A Prosperous Communist Abroad

Disembarking from the SS Bendigo in Colombo on April 4, 1936, the twenty-four-year-old Mark Anthony Lyster Bracegirdle became the exception proving the rule posited by the contemporary British writer P.M. Smythe, about those who ventured out to the colonies. “Europeans,” Smythe wrote, were “encouraged to assume that the meanest white man, the private soldier or the engine-driver, ranks above any native; he becomes a gentleman when he steps ashore”. The exotically-named Bracegirdle, the son of a well-born English suffragette and a rich but absent father, was following the footsteps of thousands of Britons (mainly Scots and Englishmen, but also several hundred Australians), who over the last century had gone to Ceylon to work as “creepers” or apprentice tea planters. The origins of the term were obscure: it was thought to refer to the demeanour expected of the trainee in the presence of his superintendent or periya dorai (big master), on the plantation where he was contracted to work.

Bracegirdle’s mother, Ina, and half-brother Simon, had arrived in Sydney in 1927, from England, under the Salvation Army migration scheme. Ina, something of an artist, carried a letter of introduction to the painter Roy de Maistre. Through him she met other artists, including Thea Proctor (who drew Simon in 1932), and later, patrons of the arts, such as the Governor, Sir Philip Game, and Lady Game, and John and Sunday Reed. Ina established a business, at first going door to door around the suburbs of the lower North Shore, before working from a small studio in a city arcade, doing portraits at two shillings a time. By Christmas 1930, she was running a genteel boarding house in Roslyn Street, Kings Cross. A frequent guest during 1931 was a wealthy young woman named Cynthia Reed. Born in Tasmania in 1908, she had been educated at home and at The Hermitage girls’ school in Geelong, before travelling to London.

Ina, Mark and Simon stayed in Melbourne for a brief period in 1932, during which Ina continued her portraiture business in the Robertson and Mullens bookshop. Simon, by then sixteen, enrolled at the Working Men’s College, while Mark, twenty, was one of the first students at the Bell-Shore school of painting, then the only Melbourne school purporting to teach modernist principles. The brothers also resumed a strong platonic friendship with Cynthia Reed, which had formed during her frequent visits to Sydney the year before.

Cynthia Reed opened an interior design shop at 370 Little Collins Street in June 1934. Mark had come to Melbourne as a salesman for a dental technician, but soon began working in Cynthia’s shop, designing furniture and fabrics. In early 1935, when she left to go to America, he bought the business, doubtless drawing on a legacy of two thousand pounds he received following his father’s death in 1933 (Ina and Simon received nothing). One of Bracegirdle’s projects at this time was a ceiling aquarium for Maie, the wife of the prominent conservative politician Richard Casey. It was not a success, proving “too pink for the women’s make-up”.

Australia’s internal security service, the Commonwealth Investigation Branch (CIB) of the Attorney General’s Department, thought Bracegirdle himself was several shades too pink. A CIB report records Bracegirdle’s first dealings with communists and paints him as an opportunist fellow traveller: 

Bracegirdle lived in Melbourne for about two months prior to June 1935 and was actually associated with the Communist movement whilst there. The general impression held … was that he was in the movement only for what he could get out of it, and he borrowed money from any members who were in a position to lend it. 

Like almost everything written about him by the security services, the report is factually incorrect or contradicted by evidence from other sources. It repeats an error in the year of his arrival in Australia; referring to Mark’s work at Cynthia Reed’s shop, it has the address wrong, and the date on which she commenced business. The report also says Bracegirdle was the manager of the shop rather than its owner. It was Simon’s clear recollection that his half-brother had bought the business. According to Simon, Mark’s inheritance was “the equivalent of a quarter of a million dollars”—certainly more than enough to buy the shop, and to obviate any need to borrow money from other Communist Party members. Indeed, Cynthia Reed’s brother, John, writing to his wife, Sunday, about Mark Bracegirdle in January 1936, described him as “looking quite prosperous for a communist”.

In the same letter, Reed also refers to Bracegirdle’s views about the Russian political and literary historian D.S. Mirsky, who would die in the Gulag in 1939. Mirsky, he said, was “not very highly thought of by the best of communists. Quite a useful man but no dialectician—too mechanical and liable to go astray but for the guidance of those more divinely informed.” Bracegirdle’s view was more likely to have been the product of a strict Stalinist position than the view of someone who joined the party for purely selfish reasons. Shortly before his death, Bracegirdle told an interviewer that he believed he was the most likely source of Cynthia’s interest in Left politics and the source of books on the Soviet Union that she sent to John in the late 1930s.

By the middle of 1935, Mark Bracegirdle was back in Sydney and living in Darlinghurst Road, Kings Cross, where he was reported by the CIB to be “an active member” of the Young Communist League (YCL). The CIB was keen to know about the Communist Party’s finances, and in late August 1935 tasked its many agents within the party accordingly. Only a month later, one of them reported that Bracegirdle, who, it was said, was also known as “Lowry Price (or Rice)”, was a “finance organiser” for the party in Kings Cross. In November, another informant reported that he was the acting secretary of a “national students’ league provisional committee”, possibly under the name of Price. The exact functions of this committee had “not yet been ascertained” but it was known to meet at the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) headquarters at 605 George Street in the city. The New York-based, Stalinist-led National Student League (NSL) was the dominant high school and college campus leftist organisation in the United States in the early-to-mid-1930s; the CPA may well have received instructions from Moscow to seek to establish a similar body in Australia. If this were indeed the case, it would not have been surprising to see Bracegirdle, already prominent in the YCL, as an office holder in an Australian NSL.

Among Bracegirdle’s “associates”, the CIB listed a solicitor, John Moore Smait of Pitt Street. It was Smait who on February 10, 1936, attested that he had known Bracegirdle for a period of two years and believed him to be of good character and a “a proper person to receive a passport”. For some reason, in his application, Bracegirdle mis-stated the date of his arrival in Australia, saying it was in December 1928, rather than a year earlier. This error was perpetuated in every subsequent official document that mentions Bracegirdle, except one: in processing his passport application, a bureaucrat noted that Bracegirdle had produced “the usual [presumably correctly dated] Clearance Certificate from the Immigration Authorities”.

Bracegirdle had indicated that he needed a passport to travel to Colombo for the purpose of “entering employment in tea planting” and that he intended to be away for at least five years. In support of his application he produced evidence that he had been offered “assured employment” on a tea plantation by a Mr H.M. Thomas. The assurance was, however, hardly set in concrete. Simon Bracegirdle said the position was originally offered to him, but because he lacked an “adventurous spirit … Mark got the job”. Later, Thomas would claim that he “did not want” Bracegirdle, saying that he knew very little about his employee. It had been collusion between Ina and his wife, who had possibly stayed at Roslyn Street during a visit to Australia at this time that led to Bracegirdle’s being foisted upon him, Thomas said. The elder Bracegirdle’s application was, however, treated as routine, and a passport (No. A168211) was issued to him in Sydney on February 17, 1936. 

Joe Lyons’s United Australia Party government was aware that the government of India had no legislative means of keeping out British “undesirables” or people with “known or suspected communistic tendencies”; or of deporting them when once they had gained entry. It attached great importance, therefore, to a mechanism by which when British or Australian authorities issued a passport to someone who they subsequently found to be a communist, they deleted an endorsement indicating that the said passport was valid for travel “throughout the Empire”. The government was also aware that in 1932 Britain’s Chief Passport Officer had advised that, before granting “facilities” to a known communist to travel to a dominion, “His Majesties Government” in that dominion was to be consulted.

Bracegirdle’s ship, the SS Bendigo, had already sailed when the man in charge of the Sydney passports office, E. Fleming, wrote to his boss, the Collector of Customs in New South Wales (the Passports Act was administered by the Customs Department) to alert him to a statement by “one of the police officers connected with the investigation of Communist activities [he named him], that Bracegirdle is an active Communist and that he is a prominent member of the Young Communist League”. Noting that the Bendigo was scheduled to make her last Australian landfall at Fremantle on March 26, Fleming said that “if so desired, action in this connection” could be taken before Bracegirdle was lost to them entirely. The Collector of Customs wanted nothing to do with this, and referred Fleming’s note directly to the Department of the Interior in Canberra.

“The Interior”, as it was known, was a strange (and in this case, suspicious) beast. With functions approximating traditional “Home Office” responsibilities such as the handling of aliens (although not, as we have seen, internal security), the department was also effectively Canberra’s town council: its many outdoors staff collected the national capital’s garbage and kept its public lawns pristine. The Interior was not disposed to take Bracegirdle at his word. Although he was “said to be proceeding to Ceylon, it would probably be easy for him to make his way from there to India unless prevented by lack of passport facilities”, an official minuted.

In Canberra, it was unclear if the British travel directive also applied to Crown Colonies such as Ceylon, but essentially, two decisions had to be made. First, should the Empire-wide endorsement in Bracegirdle’s passport be cancelled and the passport be endorsed merely for Ceylon, and “he … be allowed to proceed at his own risk with regard to admission into Ceylon”? Second, should Canberra ask the authorities in Colombo if they had any objection to Bracegirdle’s landing there? If the British Empire endorsement were deleted, Bracegirdle would probably be prevented from landing in Colombo. “If, on the other hand,” an Interior official weighing the options continued, “the authorities in Colombo are asked for advice … he might be saved making an expensive journey for nothing.” It was suggested that if the department wanted to take action in the matter, the Collector of Customs be briefed to take Bracegirdle aside when the Bendigo reached Melbourne and “suggest that he may wish to consider his journey in view of the possibility of his being refused admission to Ceylon”.

In view of the possibility that Bracegirdle might be prevented from “proceeding to an assured job”, the Interior sought further information from the CIB about his character. The CIB reported on March 16 that nothing was known against Bracegirdle except that he was an “active member of the Young Communist League”. This information was, however, insufficient to justify refusing him a chance of obtaining permanent employment, said the security service. For the Interior official considering the matter, the YCL was “of course … a training ground for Communists” but it did not follow that its members were more than merely “interested in the movement”. The official concluded: 

If any action were taken that would have the effect of preventing him from taking up his promised employment in Ceylon, it would probably help to drive him into the ranks of aggressive Communism and in all the circumstances it is suggested that no further action be taken in this case.  

We do not know why the Director of the CIB did not pass on the other information it held about Bracegirdle’s CPA activities, including those in Melbourne and his fundraising in Sydney. If it had, it is possible that the Department of the Interior’s view would not have been quite so benign. This was the first of several tactical misjudgments made in Canberra, Colombo and London about the level of the radical young bohemian’s political commitment. 

Bracegirdle was to work at a remote estate, Relugas Ltd, at Madulkelle, near Matale, some ninety miles from Colombo. His superintendent, Thomas, was a hard man who drove his labourers unrelentingly. Later, Bracegirdle would claim no ulterior motive in coming to Ceylon, nor any knowledge of its history and politics; at least when he arrived. Rather, he told an interviewer, he was interested initially in learning a new form of agriculture—he had some theories about weeding that he was keen to test. This was plausible enough, given his agricultural background in Australia, but also disingenuous, given his later work there as a communist.

Bracegirdle was able to convince Thomas to adopt some of his innovative agricultural techniques, and it seemed briefly as if the young Australian might make a career for himself as a planter. But it was inevitable that he would disoblige himself to his employer. Bracegirdle disapproved of Thomas’s management style and said of him, “despite many labourers having malaria or suffering badly from its effects, he would insist on them picking tea”. He also objected to his superintendent’s view that schooling was wasted on the estate workers’ children and that teaching literacy “was only copying white men … it does them no good at all and will give them ideas in life above their station”.

In reality, Bracegirdle’s planting career was over before it had begun. Thomas’s superior, the proprietor’s agent, one J.H. Glasse, believed the Australian unsuited to the work, and took a set against him. Agency houses and their brokers, men such as Glasse, formed the linchpin of Ceylon’s plantation sector. Initially established as small floating partnerships, offshoots of mercantile firms, or by merchant banks, the agency houses provided services for the planter that he could not do himself and ensured a regular flow of supplies to an estate. Acting on behalf of his principals in London, the agent bought a planter’s crop and shipped it to the metropolis. He also served as shipping and insurance agent and, until Ceylon’s banking industry became fully established in the first decade of the twentieth century, was also the planter’s financier. By the 1930s, as the managerial side of their operations grew, many agency houses bought into tea estates, operating them themselves.

Appalled at the conditions under which his labourers worked, Bracegirdle was unable to keep his own counsel. Barely six months after his arrival, he wrote to Vernon Gunasekera, a lawyer who was the general secretary of the recently formed Lanka Sama Samaja (socialist) Party (LSSP). Gunasekera, a sometime journalist, edited the Young Socialist, the monthly organ of the Lanka Students’ Socialist League, and was by default the LSSP’s chief propagandist.

Gunasekera found Bracegirdle’s letter hard to decipher and thought its author virtually illiterate—quite possibly an accurate assessment, given Bracegirdle’s lack of formal education. Gunasekera and two other LSSP leaders, Philip Gunawardena and Leslie Goonewardene, travelled up to Relugas to meet the Australian. They were not impressed by what they found. He was “typical of the proletarian membership of the official Communist Party, intellectually,” said Gunasekera, rating Bracegirdle as “the weakest member of the English-speaking movement”. There was more than a trace of intellectual snobbery in this assessment. The LSSP had only just begun to infiltrate the tea estates, and had stationed a trusted cadre, Anthony Pillai, in Ceylon’s second city, Kandy, as a secret union organiser. Despite Bracegirdle’s apparently manifest shortcomings, Gunasekera and his comrades knew instinctively that in propaganda terms, one white ex-planter was worth a thousand Pillais—even if the latter had been “a university man in England”; and they acceded to the Australian’s request to join the LSSP. 

The party’s leaders may have looked down their aristocratic noses at Bracegirdle, but the rank and file were rather less fussy, seeing him as honest and devoted. In an assessment that put his view of D.S. Mirsky into some context, one contemporary remembered “Toni, as we affectionately called him … [was] a typical communist of the Comintern period. To him there was no text outside the ‘authorised version’.” Bracegirdle may have been an ideological hardliner, but “stripped to the waist sweating under a burning sun preparing a platform for a May Day meeting”, he was no armchair revolutionary; and “for lunch he had a bunch of ripe plantains”.

It is unlikely that Bracegirdle would have complied with the standing requirement on Ceylon’s tea estates that the arrival of any visitor be reported to the superintendent. Gunawardena and Goonewardene were soon recognised, and Thomas was informed of their presence. Two days after their visit, Bracegirdle was sacked. He was, of course, already on thin ice with Glasse, but had done himself no favours with Thomas either. Before the unauthorised LSSP visit, the Australian supported a number of labourers and pruners whom Thomas had dismissed for “general slackness” and impertinence. Shortly afterwards, another fifty workers left the estate, according to Thomas, on account of the disaffection Bracegirdle had stirred up among them. This last was sufficient for Thomas to sack his creeper for “fraternisation”.

Under the terms of Bracegirdle’s contract, in the event of his dismissal, Thomas was required to pay for a ticket back to Australia. Thomas duly booked Bracegirdle passage to Fremantle on a vessel scheduled to leave Colombo on November 24, 1936, gave him one hundred rupees for expenses and sent him on his way. But instead of leaving, Bracegirdle called on the shipping agents Harrison and Crossfield, and deferred his departure. He then booked into a Colombo hotel, the Bristol, but the day before the ship was due to leave, he disappeared. Thomas had evidently reported Bracegirdle’s sacking to his superior, Glasse, because on November 24, Glasse went to see the Deputy Inspector-General of Police, P.N. Banks, and told him of the Australian’s failure to board the ship. Although he was suspected of no offence, it seems as if Bracegirdle’s defiance of his employer (Banks had noted that “Mr Glasse wants him to proceed” on the next boat to Australia) was sufficient for the policeman to tell his officers to look out for the former creeper.

Bracegirdle must have returned to the Bristol (to pick up his luggage?), where, as chance would have it, he encountered a policeman, Sub-Inspector Stopher, who took him to see Banks. He told Banks he wanted to stay in Ceylon until the next ship for Australia, which was due to sail on December 12. Bracegirdle declined to indicate who would be his hosts during this period, except to say that they would be Ceylonese. He had 100 rupees in cash, which he wished to augment by making and selling some paintings before leaving so he would not be obliged to seek government relief when he arrived in Sydney. Bracegirdle was “not a communist”, he said; nor had he “any political leanings whatsoever”. Then, as if this proved something, he produced a notebook containing the name of the Italian Consul General, claiming that this gentleman’s name had been given to him by a contact in Australia. Banks told Bracegirdle that as long as he was not destitute there was no objection to his remaining on the island, but warned him not to have anything to do with a radical young university lecturer, N.M. Perera, who had recently been elected to Ceylon’s State Council for the LSSP.

In what would prove one of the worst misjudgments in Ceylon’s British colonial history, Banks summed up Bracegirdle as someone who did “not appear … the kind of person who would interest himself in politics”.

On the same day that Banks interviewed Bracegirdle, November 24, Thomas confirmed that he had sacked Bracegirdle because his views were “rather Communistic”. Of greater apparent concern to Thomas was, however, that Bracegirdle was associating himself with natives. “This is the last thing I thought he would do,” he wrote from Relugas to Banks. Thomas felt all the worse, since he had given his former apprentice the money that enabled him to stay on in Ceylon. Neither was Thomas above attempting to lessen a perceived financial obligation, asking about Bracegirdle, “couldn’t the responsibility of paying his passage out of the Island be shifted onto the people he is staying with? If somebody keeps him here longer without my consent surely they come into it somewhere.” Thomas worried that he would lose face over the whole business. Asking if Banks could let him know where Bracegirdle was staying, he wrote, “If they are a decent lot I wouldn’t mind so much, but as he has been living here and came over to me, the idea of him staying with any sort of Ceylonese reflects on me.”

It was during this period that Bracegirdle and his comrades called at the home of the leading Tamil politician in the State Council, G.G. Ponnambalam (they missed him; he was in Jaffna). A prescient police surveillance record of this event went close to describing what would shortly emerge as the LSSP’s strategy, which was to use Bracegirdle “more or less like a ‘Communist placard’, so much as to say ‘Here is an Englishman who is a Communist, learn Communism from him’.” 

On January 10, 1937, Bracegirdle helped organise a rally marking the departure from Ceylon on retirement of the Inspector-General of Police, Sir Herbert Dowbiggin. The policeman had a prominent role enforcing martial law in 1915, when communal riots broke out between Muslims and Buddhists. On January 17, another policeman, G.H.P. Lembruggen, called at the home of a member of the LSSP, H. Roy de Mel. Encountering Bracegirdle, Lembruggen deduced from his dress—a shirt, sarong and bedroom slippers—that he had spent the previous night there. The policeman encouraged the Australian to talk, and “found his views strongly Communist and decidedly anti-British”. According to Lembruggen, Bracegirdle spoke repeatedly about “winning people over to the Cause” and bitterly about the “atrocities of British imperialist methods” in the 1915 communal riots. Bracegirdle also referred to the work of the “gallant Ceylon police” during this time, “pulling harmless people out of their beds at night and shooting them long after the riot had been quelled”.

Although like Thomas, Banks deplored Bracegirdle’s decision to remain in Ceylon and maintain his links with the LSSP, it was the likelihood that he would “probably go as far as to adopt the national dress”, that put him beyond redemption. Banks told Thomas that unless he had signed a bond “before a Government Agent in Colombo or elsewhere”, guaranteeing to maintain and repatriate Bracegirdle (Thomas had not), he had no further financial obligation towards Bracegirdle. At this stage, Banks regarded the Australian as simply misguided. Providing Thomas with Gunasekera’s address, he told the anxious planter: “If you can come down to see him [Bracegirdle] or write with the object of dissuading him from linking himself up with these Communists, then so much the better.”

Reassured by Banks’s advice about his financial obligations to Bracegirdle, Thomas wrote again, saying he intended to visit Colombo on December 13. “If this chap doesn’t sail on the 12th as arranged, I will call and see you. This is a really bad show and I am extremely fed up that I was the cause of getting him over here.” Thomas was still prepared to give his former apprentice the benefit of the doubt. While at Relugas, Bracegirdle had expressed some “Communistic statements but was very quickly shut up”. Thomas then went on to suggest why Bracegirdle had gone off the rails: “He spent some time in an artistic environment in Sydney where Communism is rife but I never thought he would go as far as this.” In a later addendum to this letter, however, Thomas conveyed better and further particulars about Bracegirdle, which he now claimed made him “rather wrathful”; particularly as he believed they revealed the cause of his labour force problems.

In late November, Banks had told Thomas he believed that Bracegirdle was the author of an article headlined “The Australian Youth Today”, which had been printed in the Young Socialist magazine under the by-line of Tony Price. The piece attacked alleged Australian labour practices and reported on the outcomes of International Youth Day, organised by the Young Communist League of Australia in October 1935, with which Bracegirdle would almost certainly have been involved. Thomas had asked one of his clerks if Bracegirdle had paid him for any of the extra typing that he apparently had done. The clerk responded that he’d had a row with Bracegirdle “over some books on Communism” but an assistant clerk who had subsequently left the estate had been Bracegirdle’s typist. “I asked the clerk why there was so much typing and was told it was all stuff dealing with Communism and that he had written an article. This evidently is the one you mention.” Bracegirdle had “sworn most of the staff here to secrecy and on no account to inform me”, Thomas wrote.

Meanwhile, sheltered by the LSSP, Bracegirdle was prominent on its platforms in and around Colombo. On January 14, he shared the stage with a visiting “Nehru Socialist”, Dr V. Rajulu Naidu, to celebrate the anniversary of the South Indian Maruthvar Sangam (Hairdressers’ Association). According to a police report, while Naidu’s speech was “very anti-British”, Bracegirdle “merely advocated that they all should unite to obtain Swaraj [home rule]”. The following week, the Australian gave a lecture on socialism to the Ceylon Muslim League in Colombo.

Activism such as this, combined with what the police had learned from Thomas, prompted Banks’s deputy, George Ferguson, to write on January 29 to the Director of Australia’s CIB asking if Bracegirdle had “ever come to notice adversely”. Ferguson told the CIB that since his arrival in Ceylon, Bracegirdle had taken an active part in the spread of communism, had “joined the Local Communist Party and was living with a local Ceylonese Communist”. Ferguson also passed on his understanding that Bracegirdle had “imbibed” communist ideas while studying art. The CIB reply, relayed through the Department of the Interior in mid-March, added little to the case against Bracegirdle. Canvassing his immigration history, it also mentioned his membership of the YCL and the NSL. But as had been the case when Bracegirdle had applied for his passport, the CIB did not mention that he had also been an active communist in Melbourne. The Interior repeated the CIB’s earlier view that, at the time, it did not consider what was known about Bracegirdle was “sufficient to justify refusing him a chance of obtaining permanent employment”. 

Bracegirdle continued his political activity, attending a meeting of the “All-Ceylon Barbers’ Association” on March 4. On March 28 he was “seen with his arms around the necks of two youths shabbily dressed in khaddar” (coarse, homespun Indian cloth), when he was on hand to welcome the Indian political activist, Mrs Kamaladevi Chattopadyaya, who was on an LSSP-sponsored lecture tour of Ceylon. Throughout late March and early April, Bracegirdle accompanied Chattopadyaya when she spoke on “socialism”, “national freedom”, “how imperialism should be eliminated” and “the Indian Renaissance”. Attendances at these rallies were poor, due in many cases to a combination of bad organisation and bad luck. Sometimes when she spoke in English, there was no translator; at other meetings people seemed simply to misunderstand her purpose. Rain washed out some meetings, while at others, audiences resented having to stand and listen in the sun while speakers sat under cover.

Bracegirdle accompanied Mrs Chattopadyaya to almost all of the twenty-odd meetings she addressed around the country, but he tactfully avoided stealing her thunder until April 4, in the central highlands town of Nawalapitiya, near Kandy. Chattopadyaya had already spoken earlier the same day at Hatton, in the heart of the tea-growing district. Afterwards, the crowd took little notice of her but flocked around K. Natesa Iyer, a southern Indian journalist, trade union leader and politician of Indian Tamil origin, who had pioneered the labour movement in Ceylon’s plantations in the early 1930s. That afternoon at Nawalapitiya, with Natesa Iyer’s son-in-law acting as interpreter, Bracegirdle rose to give a speech that would rock the government to its core: 

Do you see those hills? Do you see those bungalows? There the whites live in luxury! They suck your blood! [the crowd cries, “samy, samy” (god)]; they are parasites. I came here because I heard it was a rich country. So it is. But all its riches have gone into the pockets of my countrymen … the white men. They have come here to exploit the poor labourers and squeeze the lifeblood out of them; [the crowd cries, “shame! shame!”]. Come on, I will help you; I will lay down my life for you. Rise! Rise and win your freedom and gain your rights!  

To the police agent who took a note of Bracegirdle’s speech, his delivery was almost demagogic: “He repeated his sentences twice, sometimes thrice … If there is anything in words that can be called incitement, here was an instance of unmistakable incitement … the feeling of the labourers rose to a very high pitch.” The LSSP leadership saw immediately Bracegirdle’s propaganda value. The day after this speech he was in the second car of a parade led by Kamaladevi Chattopadyaya. Perera and Gunasekera travelled not with Chattopadyaya, whose speeches even the British thought were innocuous, but with Bracegirdle.

On April 7, 1937, George Ferguson reported that it was clear from police agents’ reports of the speeches of LSSP leaders introducing Bracegirdle during Mrs Chattopadyaya’s tour that: 

They are making full use of the fact that a European Communist is identifying himself with their party and that his action in doing so will impress itself upon ignorant persons, especially on the Indian Estate Labourers, as a reason of their joining the Sama Samaja Party, or at any rate taking notice of their teachings. It is clearly dangerous to allow a European youth of this type to remain in Ceylon stirring up feelings against employers of labour and against the British Government. 

Ferguson recommended Bracegirdle’s deportation from Ceylon “at the earliest opportunity”. He went on to suggest that since Bracegirdle had no money of his own, the Ceylon government should pay his passage to Australia. “The first convenient ship leaving to Australia is the SS Ormonde, leaving Colombo on 17.4.37, and the cost of the cheapest fare in this steamer is Rs. 253 to Fremantle,” he noted helpfully.

By now, the reports of Bracegirdle’s political activities and his unsavoury domestic arrangements had caused Banks to revise his formerly benign opinion about the Australian. He forwarded Ferguson’s recommendation under cover of a personally addressed letter to the Minister for Home Affairs, Sir Don Baron Jayatilaka, dated April 8, saying that he believed the deportation “essential in the interests of public tranquillity”.

Banks recommended that the deportation be carried out under an obscure order-in-council passed in 1896 for use in case of war or any other “grave local emergency”. The government in New Delhi considered the order, like the passports provision regarding travel “throughout the Empire”, an essential part of the official apparatus designed to exclude and deport undesirable persons from India. Brought into force in Ceylon in 1915, the order was later withdrawn elsewhere but remained on the books on “the Island”, chiefly because of Ceylon’s proximity to India. The order had last been used in Ceylon in 1935—although no state of emergency existed—to deport a Yemeni Arab. 

Hemmed in on all sides by steep misty hills, the hill station of Nuwara Eliya was known as “Little England”. Located in the heart of Ceylon’s up-country tea-growing district, with its mock Tudor bungalows like “the Hut” (which was anything but), and its roses in the spring, the place resembled nothing so much as a town in the Cotswolds. There was a beautiful racetrack, a public garden, herbaceous borders, and topiary everywhere. The planters had built for themselves a Hill Club. It was baronial: on its walls they hung the heads of the animals they hunted—boars and deer, mainly. There were other trophies: stuffed trout, a leopard. By the front door, the planters put their umbrellas in a stand made from an elephant foot. The Hill Club was separated from a golf course by a narrow road leading to the governor’s bungalow, a two-storey white pile known modestly enough as Queen’s Cottage.

In April, when the heat and humidity on the coast became most oppressive, those who could afford it followed the Governor and his entourage to the hill station of Nuwara Eliya where the business of government continued in refreshing coolness. It has been suggested (but without any supporting evidence) that it was in Nuwara Eliya at this time that vacationing planters met the senior British representative in Ceylon, the governor, His Excellency Sir Edward Stubbs, and prevailed upon him the view that it would be best for all concerned if Bracegirdle left the country as soon as possible.

It was then, in Little England on April 20, 1937, acting on the sole advice of his Chief Secretary, Maxwell Wedderburn, under the power vested in his office by an order-in-council signed by Queen Victoria in 1896, that Stubbs directed “any police officer” to place Mark Anthony Lyster Bracegirdle “on board any ship or boat proceeding from any port in the Island to Australia” by 6 p.m. on April 24. In case Bracegirdle was disposed to defy this order, Stubbs also signed but misdated a warrant authorising his arrest on sight.

Alan Fewster is the author of Trusty and Well Beloved: A Life of Keith Officer, Australia’s First Diplomat (2009). This article is extracted from a book he is writing on Mark Bracegirdle.