Ray as they remember him
Philip Revatha Wijewardene’s was a private life full of surprises. He had kayaked down the Mahaweli with Major Roland Raven-Hart, could wield the blow pipe like a native of Sarawak, and loved old-fashioned English lavender cologne…
Such nuggets emerge as we delve into the life of this legendary scientist and inventor away from the public realm.
Ray, whose death anniversary falls today (August 18) and birth centenary will be on Tuesday, August 20, seems to have lived life to the brim, even away from his beloved Ratmalana airport, his Landmaster (the ‘mechanized buffalo’ of a hand tractor which he invented), his prowess in sailing and soil conservation.
Flying high: Ray Wijewardene at Cambridge
One of the few people left to hark back to the 1920s era of tea parties and tennis when Ray was born, is Rohini de Mel, Ray’s sister-in-law. She it was who sat by him in kindergarten at Ladies’ College, Colombo. Ray proved to be so eloquent with her that the teacher put him beside the ‘quietest girl in the class’ – who happened to be Rohini’s twin Seela.
20 years later, Ray was to sweep Seela off her feet with his proposal, though the story at Ladies’ has it that he first proposed under a certain mango tree when they were but four.
Rohini who grew up to be a golfer, polo player and racing enthusiast, says Ray was all blonde hair and blue eyes, given his mother Corrine Amanda Jennings was English. She was a consultant gynaecologist like her husband from the Tudugala Wijewardene family and they lived in style at Rayville, down Gregory’s Road in Colombo 7.
Family man: With his wife Seela
Says Rohini, “Even then (at kindergarten), he was full of imagination, telling us that their Airedale, Trixie, was a fox!”
Afterwards they both played the violin at the Junior Orchestra under Oscar Wagn, one of the three Danish Wagn brothers famed as music teachers.
After kindergarten at Ladies’, Ray was boarded at S. Thomas’ Mount Lavinia. Here life was not as salubrious because being half-English, he felt somewhat alien wearing prim striped pyjamas in the dormitory at night while all the other boys were in sarong.
As a member of the family mused, “He was already an outsider (being half English), but that also probably gave him this duality- which influenced his (unusual) thinking.”
Truly this may have been a major factor behind his lateral thinking.
But Ray also excelled at S. Thomas’. He won the Breast Stroke Prize, and took to rifle shooting. By the time his teenage years began, he was fanatically into planes, building models and flying them with a one stroke machine on the Colombo Race Course.
Says Rohini, “Hours were spent finding (the machine) in the long grass. With like-minded friends he formed a Model Aeronautical Club which met during weekends. What fun we had.”
At Cambridge University which he went on to, Ray took to gliding and flying at the Marshall’s Aerodrome. In between, when back home, there was golfing at Nuwara Eliya, “dancing at the Grand Hotel and roller skating in the big hall”.
Asita Tennekoon, a nephew a few times removed, recalls that Ray went to the Mexico Olympics of 1968 and was in fact the first Sri Lankan to take part in Olympics sailing. He also won a silver medal in sailing at the Asian Games in 1970.
Says Asita, “He was a veteran member of the sailing clubs at Bolgoda and the harbour and gave invaluable tips and advice to youngsters with promise.”
No 133, Dharmapala Mawatha the house Ray built, is the ultimate reflection of Ray’s love for the functional and utilitarian – a rather spartan building where everything had a practical charm – solid and comfortable with a grey-brown façade.
Oscar Wagn’s mentorship stood well, and Ray played the violin into and beyond his youth. He also played the harp and the piano, his eldest daughter Anoma recalling how he, unable (she says) to read music, would stick down the notes on the piano keys.
Mandy Mudannayake, the youngest of Ray’s daughters, recalls the music wafting through No. 133:
“Ray was… versatile on the piano, being able to simply sit down and play by ear excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No.1, Op.23 or the jazz favourite Misty and oh, with such flair! I can vouch for my sisters when I say that we are all moved to tears when we hear the haunting 1960′s classic “Windmills of Your Mind” which he so loved to play. I still stop dead in my tracks when I hear Bach’s magnificent Toccata and Fugue in D Minor as I can still hear him playing this on our old Hammond organ!”
Little known is that Ray was quite good at oil painting and Anoma the renowned artist says his work much resembled Cezanne’s landscapes.
He was considered particularly skilled at portraiture, having done a noteworthy one of the heiress Marjorie de Mel, his mother-in-law, which still hangs in the house. However Augustus John, the English painter is said to have ‘let him down gently’ by telling him that “while he was a talented painter, he would never quite make the grade as a great artist!”
“He was forever experimenting with everything,” says Anoma recalling the time he was constantly drying fruit with new machines he bought – the house redolent of dried fruits- or learning to use the blow pipe.
Sunela Jayawardene, Ray’s niece is a fount of tales of her uncle, and among the most entertaining is that of Ray kayaking with that English eccentric Major Roland Raven-Hart down the Mahaweli, with the Major waving at the villagers on bridges staring shocked at the stark naked white man.
Sunela calls it his ‘Yin’ side when she refers to a letter Ray wrote her asking her to send him a picture of a Mitchum Lavender Cologne label ‘next time she went to a pharmacy’- because the label brought back memories of sales at Ladies’ College when his mother sold sheaves of lavender for the CMS.
Like Sunela, Ray also believed in those hoary legends hanging around rock and water and toponymy of yore about King Ravana, who himself was an aviator.
Ray’s witty son-in-law Suresh Mudannayake will have the last word about what made Ray tick. Says ‘Ashok Ferrey’ with characteristic perceptiveness:
“As you know, Ray designed and built his own flying machines (I hesitate to call them planes, though they actually were, ha ha!) I remember being present when he had just completed one, and Podi Hamuduruwo came to bless it. We all held the pirith noola which encircled the plane, and it was a very spiritual ceremony held at dusk, very evocative.
“It was the perfect marriage, I thought, between ancient culture and modern technology, and embodies everything Ray stood for.”
| Tribute to the inventor | |
| Vidya Jyothi Deshamanya Philip Revatha Wijewardene (1924-2010) was a lateral thinker whose mind straddled many a plane – he was an engineer, aviator, inventor and Olympic athlete. He was Chancellor of the University of Moratuwa from 2002 to 2007. Known for inventing the Landmaster tractor, he was also an expert on tropical agriculture and natural resource management, subjects that he created a logical system to study. His birth centenary which falls on August 20 will be marked by a seminar on “The Potential of High-tech Innovation Economy” at Trace Expert City, Bay 7 at 6 p.m.
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