Finding the Founder

Almost 18 months ago a few of us Old Georgians located in three continents set about to try and dig up more information on the Founding Principal of our old school in the mountains of South India! The people who led the charge were John Castellas in Melbourne, Monty Shroff in London, Bryan Mulley in Leicester, Brian McDonald in Coimbatore and a few others. We could find huge amounts of info on the man and his work, his movements in and out of India, his speeches from the pulpit and at fund raising events in India and the UK and so much more - why, John C even managed to locate and buy two copies of a book written by the good Reverend - one of those copies actually signed in his own hand is now in the School Archive! Over the months John and I realised that the Reverend must actually have been a reclusive sort, who shunned publicity and actually stayed out of pictures. The nearest we got was to a long shot picture (1914) of Lord Pentland , Governor of Madras Presidency the first sod at the foundation laying ceremony of the old school in Kodaikanal! There was a man of the cloth in the picture but his face was hardly recognisable! We plodded on, trawling through the internet and going after any lead we could get, we were told that the United Theological College in Bangalore kept detailed records of Missionaries who served in India - last July we checked the place out but only managed to find lots of material written by JB - no photos again! Last week John C was at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) Archive where he finally came upon a group picture featuring Missionary Lecturers at the Richmond Exhibition, July 20 1907 - mercifully the picture was captioned and the Reverend's name was clearly visible. From that picture John zoomed-in and got a better look at the man and sent it out to me. Some months ago I had made a visit to the Egmore Wesley Church founded by Rev John Breeden in 1905 with the idea of trying to search its archives for a picture of the Reverend - they actually had 12 portraits of Englishman Pastors of the church but none was captioned so nobody knew who was who! One of the minions of the church actually told me to go ahead and chose any one of the pictures and caption it as that of JB!! 'Who is to know' is what he asked me in Tamil!!! Well, now that John C had obtained an image of the Reverend I went back to those 12 portraits and could very quickly identify the portrait of our man!! Here it is - the Founding Principal of the St. Georges Homes , my old school!