The background
Wow! This is Colombo 7 (Cinnamon Gardens) 100 years ago. No posh residences, no SUVs running through shady roads, nor there are any slick restaurants evident in the vicinity. There are only rickshaws, bullock carts, and the bare-bodied men who are apparently the rickshaw drivers. This rare 1907 photograph of the Colombo Racecourse, seen from a distant aerial view, depicts a moment when a race was on one afternoon. This was when Ceylonese horse and harness (or horse cart) racing of the time had shifted from its Nuwara Eliya centres to Galle Face and then to this new venue, the Colombo Turf Club racecourse.
What the photo reveals
Colombo Racecourse began to stage racing in 1893 and in few years came to be regarded as the best racecourse in the East! The name “Cinnamon Gardens” came into being in the 18th Century as cinnamon was the main crop in the island during the Dutch period. Cinnamon gave way to coffee and then to tea under the British, who later turned Cinnamon Gardens into one of their favourite place for fun and frolic.
Analysis
The Turf Club pavilion and its clubhouse in Cinnamon Gardens, seen here on right, are the main focal points in this picture. The sun is setting in the west, as is indicated by the lengthy shadows evident in the middle. The two flags fluttering prominently on the pavilion roof hint at strong winds blowing from Colombo’s western shores. The rickshaws are lined up surely to take back home the race’s spectators and possibly the gamblers and punters. The bullock carts seen here would have been for the more affluent ones as the motorcar was a luxury commodity owned by a mere handful at the time.
Photographer
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Cover of the 1907 book “Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources” edited by Arnold Wright[/caption]
The photo is from the book “Twentieth Century Impressions of Ceylon: Its History, People, Commerce, Industries, and Resources”, edited by Arnold Wright and published by Lloyd’s Greater Britain Publishing Company Ltd. for London, Durban, Colombo, Perth, Singapore, and Hong Kong in 1907. Alongside the photo on page 260, it says: “One of the most important steps forward ever taken in Ceylon racing was the acquisition by the Turf Club, in the early 90s, of the land in Cinnamon Gardens which forms the present racecourse. It was high time that the Turf Club had a proper home of its own, with a course that it could fence in, and from which it could exclude the ordinary traffic, which it frequently failed to do on the Galle Face, for we read of such curious accidents as a cart containing beer barrels being run into by the field in an actual race. With the removal of the races to the beautiful turf track in Cinnamon Gardens – opened on 22 June 1893 – Ceylon racing began a prosperous and uneventful career, with plenty of popular support which made good stakes possible...”
An afterword
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Colombo Racecourse now[/caption]
About 40 years later, during World War II, the place was used as a single-runway airstrip for the Royal Air Force fighter planes to shell targets in Sumatra and Singapore.
Then, after the war in 1945, the airfield was dismantled and horse racing began again, but in 1956, betting and gambling was banned by the then S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike Government.
The land was taken over by the Government and segregated among various institutions like the Colombo University, the National Archives, Royal College, and Bloomfield Club. For the next half-century, the venue was used by the Army and Air Force up until 2011. That year, the Mahinda Rajapaksa Government renovated both the Grand Stand and the Turf Club building under its Urban Development Authority under then Defence Secretary Gotabaya Rajapaska.
In 2012 at this historic spot emerged the Colombo Racecourse Sports Complex, the first international rugby stadium in Sri Lanka.