The Butterfly Headmaster: St. George’s Homes and the Schools of the Ketti Valley

If you stand at the Ketti valley viewpoint and look across, the two largest man-made things in sight are both schools. One is a long red-roofed block on the valley floor, the CSI College of Engineering. The other is higher up the southern slope and harder to pick out, because it is not one building but a campus of two hundred and twenty acres: St. George’s Homes, whose school is the Laidlaw Memorial School and Junior College.

It began as an orphanage, and not here

St. George’s Homes started in Kodaikanal, in the Palani hills, and it started as an orphanage rather than a school. Its founder was John Breeden. The money came from Robert Laidlaw, a draper whose name the school still carries, and the institution came to Ketti later — which is where the record becomes untidy.

The school dates itself to 1914; its own site says so plainly, alongside the two hundred and twenty acres. The standard reference account says the institution moved from Kodaikanal to Ketti in 1922. Both statements are in circulation, they cannot both describe the same event, and we have not found a source that reconciles them. So we print both and say which is which, rather than picking the one that reads better.

What is not in doubt is the trajectory. It was first recognised by the Madras Education Department as a free primary school, and it was raised to high school status in 1944 — an orphanage becoming, over about thirty years, an institution that now sells itself as a heritage boarding school.

The headmaster who counted lions

In 1941 the headmaster of the Laidlaw Memorial School was Mark Alexander Wynter-Blyth, and he is the reason this school has a footnote in a subject nothing to do with education.

Wynter-Blyth was born at Harrow-on-the-Hill in 1906, into a family of chemists — his father and grandfather were both public analysts — and read at Sedbergh and Magdalene College, Cambridge. He came to India in 1936 as a housemaster at Bishop Cotton School, became headmaster of its preparatory school, and there met A. E. Jones, a well-known amateur naturalist in Shimla. Jones turned him towards butterflies. In 1941 he moved to the Nilgiris and to this valley.

He wrote one of the first field guides to the butterflies of the Indian region, which is the work he is remembered for, and he was also involved in the censuses of the Asiatic lion at Gir. He died in 1963. It is a particular kind of colonial-era life — the schoolmaster whose real subject was somewhere outside the classroom window — and for twenty-odd years the window was over the Ketti valley.

What the missions left

St. George’s is not an isolated case here. Christian missions worked this valley hard from the early 1900s, and the residue on the hillside is not mainly congregations but classrooms: the Laidlaw school, the CSI College of Engineering founded in 1998 by the Church of South India’s Coimbatore diocese, a CSI middle school, the Needle Church down by the works, St. Michael’s at Shanthoor. The valley is overwhelmingly Hindu and Badaga-speaking, and it is dotted with mission institutions. Both things are true at once.

The boarding cottages at St. George’s still carry the English names they were given, and you can read them off the map: Oldham, Hesketh, Lancashire, Lewis, Oakshott. Lancashire and Oldham are cotton towns. Somebody a long way from home was naming buildings after the places they had come from, on a slope in the Nilgiris, above a valley farmed by people whose ancestors had walked in from Mysore.

Do not turn up at the gate

It has to be said clearly, because the campus is handsome and the estate road looks inviting from the valley road below. This is a working boarding school with children living on it, and its road is signposted private. Old Georgians and prospective parents arrange visits with the school. Everybody else looks from the public road, and does not photograph the children.