Colonel John Pennycuick (1841 – 1911)

Walking through the graveyard of St Peter’s Church in Frimley a few months ago I noticed a new addition to the burial spot of John Pennycuick, a stone plaque donated by the grateful peoples of Kerala and Tamil Nadu. Kerala is one of my favourite spots in the world and my interest was piqued to find the connection between a man in Frimley and the states in the southern tip of India and why he had earned their undying gratitude.

And quite a story it is too.

The Periyar River rises in the Western Ghats and descends into Kerala, irrigating the fertile lands as it makes its way to the Arabian Sea. Kerala’s lush green countryside and wonderful backwaters are testimony to the importance of the river to the area. Those who lived on the eastern side of the Ghats were less fortunate. The Vaigai river that flowed from there to the Bay of Bengal was smaller and less reliable. Indeed, in the 19^th century the soil was dry and unfit for agriculture. Locals were reduced to stealing grain and cattle from neighbouring villages just to scrape a living.

Plans to divert some of the waters of the Periyar into the Vaigai were mooted as early as 1789. In 1808 Captain J L Caldwell did some exploratory drilling in the area but concluded that any such project was “decidedly chimerical and unworthy of further regard.” The first attempt to dam the Periyar was made in 1850 but soon abandoned because the workers demanded higher wages to compensate for the unhealthy living conditions they had to endure.

In 1882, minds perhaps concentrated by the terrible famines six years earlier, the construction of a dam was approved and the military engineer, John Pennycuick, was appointed to bring it to fruition. Work began in earnest in May 1887, using troops from the 1^st and 4^th battalions of the Madras Pioneers and carpenters from Cochin. The dam was made with concrete made from a mix of lime and surkhi, burnt brick powder mixed with sugar and calcium oxide, and was faced with rubble. It was a gravity dam, meaning that the force of gravity was deployed to support the reservoir, giving it extra stability in extreme weather conditions and in the event of earthquakes.

Situated some 3,000 feet above sea level in what was dense, malarial jungle, the dam, known as the Mullaperiyar Dam, is 176 feet tall at its highest point, 1,241 feet long and holds up to 15 thousand million cubic feet of water. It was an astonishing accomplishment, dubbed as “one of the most extraordinary feats of engineering ever performed by man.”

And that’s not all.

At the northern end of the dam a mile-long deep cutting was excavated for the water to flow through, then via a 5,704-foot tunnel and then through another cutting to reach and augment the waters of the Vaigai. It transformed the land to the east of the Ghats, making it almost as fertile as Kerala and allowing sustainable agriculture to flourish. Work was completed in 1895 and the dam was inaugurated by the then Governor of the Madras Presidency, Lord Wenlock. Penicuick had won the undying gratitude of the locals, not only at the time but for generations to come, an example (rare as it might be) of the positive effects of the Raj.

But the work came at a cost. Often rains and torrents from the swollen rivers would wash away the temporary structures as the dam was being constructed. At one point the project was perilously close to running out of money and legend has it, although there is no firm evidence to support it, that Pennycuick sold his wife’s jewellery to keep the work going.

And there was a human cost. 483 people died of disease during the construction of the dam, most of whom are interred in a cemetery to the north of the works. It is also claimed that but for the medicinal properties of the local firewater, arrack, the work would never have been finished.

A sense of the enormity of the achievement and the difficulties Pennycuick faced can be gleaned from this extract from his obituary in The Times; “under his direction the work was carried to completion in the face of numerous difficulties, the country being entirely uninhabited and most inaccessible, the climate malarious, while labour, transport and technical problems daily presented themselves for solution.”

Pennycuick, who was born in Poona in India but schooled in Addiscombe in Surrey, retired to Camberley, presumably because of its military connections, after leaving India and advising the Queensland authorities on how to control the Brisbane river. He settled down in Silourie, which was on the Branksome Park Road in Camberley, between Upper Park Road and Crawley Ridge, serving as a member of the Frimley Urban District Council, chairing it at the time of his death in March 1911, after a long illness.

A truly great man.