Institutions of Imperialism: The Royal Indian Engineering College Part 1

The Royal Indian Engineering College (RIEC or Cooper’s Hill) was founded in Egham in 1871 on the insistence of Sir George Tomykns Chesney to train students for employment as engineering officers in the Indian Public Works Department (IPWD). Chesney was a former employee at the Thomason College of Engineering, Roorkee, India, former Principal of the Calcutta College of Civil Engineers, alumnus of the School of Military Engineering as well as head of the accounts department in IPWD. This made him the ideal person to pitch the idea of a professional engineering training institution at Cooper’s Hill to the secretary of state, the Duke of Argyll, who lent his full support to the venture. 

While other universities in the UK such as Edinburgh, King’s College London, Oxford and Cambridge had engineering courses, and an established system of apprenticeship existed in the UK, RIEC intended to provide specific instruction and practical training for the application of engineering principles for the demography and geography of the Indian subcontinent. They received a royal charter and began operations in 1871 to the distaste of the universities, as it was feared that the allure of a few reserved seats in the Indian Public Works Department would advantage RIEC over all others. The college was funded in its early years from Indian taxpayers’ money, supplementing it by charging a nominal fee to its numerous students. 

Sir Digby Wyatt was hired as the architect on the project and Messers Ashby and Horner of Aldate, as the contractors. This team had previously constructed the Royal Indian Lunatic Asylum at Ealing. Wyatt nurtured a special interest in Italian Renaissance architecture, touring Europe and taking meticulous notes before beginning his career. He would later publish large volumes on the same in addition to topics such as Mahomedan Buildings at Ahmedabad, familiarising himself with the architectural legacy of both Greco-Roman and ‘Islamic’ imperial pasts. He must have understood, early in his career, the deep relationship between architecture, power and symbolism.

He was the secretary to the Executive Committee of the Crystal Palace Exhibition hosted at Hyde Park in 1851 and he wrote detailed essays for the resultant  ‘Industrial Arts of the Nineteenth Century’ prints. His close relationship with the crown was emblematised by his Knighthood, Knight of the Legion of Honour, and a special gold medal awarded by Prince Albert himself. He was a surveyor for the East India Company, designed the East India Museum at Leadenhall (1801), the court of the India Office aka the Sultan’s Court (1867), the new India Office and public and private houses in Calcutta and Rangoon. In these works, Wyatt masterfully displayed the Indo Saracenic style which would later come to be celebrated in works such as Robert Chisholm’s 1905 Madras Grand Post Office, focusing on ‘arches and domes as its principal figures’. While these were visible in his early constructions, no such oriental or Indian influence percolated through to his projects with Ashby and Horner. This might not indicate a loss of interest or ability in representing South Asian architectural languages but has more to do with the nature of these projects, both being renovations on pre-existing properties as opposed to fresh constructions. 

In the years preceding the founding of RIEC, the Imperial net was tightening around India, and became more pronounced when faced with resistance. In 1866, Dadabhai Naoroji founded the East India Association which aimed at encouraging socio-political conversations about India’s future and championed greater representation of Indians in government. A year later Mahadeo Govind Ranade organised the Poona Sarvajanik Sabha, a platform to voice the needs of Indian peasants and to mediate with the government on their behalf. Soon after this Sisir Kumar Ghosh began the first Indian vernacular paper, the Amrita Bazar Patrika, with the intention of spreading greater political awareness among Bengali speakers in India. The awakening of society coupled with tonal change in British Imperialist ambitions after the 1857 revolt and 1869 opening of the Suez Canal allows us to contextualise the intent behind founding the RIEC and the design decisions taken with regards to it through the years. 

Figure 1 P217 Cooper’s Hill, overlooking Windsor Castle. Credits: Egham Museum

The RIEC was set up on a hill overlooking Windsor Castle, a view captured in postcards and poems produced on the hill.

“The wooded slopes here rise from the bank of the Thames at Runnymede

where Magna Carta was signed by King John.

The hill commands a view of these beautiful as that from

St Anne’s hill and the towers of Windsor (words omitted) the Thames glides beneath…”

” On Cooper’s Hill eternal wreaths shall glow,

While lasts the mountain or while Thames shall flow”

– John Denham

In King Stephen’s time it was part of a nunnery’s estate, following which the estate was sold to Sir John Denham during the reign of Charles I. It fell to state control during the English Civil War, before being bought by G W Harcourt and passing through various hands before being acquired by the Indian Government in the 1870s. The small district of Egham was ideal for the purpose of the RIEC. Photographs of local Empire Day celebrations, which can be found in the Egham Museum, depict young English boys and girls dressed up as persons from the Empire.

Figure 2 P1412 Empire Day celebrations at Egham. Credits: Egham Museum

The other site considered for the RIEC was the Oatlands Hotel at Weybridge, the site of a royal Tudor palace, which successively housed King Henry VIII, King Edward VI, Queen Mary I, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I and his queen, Anne of Denmark as well as King Charles I. It was demolished by Oliver Cromwell, rebuilt and lived in by a series of nobility before being converted into a hotel. However, it could not compete with the suitability of Egham.

“it is impossible”, Wyatt declared, “to speak too highly of the general suitability of the place (Cooper’s Hill in Egham) for the proposed purpose”. The estate was 121 acres of undulating hills considered suitable for teaching surveying, was near the river Thames, and was proximate to London which made the assistance required from leading engineers and scientific men easy to access. It had manicured gardens and a guest house for visiting professors. Most importantly, the cost of the building fell within their budget at £55,000. 

When it opened in 1871, the site offered to its students: a lecture hall with a seating capacity of 150, a library, a reading room, two classrooms each for studying and drawing, one model room, one laboratory, a dining hall, offices and residences for presidents and professors and a board room. In addition to these, the college had a wine cellar, a recreational room with pool and a sports complex with cricket fields, tennis courts, and amenities for rowing. The campus also had a chapel with stained glass windows where students were required to report every Sunday for service. Chesney believed that this regulation would keep students from staying up late on Saturdays and sleeping in on Sundays. The ‘good Christian men’ Chesney desired to send out from RIEC to the world were expected to behave better than that. Non-Christian students on campus may have risked being ill considered if they too did not partake. No evidence of this has been acquired yet as personal letters or biographies of South Asian students in RIEC are yet to be accessed.

In 1881, the college ceased to be a training school for the IPWD and was opened to aspirants seeking employment anywhere in the empire.

In 1906, on charges of being a loss-making venture, the RIEC closed its doors, to the sorrow of a community of alumni and their wives who remained in communication through ‘The Cooper’s Hill Magazine’.

The students who joined this college were boys and men between the ages of 16-20. With minimal work experience and high energy, they spent this formative period of their lives training to be professionals. As graduates of a particular institution, they would be perceived as representatives of it across the world, thus the institution took great efforts to breed a sense of loyalty to their identity as students and members of an everlasting large family even after leaving it. While still at the institution, discipline was enforced by regulating uniforms, meal and study timings, incentivising academic excellence and mandating physical exercise and military duty, 

Upon graduating, this discipline was reinforced with a sense of surveillance by an active alumni network that intersected across the globe. One means of studying this network is by analysing magazines produced by them. These magazines actively sought out alumni and updates about their lives through others, creating a sense of accountability and competition amongst all by maintaining a record of their achievements, mistakes and professional growth. 

‘He (The Secretary) will be pleased at all times to receive information about the Cooper’s Hill people whether they are members of the Society or not and also regarding the employment of or the fate of those Cooper’s Hill men whose names do not appear in the accompanying list (of subscribers) ’..

 

– Inner leaf of every Cooper’s Hill magazine cover.

by Shibani Das, AHRC CDP Student from University of Exeter