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The other tomb at Law College
S. MUTHIAH
A reference at a recent talk to the Yale monument – more correctly speaking, the Hynmer’s Obelisk or Vault – in the grounds of the Law College that were once the first cemetery of St. Mary’s in the Fort, had a questioner wonde
ring about another tomb nearby, the only other monument remaining there. I know it’s called the Powney Vault, but who was Powney, he asked.
The Powneys of Madras are first referred to in 1703. The best-known of these mariners, however, was Capt. John Powney, who commanded the Britannia in 1718. In the 1720s, he became “a constant inhabitant of Madras” – and, being a man of means by then, a man of status as well. In fact, under a new Charter in 1726 he was to be one of the nine Aldermen to serve with the “First and modern Mayor of the said Town or Factory of Madras Patnam,” Richard Higginson, the son of Nathaniel Higginson, the first Mayor of Madras under the old Charter of 1687. But by the time the new Charter arrived in Madras in July 1727, Higginson and one of the Aldermen had died and two other Aldermen had left Madras. So it was that on August 17, 1727, Capt. John Powney became the “First and modern Mayor of Madraspatnam.”
When Powney died in 1740, aged 57, he left a house in St. Thomas Street, Fort St. George, and another in St. Thomas’ Mount to his wife Mary and substantial monetary bequests to his 12 surviving children. In his will, he stated that he should be buried beside his three children who had predeceased him and were interred in St. Mary’s cemetery. He then willed “that a Vault be built and their Coffins be put in with mine. Let the Vault be made large, and a large Tombstone be put over me, and a monument of Iron Stone be put over the Vault 30-foot high, which I reckon will cost about 700 pagodas…” The Vault still exists, but of the 30-foot tall monument there is neither trace nor information. Of the seven surviving sons, four served Madras in the Civil Service.
John Powney had married Mary Heron, the daughter of Capt. George Heron, master mariner and one-time East India Company chief in Pegu (Burma). Heron, who came under cloud in Pegu, after inaction in the case of a murder of a sailor by an Armenian merchant’s minions, died in Madras in 1727 and was buried next to his three Powney grandchildren. And joining them in 1780 in what had become a vault was Mary Powney. Hers was a death mourned by all Madras, for she was 100 years old. It is quite likely that she was Madras’s first European centenarian.
The Powney Vault, therefore, is a monument not without significance – a fact few realise.
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