As Connemara Prepares for Makeover, Let’s Recall the Scandal That Ended the Career of the Man After Whom the Historic Hotel is Named

WHEN Vivanta by Taj Connemara, India’s second oldest continuously running hotel, shuts for renovations on May 10, it will be an occasion to recall that the man it is named after was at the centre of a scandalous divorce case that made headlines around the world (besides being accused of having an adulterous relationship with his wife’s former maid).

Robert Bourke, 1st Baron Connemara, a successful barrister and Anglo-Irish Conservative politician, was two times Under Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, first under Benjamin Disraeli and then under the Marquis of Salisbury, who sent him to India to take charge as Governor of Madras in 1886 as a first step to higher offices.

Governor Bourke came with the right pedigree. His eldest brother, Richard Bourke, 6th Earl of Mayo, was the Viceroy from 1869 till his assassination in Port Blair in 1872. His first wife (who filed the divorce suit), Lady Susan Georgina, as Sriram V. informs us inMadras Musings, was the daughter of the 1st Marquis of Dalhousie, British India’s Governor-General between 1848 and 1856, and the grand-daughter of the 8th Marquis of Tweeddale, who was Governor of Madras from 1842 to 1848.

The relationship between 1st Baron Connemara and Lady Susan, who was chronically ill and therefore had to keep retiring to the hills, soured because of the presence of Lady Eva Quinn, the governor’s niece who was married to his ADC, Captain Quinn of the 17th Lancers. Lady Susan bitterly resented the fact that Lady Eva, who was younger than her, started assuming the duties of the mistress of Government House whenever her aunt would be away for a spot of R&R. The wife suspected that the niece had replaced her in her husband’s affections. Government House, incidentally, now houses a multi-speciality hospital in Chennai.

Rumours about the governor’s private life, meanwhile, circulated in newspapers around the world. “Losing his head with the greatness of his position,” said the New York World in its edition dated 28 November 1890, “he began a career of moral licentiousness that was the scandal of the little governmental court, to the disgrace of English representation.” (I owe this quote to Sriram V. of Madras Musings.)

The point of no return came when Lady Susan returned from one of her Ooty holidays and found Lady Eva entertaining the Earl and Countess of Jersey, who were prominent British aristocrats. That was in 1888 and the Countess of Jersey, to quote Madras Musings again, recollected the scene in her book, Fifty-One Years of Victorian Life: “The following day she (Lady Susan) migrated to an hotel just as a large dinner party was arriving and we had to conceal her absence on the plea of indisposition.”

Lady Susan stayed at the Connemara for four months, filed for divorce against the advice of her family and even Queen Victoria, and got a former maid, Hannah Moore, to confess that she had had an adulterous relationship with the governor. Stung by the charge, the governor counter-alleged that his wife was having an affair with her doctor, a certain Surgeon Major Briggs.

Well, the lady got her divorce and her husband quit on 8 November 1890, returning to England for an unspectacular career in the House of Lords. Confirming her husband’s suspicions, Lady Susan married her doctor, and the 1st Baron Connemara, whose portrait continues to hang at the lobby of the historic hotel, won the affections of a rich widow, with whom he had a happy second marriage till his death in 1902.

In fact, there’s a cheeky theory about the re-naming of the hotel, which was till then known as The Albany — according to it, it was a tribute to the spirited Lady Connemara! Despite his alleged peccadilloes, Governor Bourke is remembered for his famine relief work in Ganjam, for making vast improvements in the city’s sanitation works, and for extending the Madras Railway along the east coast to Waltair. He also took the unprecedented step of entertaining the delegates to the third session of the Indian National Congress at Government House. Madras Mail, the voice of the British elite, unsurprisingly commented on “the halcyon days of my Lord Connemara” in an article on the re-naming of the hotel and noted that he had left the country “neither unregretted nor unsung.”

Before signing off, let me compress the story of the Connemara, which has seen many changes in proprietorship. The site of the hotel, which was originally a possession of the Nawab of Arcot, was the garden house of John Binny, one of the earliest business moguls of Chennai who was known as ‘Deaf Binny’ because of his hearing impairment.

Binny died in 1827 and then the land passed into the hands of a T. Somasundara Mudaly, who opened the Imperial Hotel in 1854. Chennai’s indefatigable chronicler S. Muthiah, in his book, A Tradition of Madras that is Chennai: The Taj Connemara (2008), reproduces a newspaper ad issued by The Imperial Hotel in 1880. It promises “extensive premises … cool and fitted with every convenience” and wines from the “celebrated house of Messrs. McDowell & Co.”

By 1886, the hotel was named Albany by its then owners, the brothers P. Coomaraguru and Chockalinga Mudaly, and then renamed the Connemara in 1890. The name stayed on even after Oakshott Spencer bought the hotel in 1891 to open the department store of his dreams (the largest in Asia at the time) and then leased it out to the Taj in the next century (in 1984). In all these years, the Connemara has seen a number renovations — the first, completed in 1937, led to the hotel acquiring an Art Deco look; the second, in 1974, saw the legendary architect Geoffrey Bawa turn around the Tower Block and the pool attached to it, and finally, in 2004, as many as 65 rooms in the  155-keys hotel were given a completely new look. Through all these transformations, however, there’s one story that has not gone out of circulation — that of the 1st Baron Connemara and his tempestuous marriage that did not survive the heat and lust of Madras.

The Author is is a New Delhi-based newspaper columnist and blogger. He is the Consulting Editor of BW Hotelier. This story has also appeared in indianrestaurantspy.com