When J F Bailey, a constable in British Malaya, landed on the shores of Madras in the late 1890s, he had just a trunk of clothes and a few coins to start life afresh. Why he chose to move to the city remains a mystery, but his reason for setting up base in Perambur – after buying a thatched house from a milk vendor -was obvious: the railway workshops.

A century later, Bailey’s granddaughter Barbara Pavey and her son Robert are on a quest to find out why he chose the spanner over the baton and his life in the Straits Settlements – British colonies comprising parts of the southern and western Malay peninsula and adjacent islands, including Singapore.Their discoveries, they believe will unveil not just their personal roots but the story of Perambur, one of the earliest British settlements in Madras.

“My grandfather rarely talked about his days in the Straits. But his eyes would light up when he spoke about his life in Perambur and the road that led him to the love of his life – my grandmother,” says 70-year-old Barbara Pavey, blowing the dust off a broken wall on Ballard Street to reveal a named etched below: J F Bailey. A narrow path leads to the Baileys’ house, one of the few buildings on the street that have survived the thrust to modernity, but barely. While the columns, reflecting the Indo-Saracenic style (popular during thattime), stand tall, the walls are being crushed by the roots of a banyan tree.

“The building was called `the terrace house’ as it was the first in the neighbourhood with a terrace. Even the mayor’s and police commissioner’s houses on the street didn’t have one,” says Barbara, precariously climbing a flight of stairs that a broken balustrade lined.

Barbara, who moved into the Bailey house with her parents and seven siblings in 1958, reminisced of Christmas ball and parties at the Railway Institute; of men in bowler hats and suits cycling to work, and of people drinking wine and singing rhymes. But the locality was more than that. Noted for its railway establishments since the 1850s, the Anglo-Indian community in the neighbourhood, with their grit, dominated the Railways until well into the 1960s.

“We always made time for music too.Every evening, after my father got back from work at Central railway station, he would pick up his banjo, while my mother would play the piano. Their music could be heard right down the street,” recalls Barbara. The piano now lies in a locked room in the Baileys’ house, which has remained unoccupied since 2007, after Barbara moved to an apartment close to the locality following her mother’s death. With many members of her family and community leaving the country from the ’80s, many stories like Barbara’s have died along with the bungalows that once lined the narrow Ballard street.

There were around 6,000 AngloIndian families from in Perambur earlier; there are fewer than 1,300 now.

source: http://www.timesofindia.indiatimes.com / The Times of India / News Home> City> Chennai / Ekatha Ann John / April 29th, 2016