• "Ceylon"   

      November, 1945 / January 1946

      Album of photographs and ephemera compiled by actor, writer and director James Grant Anderson (1897~1985) whilst on an ENSA tour of Ceylon, India and Burma. 

      The Entertainments National Service Association (ENSA) was an organisation established in 1939 by Basil Dean and Leslie Henson to provide entertainment for British armed forces personnel during World War II. ENSA operated as part of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes. 

      The album consists of 125 photographs alongside official documents and letters, posters, flyers & adverts, tickets, programmes, banknotes, postage stamps & newspaper cuttings etc. Most photographs measure roughly 8 x 6.5 cm. 

      Album measures 3 x 26 x 34 cm and consists of brown paper covered boards and cloth spine with 25 leaves held within a simple string binding (making it possible to remove individual leaves if required). 1132g.

      There is some wear and discolouration to binding and one page and one photo have been cut out, and another removed. Contents secure. 

      The album starts with the following typed description of the journey out. 


      THE JOURNEY OUT.

      We left Victoria, London on Wednesday, 7th November 1945 by special train to Bournemouth, here we spent the night at the Sandacres Hotel, Sandgate. 

      On Thursday morning, , 8th November, we took off from Hurn Airport, near Christchurch at 8 am. in a B.0.A. Silver Dakota. we came down at Istris, near Marseilles for lunch; then on to Luga Airport in Malta where we slept.

      On Friday morning we took off from Malta at 9am. About two hours later we ran into a very bad electric storm with hailstones and rain. We dropped over 2000 ft which was extremely unpleasant. The weather cleared and we came down in the Western Desert, El Adem near Tobruk for lunch. Our next stop was Cairo, where we landed in the evening at Almaza Airport and slept the night in the big R.A.F. Transit Hotel in Heliopolis.

      Saturday was the worst day and we flew for nineteen hours with four stops in three countries. We left early, flew over the Suez Canal and made Lydda in Palestine our first stop. We had lunch in the plane from the excellent boxes supplied by the B. 0.A. C. and then came down just outside Baghdad, Irag and went into the town for two hours and had tea. Next to Basra where we stayed an hour and had dinner. Midnight found us in Beau Geste setting, big white-washed compound In the desert at Sharjah in Arabia, on the Trucial Orcan Coast. Here we waited three hours for good weather, had tea and baths and then flew on to Karachi, India which we reached in the early hours of Sunday morning. The actual time in the air was only thirty four hours. The distance flowa was about 6120 miles.

      Next day we flew to Vera Cruzz drome near Bombay, the plane had a broken elevator and spent the night at Juhu Transit Mess. followed by Sellore, Then we touched down at Bangalore next day, near Coimbatore and then a really bad landing at Cochin, shot up into the air and went round for an hour before the Pilot had courage to try it again. He did, we had tea, into the air again and reached our Journey's end with a sigh of relief at Ratmalana Airport outside Colombo.

      A long, wearisome journey, and we found the transition from English November to Ceylon's humid heat a bit rapid.  


      Subjects include:

      ENSA House, Colombo.
      Fellow actors including John Gielgud (1904~2000), George Howe (1900~1986), Irene Browne (1896 – 1965).
      Polonnaruwa (Ceylon).
      Kandy.
      Kandian Dancers.
      Buddhist Temple.
      Temple of the Tooth.
      Mount Lavinia.
      Yogis, Saddhus.

      Ephemeral items include:

      Handwritten note by Constance Carpenter (1904~1992).
      'ENSA Parties in Burma June 1945-Aug. 46'.
      30th March, 1946 issue of the Burma Star 'bulletin'.

      Banknotes include Goverment of Ceylon, Japanese Goverment, Military Administration of Burma issues.

      Postage stamps include Ceylon, Japanese Occupation & Burmese issues. 

      Also included are 2 hand-signed prints by Anglo-Burmese artist Eric Gordon MacColl* (wrongly described as pencil drawings). 

      ---

      James Grant Anderson (1897–1985) was a Scottish actor, writer, and theatre director. He served in both World War I and World War II and founded the Indian National Theatre in 1932.

      Anderson was born in Glenlivet, Banffshire, Scotland, on 20 April 1897. He trained for the stage at the Richmond Theatre and the Surrey Theatre. In World War I, Anderson served with the London Scottish Regiment starting in 1915. He was wounded in 1917 and discharged the following year. Anderson served with the London Scottish Regiment again in 1939 at the outbreak of World War II. He later served on the Entertainments National Service Association. 

      In the summer of 1915, Anderson appeared in a series of plays at the New Theatre Oxford with Sir John Martin-Harvey. In 1923, Anderson started his own repertory company in Gosport. From 1929 through 1939, Anderson toured with his company through India, Burma, Ceylon, China, Japan, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Java, and Sumatra. In 1932, he founded the Indian National Theatre in Bombay, in which English and Indian classics would be presented by all-Indian casts. While in Burma and what was then known as Siam, Anderson appeared as a clown in Hagenbeck's Circus. After serving in World War II, Anderson served as resident director at the Intimate Theatre from 1947 through 1950. 

      Anderson wrote the play The Wisest Fool in 1946. He also wrote an autobiography titled Diamond Jubilee Hangover.

      He died 1 October 1985 at Denville Hall, the retirement home for performers.

      ---

      *Eric Gordon MacColl (1896-1973) was born in Maymyo, Burma, the son of Hugh Ernest MacColl, a Judge of the High Court of Judicature at Rangoon and the Burmese Princess Ma Phyu.  His grandfather was the Scottish mathematician, logician, and novelist Hugh MacColl.  E.G. MacColl had 11 brothers and sisters, including Alexander Malcolm MacColl, a member of the Burma Imperial Police and an Assistant to the Deputy Inspector General of Railways at Rangoon. and Hugh Herbert MacColl, a district forestry officer in Burma.  During WWI, he was an acting corporal in the British Fusiliers (City of London Regiment).

      MacColl was an artist well known throughout Burma particularly for his etchings of local scenes and his portraits of men and women of the various Burmese peoples in their traditional costumes. His paintings in particular show an anthropological interest in the various Burmese ethnic groups,  He also decorated scarves, lamp shades, wall plaques and other bric-a-brac. 

      It is unclear if he served in any official capacity during WWII, although he clearly had some relationship with members of Britain's Royal Air Force No. 181 Signals Wing Corps that was stationed in Burma. This unit began in Imphal, India, proceeded down through Burma to Rangoon, then on to Malaya and Singapore, and finally to Java and Sumatra.  MacColl seemed to have been able to sit out most of the war under the Japanese radar because he lived as a Burmese native and had a Burmese wife.  At some point during the war, however, MacColl was interned by the Japanese (as was his brother Alexander).  According to one report, while under arrest on suspicion of spying, MacColl kicked a Japanese officer who shot at him twice with his revolver, but fortunately the gun misfired.

      MacColl's etchings found a receptive audience with British servicemen looking for local souvenirs of their time in Burma. One serviceman who was friends with MacColl said that he would sell his etchings for alcohol. His figurative etchings realistically depict the Burmese people in a sympathetic manner. His landscape etchings, on the other hand, are filled with vivid shorthand renditions of village life, temples, huts, moats, and paddy boats.

      MacColl's etchings are notoriously hard to find in good condition.  This is no doubt largely due to the fact that high quality paper was not available to MacColl during the war, and the extremely humid weather conditions of Burma made them particularly susceptible to foxing.  In fact, paper itself was of such short supply that it is not uncommon to find MacColl's etchings printed on the back of military maps.  They are also found frequently folded or creased, no doubt because the Corps was constantly packing up and moving from place to place and/or because they were folded when mailed home to family and loved ones.

      MacColl's post-WWII years are almost as mysterious as his life before the war.  His nickname was "R.C.P." (for Roman Catholic Priest) by family members, though no one knows why.  It does suggest, however, that he led a rather ascetic lifestyle and may have been religious. Frank Silverstein, who as a child met McColl at his home in Maymyo in 1961, said his place was "huge and piled high with curios and junk and scraps of things collected over his lifetime. It was much more like a barn than a hut!' To Silverstein, MacColl "seemed like a hermit and a tinkerer."  He also said that MacColl's etchings were made with the use of discarded dental X-ray plates.

      In 1963, MacColl provided illustrations for the Burma Baptist Chronicle, a history of the Burma Baptist Church.  Given that many of the illustrations depict events that took place before MacColl was born, they would appear to have been commissioned specifically for this publication, rather than taken from his war-time sketchbooks.  None correspond to any known MacColl etchings.  He died a decade later in poor circumstances, in a dilapidated hut in Maymyo littered with his artwork.  His friends saw to it that he was given a dignified funeral. Today, the Denison Museum in Granville, Ohio has a sizable, though as yet uncatalogued, collection of MacColl's work.  His work can also be found at the Brighton Museum.

      All of his etchings appear to be undated, but they all presumed to date to the 1940s.

       















































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