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Journalism of Courage
In the heart of Kolkata, the Great Eastern Hotel stands as a reluctant relic, struggling to maintain its once-storied grandeur amidst a skyline dominated by modern luxury. Just a stone’s throw away lies Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah Sarani (formerly known as Waterloo Street), home to the first financial newspaper of India, Capital.
Few are aware of the man who connects both these enterprises. The enigmatic Shirley Tremearne, a British businessman, who after joining the hotel’s board as an ordinary director in 1887, set in motion a transformation that would ripple through the city in unimaginable ways. Arriving in this bustling port city at just 20, Tremearne didn’t just enhance the hospitality scene; he was also the visionary behind Capital.
Chronicling Tremearne and other people is Devasis Chattopadhyay’s book, Harry Hobbs of Kolkata and Other Forgotten Lives (Niyogi Books).
During World War II, the hunt was on for a quick route to riches and Indian investors knew just where to turn. They looked to Capital, the oracle of the stock market. While the weekly newspaper couldn’t guarantee a killing, it offered the next best thing – a steady stream of news and information to help savvy fortune-seekers strike gold.
Capital was India’s first economic and financial weekly, and it remained the Bible for investors for 91 years. When it received a quiet burial in 1979, incredibly, it was still selling 4,500 copies to a loyal subscriber base. But, for the most part, its end went unnoticed.
In February 1979, India’s then premier news magazine India Today reported that the country’s oldest financial journal, Capital, seemed to be heading for closure. It had been edged out of the market by daily business newspapers such as The Economic Times and Business Standard, and the then recently started fortnightly business news magazine, Business India.
Capital: A Weekly Journal of Commerce was published in the tabloid format. Launched as a weekly newspaper, it covered trade, economic output, industry, infrastructure development, public affairs, and current events, apart from routine commercial news. The newspaper had an interesting tagline, which read: ‘A Weekly Commercial Paper Devoted to the Interests of Capitalists and Employers of Labour’.
The newspaper was launched by “businessmen Shirley Tremearne and W. H. Targett (William Harold Targett) in Kolkata in November 1888 as a commercial and financial weekly newspaper in English”, wrote Aruna Magier (New York University) and Judy Alspach (Center for Research Libraries, Chicago) in their article ‘Preserving Capital: An Important News Source For Indian Economic History’. During its initial years, Capital was published from the office of W. H. Targett & Company, of which Shirley Tremearne was the editor and Managing Director, at 4 Waterloo Street (now Nawab Siraj-ud-Daulah Sarani). An imprint line of the newspaper informs us that Capital was printed by A. Acton at the Caledonian Steam Printing Company at 3 Wellesley Place (in the BBD Bagh area), Kolkata, at that point of time.
The two decades following 1885 constituted a germinal period in the history of modern Kolkata as well as India. The general upsurge in the wake of the Bengal Renaissance began to express itself passionately in animated discussions and in the formation of political associations of which the Indian National Congress was a manifestation. The consequent release and interaction of such diverse forces as imperialism and independence, nationalism and separatism, obscurantism and enlightenment, moderation and extremism led to a strange alignment of political forces that shaped India’s political destiny. Alongside, the modern economic and commercial impulses were also shaping our world and our hopes and aspirations.
No wonder that India’s first financial newspaper was founded in Kolkata. It is a testament to the then growing economic importance of the city, which was also the imperial capital of the colonial British in India. The financial and economic weekly was widely read and respected as a business newspaper of record at the time all over the subcontinent and overseas. Although it was primarily a financial weekly, it published interesting articles on politics, social life, trading, and other domains of general interest as well. Commencing with 32 pages in 1888, Capital grew to be an 80-page weekly newspaper at the height of its popularity in between the two World Wars.
So, it was but natural that Tremearne would start Capital in Kolkata. The last three decades of the 19th century saw some significant improvements to the city and her infrastructure: underground waterpipes and drains in some areas from the 1870s; a pontoon bridge across the Hooghly River around 1874; horse-drawn trams from 1880s; gaslights on streets, and then a slow replacement of them by electricity; the first telephones in 1882 and a few motor-cars from 1896; and, electric lights and fans in a few homes and electric trams from around 1900.
Though its obituary may have been written nearly 45 years ago in 1979 but Capital lives on in research that is currently underway at New York University, under the aegis of The South Asia Materials Project (SAMP). Historians, especially those studying economic and business history, will find in it a multitude of data, opinion pieces, advertisements, industry and labour relations reports, and analyses of events, which could provide depth and nuance to their research relating to various industries of that period.
Archived editions of this weekly newspaper at the National Library of India in Alipore, Kolkata, are a fount of information on companies operating in India from the 1880s till about 1960, including those producing and dealing in tea, cotton, jute, sugar, tobacco, coal, and Iron and Steel. Business historians will find a wealth of quantitative and qualitative data on the history of Indian industry, including the Tata companies, which are global entities today. Capital also contains extensive historical data on the Kolkata stock market and the Indian banking industry. And, I would dare say that the later day business and finance newspapers and magazines in India mostly copied its format and content structure.
In the field of economic journalism, Capital had a number of ‘firsts’ to its credit. Columnists and journalists will be interested to know that a column in the weekly newspaper, titled Ditcher’s Diary, marked the beginning of personalised business and finance columns in economic journals. In 1937, it was Capital that introduced the convention of publishing indices of stocks and shares from the Kolkata Stock Exchange, to help market-pundits gauge the general economic climate.
So, the question is who was this Shirley Tremearne, editor of Capital? Why haven’t we heard of him, a man who should have been talked about and celebrated long ago?
“Very few businessmen made so unfortunate a start in India as Shirley Tremearne (1848-1923), who claimed his descent from one of the oldest families in Cornwall, England,” wrote Harry Hobbs in his book John Barleycorn Bahadur: Old Time Taverns In India in 1944. Born in Tregenna in Cornwall on 21 August 1848, he came to Kolkata when he was 20 years old, a decade after the Great Revolt, to join his brother, who worked for Tremearne, Day & Co. He, however, had a dramatic start to his long and eventful career in the subcontinent for he found on arrival that the firm, and his brother, had both vanished as completely as if they had never existed! Tremearne would later discover that he was a man of many talents but, for now, he had to take the first job that came his way. He landed the minor position of an ‘Examiner’ at the Accountant-General’s office in Rangoon (Yangon now in Myanmar) and it didn’t pay much, just Rs.80 per month, as salary.
Tremearne was later transferred to Kolkata’s ‘Currency Office’, which marked the beginning of a career in which he demonstrated a formidable prowess in the realms of law, hospitality, journalism and the general business management. He had a sharp and agile mind and, at the Currency Office, a young Tremearne attracted the attention of John Henry Rivett-Carnac, a provincial civil servant with the Bengal Civil Service, an Indologist, the private secretary to Richard Temple (Tale Seven), and founder of the Kolkata Town Band.
Rivett-Carnac recommended Tremearne to Richard Couch, Chief Justice of Bengal. This led to Tremearne’s appointment as the clerk and private secretary to two successive Chief Justices of Kolkata High Court – Richard Couch (1870-1875) and Richard Garth (1875 -1886). Eventually, he became an Assistant Registrar on the ‘Original Side’ of the Kolkata High Court and served the court till 1887, when he resigned.
And, he was yet to make his greatest contributions.
In the words of Mark Twain, the Great Eastern Hotel in Kolkata was the “Best hotel East of the Suez” but it was well past its glory days when an up-and-coming Tremearne began his association with this Kolkata icon in the early 1880s. Still in his 30s, Tremearne was initially the hotel’s legal consultant, while he was working at the Kolkata High Court. Later on, after resigning from the services at the Kolkata high Court, he joined the hotel as an ordinary Director in its Board in 1887. Simultaneously, he was planning to launch Capital in 1888 as its editor and Managing director. In 1891, he also became the Managing Director of the hotel.
Montague Massey, in his Recollections of Calcutta for Over Half a Century (1918), shares an interesting nugget about Tremearne and the hotel’s Ghari Verandah – the large balcony that overhangs the pavement on the street below. This ornate gem is the piece de resistance of the establishment even today.
To install the balcony, the hotel required the sanction of the Building Committee of the Kolkata Municipal Corporation. The Building Committee was entitled to charge a fee of Rs 100 per month for such sanction as per the Municipal Act. The Kolkata Municipal Corporation, however, refused to clear the plan as the balcony was a colossal structure; it insisted on a monthly fee of Rs 300 after passing a special resolution. Members of the hotel’s Board were in a fix as they had already placed the order for fabricating the verandah with the vendor, Walter Macfarlane & Co, as soon as the municipal corporation’s engineer approved the plan.
Most of the directors were on the verge of giving in to this ‘extortion’ but Tremearne would have none of it. As the legal consultant, Tremearne found a loophole in the Municipal Act, and refused to budge. The hotel, he insisted, would not pay the enhanced fee of Rs 300.
It was the municipality’s turn to climb down. It took the regular fee of Rs 100 per month and the matter was settled. The massive, regal balcony, which spans the length of the hotel’s facade, overlooks the Old Court House Street even now. Installed in 1883, it became the first Ghari Verandah in Kolkata and inspired many others like it to be installed across the city.
It was only the first of many things Shirley Tremearne would do to revolutionise the Great Eastern Hotel.
In 1891, at the age of 43, Tremearne became the Managing Director of the Great Eastern Hotel. By that time, he in partnership with William Harold Targett had already started Capital. With his legal expertise and great business acumen, he dragged the hotel out of the quagmire that threatened to sink it, a mess created by David Wilson (founder of the hotel), his son D H Wilson, and their nominees.
Let me return to a story that Harry Hobbs wrote in his book John Barleycorn Bahadur. He recounted, “Shirley Tremearne told me how easily he became the managing director of the Great Eastern Hotel and started up the ladder of financial prosperity. An old gentleman living in the hotel complained that a pint bottle of claret was corked. The steward, who probably knew no more about wine than he did about Heaven, took a good sip, and said it was near enough; the manager supported the steward, and the board of directors saw no reason to reverse the decision of their staff. Bitterly angry, the regular boarder told everybody how scandalously he had been treated. One of the last men he went to was Shirley Tremearne (then a director) who ironically suggested that he should turn out the board of directors.”
Sometime later, the old, regular boarder of the Great Eastern Hotel asked Tremearne if he would care to be the Managing Director and run the hotel. He explained to a perplexed Tremearne that he had done as Tremearne had suggested. He had bought enough shares in the hotel’s existing joint-stock company to throw away the inefficient management! Tremearne accepted the offer. So out went David Wilson’s son, D H Wilson, and his crony board members. Eminently suited to his new position, Tremearne started to salvage the Great Eastern Hotel and restored it to its former grandeur, narrated Hobbs.
Excerpt published with permission from Devasis Chattopadhyay and Niyogi Books
