Rooted in the period that began at the end of the Gurkha War in 1815, are Mussoorie origins. Embedded in the public domain is the Irishman, Captain Young, who commanded the first Sirmur Battalion (later the First Gurkha’s). He built himself a shooting lodge in Landour at the other end of the station. It is named after the Mansur shrub Coriancanepalensis, which grows in abundance here.
Credit for our first school goes to a Scotsman, John Mackinnon, who retired as a schoolmaster and, in 1834 moved his private school from Meerut to call it the Mussoorie Seminary.
In 1849, Mackinnon downed his shutters to start a brewery. Afterwards, the 26 acre Grant Lodge, above the Library became Maddock’s School when the Chaplain of Christ Church, invited his brother from England to run it. However, by 1866, it ended up being sold to the Church of England for 12,000 pounds. Three years later, Rev Arthur Stokes was at the helm and became known as Stokes School — a very pucca affair — with very steep fees.
Illustrious alumni? If that is what you want, it included Sir William Wilcox who built the Aswan Dam; and another C. M. Gregory, who built many of India’s earliest and largest railway bridges. Others amongst them were boys from the Skinner and Corbett families.
Faced with a dropping enrolment, the archdeacons of Calcutta and Lucknow could read the writing on the wall. They decided to wind up the senior school and shift the preparatory school to the Abbey.
We must remember that in those early days, the only way to get here was up the bridle path from Rajpur.
Braver spirits walked the seven miles from Rajpur via Jharipani and Barlowganj. Those pioneers brought everything up the ramp of Rajpur: massive Victorian or Edwardian furniture, grand pianos, billiard tables, and crates of champagne – all the things that make a great hotel.
In March 1906, the hotel was ready for the royal visit of Her Royal Highness, the Princess of Wales (later Queen Mary), who attended a garden party on the grounds of the hotel.
Hardly had the royal visitor left, when Mussoorie was rocked by the Kangra Earthquake. Which knocked down the hotel’s turrets. Closed for repairs, it reopened in 1907.
After the First World War came the ‘merry twenties’ when the orchestra played every night as couples danced to set the floor afire as they jived, jitterbugged, rock and rolled, swung, tap-danced, waltzed and tangoed while jazz legends like Rudy Cotton played the trumpet.
‘There is a hotel’ wrote writer Lowell Thomas in The Land of the Black Pagoda, ‘where they ring a bell just before dawn so that the pious may say their prayersw and the impious, get back to their beds.
Through this archway have come emperor and clown, going from door to door, from corridor to lounge, from ballroom to balcony, tracing a century here and a generation there, in pillar and arch, vault and buttress. All of them ended up where it began: at the rosewood entrance, which throws its arch to span the corridor, hiding a treasure trove of history.