A Visit to the High Range Club, Munnar

Planters Hats of the High Range Club Bar

Established in 1905, The High Range Club first came to my attention several years ago whilst reading 'Where the Lion Trod' by Gordon Shepherd. The book, published in 1960, investigated how India had responded to her independence ten years on and what vestiges of the period of British rule remained inplace.

One chapter deals with various formerly British Clubs and explores the different ways each has adapted in the preceding decade. A good portion of this section deals with his visit to the High Range Club and the author suggests that this centre of the Munnar planting community was, perhaps aided by its remote location in the mountains of Travancore, even by the late fifties already out of kilter. He predicts that it would be unlikely to survive for another decade. Of particular focus are the rather unusual planters' hats, hung up behind the bar and which have the initials and dates of every planter who had been member for 30 or more consecutive years.

Fast forward over 50 years and curiosity - as ever- led me to Google. To my surprise I discovered that the club, unlike so many others, had survived and that not only was it still operational, but it seemed to have been preserved, at least physically, almost intact.

Several more years passed and then an opportunity to actually stay at the club arose. The time seemed to have arrived not to put off a visit any longer. I was finally set to follow in Shepherd's footsteps and to discover what The High Range Club was like today. This time though it would be sixty five years rather a mere decade since Independence.

I felt a good way to illustrate this would be set quotes from Shepherd's 1957 visit ( in blue italics) alongside photos taken from my own trip in 2013.

 We begin with his drive up into the High Range from Cochin...

"By the time this introduction to the plantations of Southern India was over, the Buick had slewed round another hundred hairpins on the tarmac road. We were now 4000 feet up and still climbing steadily through the forest. "

Drive up to Munnar 2013

"The clamminess of hot and humid Cochin on the coast behind us had turned into cool, almost Alpine air."

Looking back down to Cochin 2013

"And so, late in the evening, we arrived at Munnar, High Range…"

Let the tea begin, High Range Club not far away..

"Munnar in the brilliant morning sunshine was an invigorating sight a huge green bowl, topped all around by wooded heights and divided by a slow-moving river whose reeds and willows reminded one more of Southern England than Southern India. Nature could not have designed a better grass amphitheatre, and three generations of British planters had made the most of it."

High Range Club 2013

 "The club-house was set on a rise at the tennis-court edge of this stadium, an elongated bungalow with outbuildings sprouting untidily from each wing and a blaze of bougainvillea over the porch."

Bougainvillea at High Range Club 2013

Bougainvillea - High Range Club 2013

"Tennis courts ran parallel to the drive-way..."

 

HRC Tennis courts 2013 - Unsurprisingly still parallel..

"Next to them came cricket practice - nets"

Cricket 2013......

"a nine-hole golf course with tolerable grass"

Golf HRC 2013

"Inside, the club had the comfortable look of a sprawling English house meant to be lived in, combined with that uncomfortably empty feeling of a home which children have just left. Uncomfortable too was the impression that it was 'between lets' ".

High Range Club 2013 between lets ?

High Range Club 2013 between lets ?

" In the dining-room, turbaned waiters offered roast beef and Yorkshire pudding under portraits of the Queen..The men whether British or Indian mostly wore the common professional badge of a tweed sports coat ; but there was a strict division among the ladies between skirt and sari, and one sensed that this applied to other matters too. There was not the slightest hostility and not the slightest integration. Everyone seemed to have got used to the fact that they would never get used to it."

No roast beef in 2013 but food on offer was delicious

"The heart of the club was, of course, the bar. The Men's Bar of High Range Club, being the Holy of Holies, preserved for display all the sacred relics which this White Man's Temple had accumulated since its consecration...

Of these, the sporting trophies which line the dark wood walls the prize trout in glass cases, the heads of bison, ibex, roebuck, stag and leopard are the lesser glories.

Tiger High Range Club 2013

Deer High Range Club 2013

Bison HRC Bar 2013

"More remarkable and more luxuriant by far is the unique display of hats hung on nails which frames the main alcove, like bosses on a shield. This sprawling cluster of human headgear includes brown and white topees, trilbies, sporting felts, pork-pies and even a black bowler. And on each dusty relic is painted the initials or nickname of its one-time owner and the dates during which he swigged and sweated on the tea plantations outside."

 

Planters hats High Range Club 2013

Planters hats High Range Club 2013

"Each hat summing up a British lifetime in this remote but pleasing bowl of hills : thirty years of drink and lonely despair for some, thirty years of good company and boyish enjoyment for others. And the bar, which had been their common denominator, was now their common cemetery. This graveyard by proxy was to me more fascinating than any ordinary burial-place, for it was destined itself to die with its last inhabitant."

Planters hats High Range Club 2013

Would the Indians preserve it, I wondered, like the bagpipes in their Army bands? Or would they dismantle it, like Queen Victoria's statue in Calcutta? Already, the Indian members gazed at these human trophies with a mixture of awe and ridicule. Only the barman, a veteran of many hanging events', still regarded them fondly, with the unswerving wet-eyed loyalty of the colonel's batman. It was touching to picture him in the early 1970's, defending the sahibs' dusty topees nail by nail from the desecrations of an army of 'Sirs '.

Today the walls of most public rooms: the billiards room, the members billiard room, the ladies bar, the main bar, card room and hallways were crammed with team photos running form the Twenties up until the late Sixties. It seems again that this has not changed since  Gordon Shepherd's time.

"Gazing at me from the billiard-room, I suddenly saw the man who had driven me from the race-track. Saw him, that is to say, thirty-one years ago. There he stood in the untroubled spring of 1927 pink, fresh and slim, straight from his public school, and clutching the captain's rugger ball of his planters' team."

Sports team photos HRC 2013

In a daze only partly induced by the hospitality I was enjoying, I followed him down the years through library, reading-room, hall and ladies’ bar. The fifteens, elevens, sixes and pairs told their own tale. He disappeared from the rugger pictures around 1935. In 1936 and 1937 he was still among the 'flannelled fools' of cricket and tennis already far more portly: a slow bowler and a dour lobber, one felt.

 

Sports team photos HRC 2013

Sports team photos HRC 2013

"By 1949 there only seemed to be golf left. Balding and greying, he stood with his foursomes partner on the last pictures, the flush of innumerable sundowners on his face. From here, he had just one more monument to come that faceless effigy of the hats..."

Hanging in the bar today, amongst all the fishing trophies, hats, swords, sporting equipment, not to mention various examples of local fauna, there is a photo from what appears to be the early 1950's. I have put below a photo taken from the same angle in 2013. The quality is not good for which I apologise, but despite this you can see that the bar remains near enough exactly the same. Only the people are missing. The Club no longer has a liquor licence. The barman remains however and having completed twenty eight years of service he is hoping to complete two more and add his own hat to the wall. He happily served me lemon squash after lemon squash. Each one prepared with the same care and attention he might once have given to a Gin and Tonic. He kindly and patiently showed me around the room, acknowledging that his role had developed over the years from barman to a rather forlorn curator.

HRC Bar early 1950's ?

 

HRC Bar 2013

It is not just the bar which is so evocative. Other areas of the Club are equally fascinating in their own way. There is a wonderful squash court tucked away at the end of the library for example and a card room all set, waiting for up to twenty players. A light and airy 'Ladies Bar' sits empty.

Ladies Bar HRC 2013

HRC records

The guests billiards room

HRC The Lobby 2013

Cards anyone ?

Having read Shepherd's words so many times it was rather special to see so much of the picture they created preserved almost exactly. Interestingly though, despite the lack of people, it does not come across as a museum but a slight oddity that has somehow survived lost world-style, trapped 4000 ft up in the mountains of Munnar. What makes it so fascinating is that the people running it seem to have little idea that there is anything especially unusual about the place. The staff were completely charming and made me feel very welcome indeed.

The most surprising thing about the trip however, was that having seen the club in all its glory and not been disappointed in the slightest, the most memorable thing about the very brief visit to the High Range was not the club itself, but a hour's walk up in the tea plantations just above it. The quite ridiculously vivid hillfuls of green tea with their surreal zigzag pattern paths are an overwhelmingly beautiful and peaceful place to be.

Tea Plantations near HRC

Tea Plantations near HRC

Tea Plantations near HRC

May 2013