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Maymyo Days: Forgotten Lives of a Burma Hill Station
Stephen Simmons
River Books: 2023
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For a man who had an entire township named after him, Colonel James May has left little else for the historical accounts to mull over. After the capture of Mandalay at the end of the Third Anglo-Burmese War, May in 1886 led the Rangoon-based 5th Bengal Light Infantry into the Shan hills to pacify the notoriously independent region. At around three thousand feet, in the cool sweet air, they found a plateau that was both strategic and large enough to establish a campaign base. A small Danu hill tribe village named Pyin-u-Lwin stood there; nothing else. 

May set up camp. They stayed there for two years, long enough for the sprawling encampment to become permanent. It was referred to jocularly as May’s Town, a name that was officially adopted in its direct Burmese translation of Maymyo a few years later when the army base was laid out as a hill station. In 1900, when the town was connected by rail to Mandalay and thence to Rangoon, Maymyo became the summer capital for the British Raj in Burma.

As with most of the hill stations, the gentle climate unleashed the Home Counties yearning in the British, and with no necessity for housing designed to keep out the heat, a small corner of Surrey soon flourished in the unlikely surroundings of the Shan hills. Amongst the first essentials to be established were the club, churches for Anglicans, Catholics and the garrison, a polo ground and a chummery for the bachelor employees of the Bombay Burmah Trading Corporation. Schools, a hospital, a telegraph office and a reservoir soon followed, as well as a botanic gardens in 1915. Maymyo became so much like an idealised version of home that many were reluctant to leave for Britain when they retired.

Stephen Simmons, in Maymyo Days: Forgotten Lives of a Burma Hill Station, does not however dwell on the crusty stragglers of the Raj. Maymyo attracted gifted people: the talented, the unusual, sometimes the odd. Simmons is interested in those who made a lasting contribution of some kind, whether tangible, cultural or political. Nor are his subjects confined to the British. He stays away from the scandals that must have gone on behind the demure façades of villas and bungalows with names like Camberley, Audrey Villa, Red House and Lovedale. George Orwell, who spent a month in Maymyo in late 1923 during his Indian Imperial Police training in Mandalay, makes a brief appearance, his photograph showing a beefy-faced young man with a toothbrush moustache, rather than the gaunt, tuberculosis-ravaged image that is familiar to us today. Otherwise, these are lives that have been forgotten even though their achievements linger on. 

Only one violent crime is covered in the book. Early on the morning of Sunday, 17 May 1931, a riderless pony with blood on its neck and saddle wandered into the compound of a local official. The pony was uninjured and it was clear that a serious incident had occurred. Search parties were sent out, and early the following morning the pony’s owner, Lieutenant Colonel Henry Morshead, was found dead in the jungle. He had been shot at close range in the chest, and a second shot had peppered his back with pellet wounds. Morshead was director of the Burma Circle at the Survey of India, supervising the mapping of uncharted areas and revising existing maps. A skilled engineer and surveyor who had previously worked in Tibet, he was also a mountaineer and had been on the 1921 Everest expedition. The expedition had failed to reach the summit, and a second attempt was made the following year; Morshead lost a toe and three fingertips to frostbite before the climbers were forced off the mountain by high winds. His assassination in Maymyo nine years later remains a mystery.

Colonel Morshead’s lasting contribution to the Shan hills was in accurately surveying and mapping the little-known region, whereas Charlotte Wheeler Cuffe’s influence can be seen in the creation of the Maymyo botanic gardens in 1914. An amateur botanist who earlier had the distinction of discovering three previously unknown plants—one of which was named after her—she had been invited onto the botanic gardens committee at the discussion stages and three years later was appointed as Clerk of Works. Under her guidance the gardens grew from thirty acres to 150 acres. Maymyo Days includes a selection of Charlotte’s landscape and floral watercolours, which combine detail with a dreamy, wistful quality that she also used as an illustrator of children’s books.

A man who ended his days in Maymyo in obscurity but who had played a significant role in the final years of the colonial era was Smith Dun, a Karen who joined the Burma Rifles at the age of sixteen and rose to become Lieutenant General Smith Dun MC, the first commander-in-chief of the post-independence Burmese Army.  A hardy fighter who had won the Military Cross in action against the Japanese, he found himself facing turmoil and danger of a different kind when, at independence, factions within and without the army began competing for their share of the spoils. Desertions and mutinies weakened the armed forces and law and order broke down into widespread fighting. Dun, as a Karen and an outsider, needed full and unequivocal support from both politicians and general staff. This was not forthcoming, so he resigned in February 1949, handing over his job to his second-in-command, General Ne Win.

Ne Win makes another appearance during the poignant story of Princess Teik Tin Ma Lat. The princess had been due to marry Prince Sidkeong, son of the King of Sikkim, in what was clearly a love match. Only weeks before the wedding, the Prince was found dead, apparently of heart failure, at the age of thirty-five. The distraught princess, who was seen as a great beauty, was considered undesirable by any potential suitor. She drifted for several years until finding love in the unlikely form of Herbert Bellamy, an Australian orchid collector and bookmaker who lived near the Rangoon racecourse. They married in 1928 and a daughter, Princess Yadana Nat Mai, known usually as June Bellamy, was born in Maymyo.

June grew up and married an Italian doctor, but the marriage eventually failed. She had known Ne Win when he was an army captain, and now General Ne Win was the military ruler of Burma. Socialism and isolation had reduced Burma to economic chaos and he was deeply unpopular within the country. Ne Win had recently been widowed, and meeting June while on a visit to Europe, where she was then living, he made the calculation that marrying a member of the royal family, still held in great affection by the people, would strengthen his position. He proposed and June accepted, feeling that as First Lady she could help soften her hard and intransigent husband and change the direction in which he was taking Burma. Spoiler alert: it did not work. After five months and a violent argument, she left both him and the country.

Maymyo itself forms only a lightly painted background to these tales, as insubstantial as the township’s founder. Stephen Simmons has however done excellent research on the illustrations and uncovered a photograph of May, a Victorian Adonis of the kind that does not appear to be made nowadays.     

• Tags: Free to read, Kenneth Barrett, Myanmar, Notebook, Stephen Simmons