Chennai: Sporting Life, Facts and Figures, a Travelog and a Family Tree

This is one of the tangents promised in the blog tagline, a summative post, partly public service announcement if you like, hoping to share a few thoughts and experiences so that anyone else coming to this destination can have an even better experience.  This post has four sections, and I hope that at least one will grab your interest and be useful.  Some background to the sport in Chennai (1) is followed by some information and logistical advice for anyone heading there (2a/2b).  Then there is a personal travelog with photos (3), before the post concludes with a family history story (4) which is the background to why this trip took place, with some research advice for anyone thinking of starting. Thank you for your interest.

Disclaimer: everything herein is true to the best of my knowledge at the time of writing (February 2018), but this is a city and country where change is routine, so please double-check everything.  If it helps one person plan a similar trip, or inspires one person to take up genealogy or multi-sport groundhopping as a hobby (or both!), job done. It’s not a replacement for the guidebooks – Chennai is a destination where up-to-date reading and checking are essential. 

1 A Sporting Life in Chennai

As I’ve said before, this was never really a hopping trip, but I’ve discovered a few things worth sharing, especially for multi-sport enthusiasts.  I was able to visit two cricket grounds.  I could have done four cricket matches and a football match in five days, all within an hour or two of the hotel.  I also noticed the existence of a hockey stadium – it’s another popular sport in these parts – but I had to let that pass.  Finally, I see that Chennai is hosting an ATP Challenger tennis tour event which raises the real prospect of a great multi-sport hop in early February for anyone so inclined. Football At the time of writing, the city’s Indian Super League football team is Chennaiyin, managed by John Gregory (so that’s where he went...) and based at the J Nehru Stadium, which is close to the city centre. They should not be confused with Chennai City of the second-tier I-League, who are also currently at a J Nehru Stadium, but many hours away in Coimbatore.  Fortunately this was not an expensive error (see earlier blogpost) – the VIP advance ticket that I purchased online was around £5.  A good hotel will also have virtually continuous football, live and re-runs, on various sports channels. Cricket The IPL have reinstated Chennai Super Kings for the new season after a two year ban for naughtiness.  The season starts later in the year and I can’t comment on costs or ease of obtaining tickets, but the home matches will be at the 38000-capacity MA Chidambaram Stadium.  See previous post for a flavour of the venue in different circumstances. However, my cricket experience centred on the hidden gem of the Vijay Hazare Trophy.  Assuming it continues in its present form, it overlaps with the football season and is fantastic value.  It is a one-day tournament played over 50 overs-per-side, between regional teams.  The group stages take place intensively over a short period of time, and groups are based around a geographic centre.  Teams may have matches on successive days.  The regional side is Tamil Nadu, and they were in Group C (faring badly as it happens) along with six other teams.  On some days there were three games taking place at various venues in the city.  In addition to the main stadium, various works and college grounds come into use. The start time is 9.00am, which means some early breakfasting and getting through the rush hour.  The spectator entrance for the MA Chidambaram Stadium was on the OPPOSITE side from the Madras Cricket Club.  For the other venues I would recommend getting to the main entrance of the appropriate college or sports club and asking from there.  Don’t assume that the works sports club is adjacent to the works. As you can see from two previous posts, the Trophy is part of the development programme for local talent.  You don’t need me to tell you how insanely huge this sport is in India.  For the group stage matches, you will find free entry, no scorecards, small but knowledgeable and appreciative crowds.  You will see genuine fast bowlers, more spin and deception than Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage put together, brutal batting and some of the stars of the future alongside the odd household name.  The cricinfo site was unfailingly accurate for times and venues, and following the BCCIDomestic Twitter feed helped me follow what was happening, and the names of the players.

2a Getting Around

I used the tuk-tuks for getting to and from the venues.  You are never more than 10m away from a tuk-tuk.  Read the guidebooks for general advice.  There are no enforced rules, so generally speaking you will pay more as a tourist than the locals and don’t expect the meter to be running.  With hindsight I paid over-the-odds on my first day but was hampered by having no small-denomination notes and coins at that point.  After that, a 15-30 minute journey cost me 100-200 rupees.  At the exchange rate of 90ish rupees to the pound (at least for now), I didn’t haggle any more than that, but you could probably get even cheaper rates.  I tended to walk away from the immediate area of the hotel or the main tourist venues before approaching one (if I hadn’t already been approached), avoiding the groups of tuk-tuks (we need a collective noun here, people) bunched together.  The main point is to agree the price with the driver before you climb on board.  Tuk-tuks will get through the rush hour quicker than cars and are an experience in their own right. Most tuk-tuk drivers speak very little English other than the numbers 1-9 and the word “hundred”, it seemed.  I had pre-printed some maps of the city centre, or occasionally showed the driver my phone screen with a picture or the destination shown in Google Maps.  I felt that if the driver knew I was tracking the route I’d be less likely to be diverted to a mate’s pashmina emporium, but of course you’ll be paying extra to your phone provider for data.  Make sure you know in advance what you will be paying – I’m with EE and it was very clear.  You’ll also have to say “No” frequently to repeated offers to take you on a tour or to the best shops.  I had no problems beyond the first day, and even that was only being charged £5 for a £2 journey.  Be confident, and assertive if you need to be.  All of the other precautions that you need to take about wallets and belongings are no different from any other city.  I thoroughly enjoyed every tuk-tuking minute of getting around, it is a wonderful, chaotic and yet extraordinarily effective experience.  Just do it, as they say. I chose not to use the buses and trains, even though they looked to offer quite a memorable experience!  Taxis also come in various shapes, sizes and guises.  I only used them for the airport transfers and one day trip as explained below.  See the guidebooks!  It’s worth reading up the advice on vaccinations (you need to take action several weeks before travelling), food and water, sun protection, and the best times of the year to visit.  As is so often the case, the locals have enough knowledge of English for us to get by without speaking or reading Tamil.  Embarrassing but true.

2b Logistics and Costs

The Tourist e-Visa application process can be completed online and there is a fee, currently £59.  Follow the instructions carefully for the physical size and file type/size for the images you need to upload of your passport and your face.  There are lots of do/don’ts about these.  Mine came through in 24hrs but allow a few days.  If you are not travelling on an Indian passport you need to fill out a form that the airline cabin crew will give you.  Take a pen, and read the instructions carefully.  Expect a queue and to have your fingerprints taken at border control.  It’s a serious rather than a jokey atmosphere there. For a long flight I wanted to be in good shape from the start so I drove to Heathrow T5 and parked the Yappmobile there, costing £140 for the week.  Not cheap, but very convenient.  I flew with BA for £520, direct to Chennai, which takes 9-10 hours.  On both legs they dimmed the lights a few hours – we took off at 1420h, and with a +5h30min difference at this time of year, landed on time at 0530h.  I’d booked the hotel for an extra night so that I’d have somewhere to go immediately.  This is not a city for being encumbered by luggage. You can’t get rupees in advance so it’s important to use the ATM or money exchange counter in the relative calm of baggage collection before the chaos of the Arrivals floor.  Before you reach the exit, there is a Pre-Paid Taxi desk, and that was my chosen method for getting to the hotel, having read the guidebooks.  The cost was 500 rupees for a 40-minute journey and I didn’t argue.  As soon as you turn the corner someone will be waiting to escort you (hoping for a tip) to the pre-paid taxi ranks.  These people are hard to avoid, but it’s probably worth just going with the flow after a long flight, as the rest of the crowd will leave you alone.  I was at the hotel well before 8.00am. I stayed at the Ramada Egmore for several reasons, and I’m happy to give them a very positive plug.  I paid for seven nights including the extra one at the start, at a cost of around £360 including breakfast.  I knew my family history activity would be around the old Fort St George area, and Egmore is close enough.  The Ramada Egmore (there’s another one elsewhere in the city I think) was the nearest relatively upmarket hotel (I like my comforts, tyvm).  I had a large room with WiFi included, and a TV with scores of channels, many of them showing football or cricket.  None of your Six Nations or Winter Olympics here.  All the plumbing worked, there was complimentary tea, coffee and bottled water, a most reasonable minibar (best value in the world so far), and a big desk and chair.  Perfect for the passing blogger, in fact. The food was excellent – there is an alternative à la carte restaurant, a lobby coffee bar and extensive 24hr room service but I stayed with the buffet breakfast and the Symphony buffet dinner.  The staff in the restaurant were particularly helpful, and I can’t praise them highly enough.  Jaikumar, if you ever read this, thanks again to you and your colleagues for guiding me through the bewildering array of choices.  The buffet always had a European alternative, usually Italian, alongside many and varied Indian dishes.  I am not a foodie, but it all looked good, and I tried several new things over the course of the week.  I spent a total of about £300 on tuk-tuks, taxis, entry fees, souvenirs and evening meals.

3 The Travelog Bit (See Also: three previous posts)

What I Did On My Holidays by Graham Yapp Aged 60.  Well, you know what I mean.  Wednesday: After a nap, I found a tuk-tuk driver who knew where Trinity Chapel was located.  I then headed fruitlessly to the football stadium, as previously blogged, so changed plan and diverted to St Matthias’ Church.  Both churches feature in my family tree.  Several church members were around due to works in progress, even though it is now part of a secondary school.  This particular tuk-tuk driver, a friend of the first, was trying everything to get me to sign up with him for a week and I was glad to get back to the hotel.  It was never unsafe, but with hindsight he overcharged me and saw me as a big earning possibility. Thursday: I walked 45 minutes or so to Fort St George, which taught me never to walk that much in the blazing sun again!  Some of the poverty was distressing and some smells unpleasant.  At the Fort, there is a museum of moderate interest, but the church within the grounds is St Mary’s, which also turns up on the family tree.  As my metabolism had not yet reached the same time zone as my body, it was back to the hotel for dinner and sleep. Friday: The first of two games of cricket, as blogged previously. Saturday: Through the hotel, I booked a car and driver to take me to the World Heritage Site at Mahabalipuram, where Hindu temples and monuments have been carved from solid granite, and truly the site deserves its special status.  However, being less independent meant a day of hidden costs and tourist games.  I could not realistically travel by train and bus to the site.  This was the only way in practice to get there and back with ease in a day. The price of the trip increased by £3 overnight, and only after I’d paid was it revealed that there would be other admission and toll charges.  Fine, it was all still good value.  The journey was smooth, and interesting in itself.  I paid the small road toll, the small entry fee to the site as a whole, and suddenly another man got in the taxi and introduced himself as my guide.  I hadn’t understood that this would happen.  In fairness, he was very good indeed.  I had to pay again (but still only £5) for a foreigner’s ticket to the temples.  Occasionally we jumped back into the car to get around, which was a big advantage on a very hot day. All good, until I was ushered into a shop.  A battered certificate was produced by the custodian which, it was claimed, showed that all profits were being reinvested in approved educational schemes and tuition for the artists and creators.  I played the game and bought one objet d’art, but then had to be firmly clear that was it.  It wasn’t unsafe, but it was intimidating.  At the end of the tour the guide asked for 4000 rupees, we bartered and in the end I paid him 3000 for an hour and half of one-to-one conversation. Although feeling some loss of control, I’d enjoyed the tour and learned a lot, and was still within my budget. Krishna's Butterball: appears to defy physics (but doesn't really) and will be in my lesson plan the next time I teach stability and centre of mass! It was, however, more irritating when the taxi driver ensured that we visited another shop on the way back.  It’s the way of the world out here.  This place was full of assertive salesmen speaking at ten suggestions and special offers per minute.  I asked a guy with a zillion pashminas whether he’d take a credit card, and his reply was, “I take anything that smells of money”.  Hmmm.  That’ll be me then.  Oh well, at least pashminas don’t make the suitcase lumpy, and Mrs Y has already worn it today, so maybe it’s not so bad. Overall, the balance of power is as follows.  The more independent you can be, the more likely you are to avoid the tourist traps.  On the other hand, playing the local games can sometimes be the only way to get where you want, and you are maybe a touch safer.  The current exchange rate means that I won’t need to declare bankruptcy. Sunday: Cricket again, as per the previous post, and an early finish meant that I made it to the Government Museum, which turned out to be a little gem with overtones of the grand past and a golden age of taxidermy. Monday: I went for a photowalk near Marina Beach, the fish market, and the Kapaleeshwarar Temple before returning to pack, and spent an hour surfing the non-sports channels, marvelling at all the facial expressions in the soaps and dramas. Chennai has been fun and varied.  It is an in-your-face, chaotic, messy city where you need to be as careful as you would in any other major city.  You see more poverty, or at least living on the subsistence line, than riches.  I can see why Alexander Walsh (see below) wanted to be here in the early days, and maybe as it grew and changed why George Saul wanted to bring Margaret back to England.

4 The Genealogy Bit Surnames: Walsh, McConnell, Saul, Yapp, Bolton, Fenton

Maybe one of the other descendants will stumble across this thanks to Google (other search engines are available), so here’s the sense of what brought me here in the first place. In 1829 a nineteen-year old Irishman by the name of Alexander Walsh of Loughrea signed on the dotted line for life with the Honourable East India Company.  He is repeatedly shown in the records as hailing from County Westmeath, though there is a more likely location in Galway.  No records survive to my knowledge to tell us more.  Times were very hard in Ireland.  We don’t know whether he was adventurous, ambitious, or felt that immigration was his best bet for a good life.  He transferred from Dublin to the Company’s holding camp at Chatham, before setting sail on the HEICS Minerva.  I have sat in the British library with the original ship’s log in front of me, tracking the events of the voyage and the names of the others who did not survive the journey.  In those days Chennai was Madras, and young Alexander landed in August 1829 to become a Gunner in the Company’s Artillery. Alexander Walsh is one of my great-great-great-great grandfathers on the paternal side. Something happened in 1833 which also fuels speculation about his character, or his treatment.  The bottom line is that a court martial found him guilty on two counts – persistent talking in the ranks, and hitting his drill sergeant with a stick.  He was sentenced to six months of solitary confinement. He served his time and then reappears on the annual personnel listings of the Artillery.  He was discharged in 1848, in his late thirties, and I have seen the original pension record that says he was “permitted to remain in India”.  The next identifiable record is the baptism of Margaret Walsh, the daughter of Alexander and his wife Catherine.  We know nothing about the marriage location or any other siblings, and we know nothing at all about Catherine except that she outlived Alexander, finally buried in Madras in 1900 as a widow at the ripe old age of 85.  We don’t know what happened to Alexander.  It is quite likely that Catherine was younger, and Anglo-Indian.  The Company was quite happy with intermarriage as part of its vision for a peaceful society.  It fared less well in its principal activity of trading for profit in times of war. I should now introduce William McConnell, a private in the British Army 45th Regiment, The Sherwood Foresters.  It has not been possible to trace William back any further.  In 1868, the regiment was involved in a memorable march over a mountain pass, covering 300 miles in 24 days and taking part in the capture of Magdala in Abyssinia, before being sent to India.  There is no documented certainty that William took part, but it is very likely.   On 26 May 1870, William (34) married Margaret Walsh (17) at St Mary’s Church within the walls of Fort St George. pictured below.  There must have been a redeployment to Burma before the birth of their first daughter Ellen in 1873.  The key event for my tree is the birth and baptism of their daughter Margaret McConnell in 1874.  There would be a third daughter, Mary, around 1877.  William, it seems, did not return to England with the Sherwood Foresters in 1878, and were controversially re-organised, in effect disbanded.  We know (see below) that the couple were still together, in worsening health, in Madras in 1912. The third generation of my family in Madras starts with the marriage of Margaret to my great-great grandfather George Saul, at the Madras Registry Office in 1870.  George was in the Duke of Cornwall’s Light Infantry.  His father Jasper was a horse trader and boatman from Gloucestershire who had settled in the Black Country, literally by the side of a canal in Oldbury.  George was doing a twelve-year stint in the British Army, and Margaret gave birth to their first child, George Jr, in Madras.  The place of his baptism, Trinity Chapel, still stands and functions today and I received a warm welcome when I turned up out of the blue last week.  Maybe that's the same font used for the service. George and Margaret returned to England with their son in about 1896.  Their second child, Martha Saul, is my great-grandmother.  Margaret became known as “Granny Saul” and my parents have definite recollection of her Indian facial characteristics and long plaited hair.  She was frail and housebound in her latter years.  Incredibly, a letter from Margaret to her mother, and one in return, surfaced for me in Texas through a contact of a contact in the genealogy forums.  (Thanks to Angela and Jen for all they contributed to my investigations.)  Young Margaret wanted her mother to come over and join them in England, she had “no regrets”, and “George will work night and day” to keep them.  George was working as a labourer in the phosphorus factory in Oldbury.  The letters contain checkable details about other family members that all stack up.  Her mother never made the journey because of failing health.  She died in 1912, the funeral taking place at St Matthias’ Church, where I was also warmly welcomed last week.  Restored, it's now within the grounds of a secondary school and has a large active Anglican congregation. Meanwhile William then seems to have returned to England as a widower – more correspondence shows him to be in Chatham in 1916, and I am waiting impatiently for the 1921 census to be published in the hope that he is alive at that date and traceable.  We know all this because William’s personal effects were eventually in the keeping of descendants of his eldest daughter Ellen, in the United States. In 1912, Martha had a son, James Yapp.  James’ father, James Powell or Powles, had by then taken his mother Mary Ann’s original surname, Yapp.  In my case, the nominative line then tracks back from Mary Ann, to Henry, to George, to Thomas and finally (for now) to John Yapp (or Yopp) in the village of Lydbury North, Shropshire.  If anyone knows any more about John Yapp, probably born around 1730, and who married Mary Jones on 12 May 1750, I’d be very happy to hear from you! James Yapp is my grandfather and he married Lily Bolton, who was in domestic service in Leamington Spa and whose ancestors pretty much all came from the Coventry area, where they mostly enamelled cycles or wove and wound silk.  The eldest child of James and Lily is Raymond Yapp, who married a West Bromwich girl by the name of Lily Fenton after his National Service.  Their eldest son is Graham Yapp, that’s me, vintage 1957, and I cannot begin to tell you how much fun and how fulfilling it has been to track all of this story and to know and understand how I got here.  I hope that my children and grandchildren will enjoy the outcomes of the research and understand the life decisions of their ancestors.  They seem to have had hard-working lives, large families and significant hardship when I look at my tree as a whole.  They weren’t “good old days”, and one thing is incredibly clear as you follow the story down the decades – the women of the world have had the worst of the deal. How did this story unfold? Well, we have done most of this through subscriptions to internet-based services such as FindMyPast and ancestry dot com.  Searches starting with the Victorian censuses from what we knew from the family “oral history” led to the purchases of birth, marriage and death certificates as needed to prove the generational links.  Once the India connection appeared I spent several days at the British Museum in London for the East India Company and India Office archives, and a couple of days searching regular British Army records at the National Archives in Kew.  I’ve also needed to use several websites for army regimental history.  Through a chance search on the Sole/Saul Society forum (known of course as Sole Searching) I later corresponded with researchers Angela, linked to the Sauls of Gloucestershire and Jen, a descendant of Ellen McConnell, who supplied the amazing correspondence via Texas that added emotional colour to the names, facts and figures in my database. More and more material is being added to the online resources every week.  We’ve spent around £1500, spread over many years, to get as far as we will be able to get before the threads of evidence come to an end.  Now you can understand why I never found time for trainspotting or planespotting as well as groundhopping, and thank you if you have read this far.  I’m happy to give some amateur advice to anyone who fancies starting, but there is plenty of support material out there.  Just be prepared for surprises, and take your time to get it right.

What Next?

Weather-dependent, but hoping to get to football on Saturday.  Follow @GrahamYapp on Twitter for details!