The history of our freedom Miran PERERA After 60 years of Independence we are at a stage where we should look at the country and ask ourselves whether we have achieved any economic, social, religious or national development during the last half century. This is the result of our slavish mentality as we understand our public have no true desire to develop and uplift the country. To save our country and nation from the catastrophe we are facing today working as a united country is a necessity. On an important day like the independence day we should focus our attention to overcome national and political problems by discussions. We celebrate the 60th anniversary of our national independence amidst a certain degree of uncertainty and tension. For a country which is desperately struggling to forge an alliance of diverse cultures and simultaneously arresting the state from withering away from fault lines appearing among all ethnicities and religious groups, February 4 is a date to be repositioned as a day of national integration and the day we struggle against all our internal foes. Going back in time of our history, the Dutch who ruled the maritime settlements of Sri Lanka for 138 years (1658-1796) finally surrendered Colombo to the British forces on February 16, 1796 without a struggle. Thereafter the maritime settlements were first attached to the Madras Presidency and were administered through military governors. The Secretary of State in England to avert any uprising from locals decided to place then Ceylon under the British Crown, and thus Ceylon became a crown colony on October 12, 1798. The first British Governor to assume office for Ceylon was Frederick North the late Earl of Guildford. He displaced Brigadier General Pierre Frederick de Meuron who was the military governor at the time. The first step taken by North as authorised was to nominate a council of advisors and to form a civil establishment for the island, known as His Majesty’s Council. The last Sinhala King to rule Sri Lanka was Sri Vira Parakrama Narendrasinghe (1706-1739) who was known as Kundasale Rajjuruvo. After his death Malabari kings from South India who were Hindus ruled the Kandyan Kingdom for 76 years. In 1829 Major W. M. C. Colebrooke came to Sri Lanka having been appointed by a Royal Commission by King George IV of England - to examine all laws, regulations and usages of the maritime settlements of the island. The first Independence Day celebration He was followed by another Royal Commissioner C. H. Cameron who was directed to report on judicial establishments and procedures. The Colebrooke Commission recommended a series of reforms including the abolition of land tenure by slave labour and the opening of the public service to all classes of people. It was also appointed because of the financially disastrous position of the country at that time. The two reports of Celebrooke and Cameron made very important and far reaching recommendations. The first and foremost was the joining of the maritime and Kandyan provinces into the Government under a uniform administration. Maintenance of two separate establishments was contrary to British policy and most unpolitic and was only conducive to the benefit of few chiefs and to the detriment of the Kandyan people. It recommended the division of the country to give provinces Colombo, Kandy, Galle, Trincomalee and Jaffna as capitals for better administration. The other recommendations of the Commission were the abolition of the caste system, establishment of reforms in education, freedom of the press, the removal of the distinction between the courts of law in the Kandyan and maritime provinces, the extension of the jurisdiction of all courts to Europeans and natives alike without distinction or discrimination, the establishment of a Supreme Court with a Chief Justice and two judges and the district courts to supersede all existing courts. It was during the Governorship of Sir Robert Brownrigg (1812-1820) the Kandyan Kingdom was reduced by the British Forces and its territory annexed to the maritime settlements which were already under the British. The home Government in England hailed Sir Brownrigg as the conqueror of the Kandyan Kingdom and King George III allowed him to wear in his arms the crown, sceptre and banner of the King of Kandy. Then many decades later the demand for effective participation in the British rule and the introduction of an elective principle for the filling of seats in the legislative council and for other reforms became more insistent than before. Many years of partial rule by the British since annexing the Kandyan Kingdom became evident. There were sporadic uprisings against British rule by the natives of Ceylon from many nationalities. Agitation towards self rule increased with time where eminent Sinhala patriots rallied against British rule where the colonisers successfully quelled the uprisings. In 1912, a Reforms Commi

Dame May Whitty [real name Mary Louise Whitty] (1865–1948), actress, was born in Liverpool, on 19 June 1865, the daughter of Alfred Whitty, journalist, and his wife, Mary Ashton. Her grandfather was Michael James Whitty, founder and editor of the Liverpool Daily Post and chief constable of Liverpool. She made her debut in Liverpool in 1881 and, after an appearance in London in 1882 at the Comedy Theatre, she joined the company of Hare and the Kendals; her work always bore the impress of Madge Kendal's training. As a charming ingenue she appeared with all the leading actor–managers of the day, including the Bancrofts, Forbes-Robertson, and Wyndham, and she made her first big personal success in Mrs Musgrave's Our Flat in 1889. With her husband she joined Irving's company (1895–8), but was still cast for rather colourless parts that somewhat belied her own character. Her Susan Throssell in the original run of J. M. Barrie's Quality Street in 1903 was the climax of this part of her career, but she played Countess Cathleen in Dublin in 1899 in the play of that name by W. B. Yeats and in America in 1905–7 she was given stronger work. Her daughter, Margaret Webster, who became an eminent producer, was born in New York at this time. Back in London in 1910 May gave a series of clever character studies in Charles Frohman's repertory season in plays by Meredith, Barker, and Pinero, as well as in other engagements, until the outbreak of war in 1914 changed the current of her life. She had always been a public-spirited woman and about 1900 she had taken up the cause of women's suffrage, becoming chair of the Actresses' Franchise League. Although a convinced pacifist, she now switched the whole organization over to beneficent war work. A Women's Emergency Corps was formed, pioneering in such causes as women's land work, camp shows for the troops, and workrooms for out-of-work actresses. She chaired the Three Arts Women's Employment Fund and the British Women's Hospitals Committee, which eventually created the Star and Garter Home for disabled servicemen at Richmond, Surrey; for the great organizing ability that she showed in this and other similar causes she was appointed DBE in 1918. Practical charity, based on self-help, and a keen eye for humbug were characteristic of all her work. After the war May Whitty returned to the theatre with a much more assured and dominant style. In her youth she was a tiny delicate figure with a small round face, dark hair, blue-grey eyes, and an air of impudent innocence; in mature age her face and figure expressed a downright common-sense motherliness. She played in Pinero's The Enchanted Cottage, Frederick Lonsdale's The Last of Mrs Cheyney, made a hit in both London and New York as the old Nanny in John Van Druten's There's Always Juliet, and was with John Gielgud in Ronald Mackenzie's The Maitlands. In 1935, at the age of seventy, she made the greatest success of her life in Emlyn Williams's Night Must Fall, a terrifying performance of a terrified woman. She repeated the success in New York in 1936 and again when the play was filmed in Hollywood in 1937, for which she received an Oscar nomination. From this followed a completely new and successful career as a series of indomitable old ladies in films, of which The Thirteenth Chair (1937), The Lady Vanishes (1938), and Mrs Miniver (1942; for which she was again nominated for an Oscar) will be the best remembered. She made one or two notable appearances again on the stage in New York, including those as Madame Raquin and as the nurse in Laurence Olivier's production of Romeo and Juliet. May and Ben never returned to England but made their home in Hollywood, drawing round them there a circle of friends that was almost as close as that in England. Their home in Covent Garden from the 1890s onwards had always been both a meeting-place of the famous English and American actors and a refuge for all in trouble. They were both deeply interested in actors' organizations. British Actors' Equity, the actors' trade union, was founded at their home and they did active work for all of the theatrical charities. Retaining throughout the affection and respect of the whole profession, Ben and May Webster served the theatre with integrity and distinction, almost continuously through the changing period from Hare and the Kendals, through Irving, Pinero, Wilde, Barrie, Barker, and Van Druten, and from the first silent English film to modern Hollywood. Perhaps Ben missed London more than May did, especially his beloved Garrick, of which he had once been the youngest member the club had ever had. But Ben and May were inseparable from their marriage in 1892 to their golden wedding in 1942; Ben was proud of May's late success, and he continued, they say, almost to his death the loving nightly custom of brushing his wife's hair. She did not long survive him, dying in Hollywood on 29 May 1948. Margaret Webster was their only child, except for a son who died