St Thomas’s to the topic of the school itself, and the moral and practical rationales for its existence. If Warden Davidson was hesitant to address political or social issues, Dr Hayman showed no such reluctance; he proceeded to tackle, head on, one of the stock nationalist complaints against STC and other Christian missionary schools.

 

The vast numbers of professional men who received their early training in the College… refutes the modern propaganda which asserts that missionary schools were founded solely for the purpose of turning out clerks

and minor officials to serve an alien government… It is a plain fact of history that S. Thomas’ showed no

exclusive interest in their production.

     It actually aimed at a much wider objective. In order to maintain modern civilized life, there is a great

variety of tasks to be undertaken and jobs to be done. STC set out to provide a training which would fit its

boys to enter upon any of the careers thus opened up…

 

Hayman went on to compare the subjects taught at Mutwal in 1851 to the ones offered by his own old school, Sherborne, subsequent to the curricular reforms which had been implemented there the same year. The two curricula were, he said, effectively identical, save that, at Mutwal, Sinhala and Tamil lessons had taken the place occupied by French and German at Sherborne.

 

The point which I wish to drive home is this: the founders of S. Thomas’ College set about giving their charges everything in education which they themselves valued most highly. They gave nothing less than what they considered to be the best. They held nothing back.

 

Turning from the past to the future, he insisted that St Thomas’s still had a role to play in producing Ceylonese leaders, not solely in politics but in all the departments of ‘modern civilized life’. Noting that the threat of government acquisition still hung over the school, ‘[in which case] the onus for planning for the future will rest with it and not with us,’ he offered a review, based on thirty-four years’ experience, of what he described as typically Ceylonese defects of character – defects which, he said, the College had a duty to rectify in the boys it taught. This kind of stereotyping is, of course, much frowned upon in our own day, but readers not bound by intellectual fashion may find it interesting to consider Hayman’s criticisms and what bearing, if any, the traits he mentioned have had on Lankan history in the decades since he made them. Summarised for brevity, they were a lack of personal pride in and duty towards the society and institutions of which one is part, low standards of honesty, conduct and respect for the property and rights of others, and a weak sense of fairness and sportsmanship, leading to aggressive, selfish behaviour, unhealthy rivalries and feuding among individuals and groups – and arising from these, the impotence of public criticism or peer pressure to deter wrongdoing. ‘If public opinion is lacking, there will be no stopping the bribery and corruption we see around us,’ Hayman earnestly declared.

       Finally, he came to his point:

 

It is important, while we are still at school, that…[our] rivalry should not prevent friendship and respect… We

must learn to see our differences in their true perspective, against the background of our common membership

of the same school.

     If we can do that, we have something in the way of a blueprint for the manner in which the different races

and creeds of Ceylon may sink their differences and so work for the common good.

 

No doubt there were some in the audience who reflected on his words and tried to heed them. But the ‘blueprint’ for social relations in Ceylon was no longer being drawn up by alumni of St Thomas’s College.