CHAPTER 1:
Maxine Iona Taylor Steller (Married to St. Mary's oldest Alumnus around, Fred Steller) #smsac2014
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| Maxine & Fred Steller in 1990's |
With this post we start a series of blog posts on the Steller
family. The Steller family has a long connection of over 112 years with St.
Mary’s School. Mr. Charles Steller was admitted to St. Mary’s School sometime
in 1900. During his schooling years he joined the school band and later was
part of a popular band in Bombay called the ‘Karl Starr and his band’ which
also performed at various school functions on the school grounds (There is a
mention of the same in an article in the 1938 school magazine). All his four sons
(Anthony (deceased), Frederick, John and Wilfrid also attended St. Mary’s
School at Mazagaon, Mumbai. Fred, John & Wilfrid Steller and Fred’s
classmate Rev. Fr. Richard Lane-Smith (you can read more about Father
Lane-Smith from our previous Blog of October 1st, 2013 (Blog post
link: http://bit.ly/1aFjEc9); all were
part of St. Mary’s School’s famous band.
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| St. Mary's School Band Pic from 1946-47 |
John later migrated
to Australia like his brothers and went on to become a world renowned performer
in the music industry, but more on all that in our later chapters on the
Steller Family.
Through this series, we not only try to bring alive the
nostalgia of an era of Bombay life long gone by, but also of life at St. Mary’s
during the 1930’s and 1940’s, a time that arguably formed the golden years of
St. Mary’s School.
We start this series with Maxine Iona Taylor Steller, the person
who not only, so kindly, has been a liaison between Fred and his brothers and
us but who also put us in touch with their batch mate Rev. Father Lane-Smith
who currently resides in Mumbai. Maxine is 83 and currently resides in Sydney,
Australia with her husband Fred Steller (Fred, who is possibly our oldest
Marian Alumnus out of India or within India for that matter. He is 88 years old
and studied at St. Mary’s during 1933-44, which makes him the oldest Alumni
around. Read more about his life at the school in the 1930’s and 1940’s in the
next chapter of this blog post series).
What follows is an excerpt from ‘Maxine Steller’s Bombay’
a post from Naresh Fernandes’ brilliant, nostalgic, evocative and must read
Blog ‘TajMahal Foxtrot’ http://www.tajmahalfoxtrot.com/?p=1672 which beautifully recaptures
the magical era of Jazz Music in Bombay. The passage reproduced below are
Maxine’s own words.
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| Maxine Iona Taylor Steller in 1946 |
Maxine
Steller’s Bombay
I was born in the Motlibhai Hospital in Bombay, India on the
23rd October 1930 and baptised Maxine Iona Taylor at St.Anne’s Catholic
Church, Mazagaon (In whose compound resides the St. Mary’s School).
In 1938, I joined my brothers at Christ Church High School and
was placed in Standard 2 with Miss Penner as my class teacher. Previously,
I had attended a private kindergarten and to have so many teachers and children
milling around was very exciting.
The dining room attached to our school was huge and the tables
very large. There would be a table reserved for each family and the
family ‘bearer’ would serve a hot meal every lunchtime, set out on a clean
tablecloth with cutlery from home. Chemun would carry the meal in a
‘tiffin carrier’ and lunchtimes would always be noisy and fun. When one
thinks back, we really used to eat far too much considering the heat and our
sedentary lives. Most people would have porridge, eggs and toast for
breakfast, then morning tea (elevenses), then a hot lunch of curry, dhal and
rice, then afternoon tea, then dinner at about 8.30pm which was an English meal
of soup, main course and pudding.
Wages were paid once a month in India, and my Mother would go
monthly to Crawford Market to buy sugar, flour, rice and all the other
ingredients that didn’t need to be fresh. She’d hire a coolie with
a huge basket on his head to carry her purchases back to the gharry (horse and
carriage). It was most important to bargain for everything as the
shopkeepers added extra on to the price and expected it. If you didn’t,
you were considered ‘weak’ and lost face. Crawford Market is in the
centre of the city. There are beautiful carvings over the doors of the
massive stone building which were done by Rudyard Kipling’s father, who was a
famous architect.
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| Maxine & Fred Steller in 1970's |
I remember when we were on the netball field at school one
afternoon, there was a huge boom, and window panes were shattered. It was
April 14th 1944 and the SS Fort Stikine carrying tons of explosives, gold
bars, bales of cotton, drums of oil, scrap iron, rice and resin blew up in
Bombay Docks. Her berth in Victoria Dock was ringed by 24 other vessels
and when she blew up she devastated 300 acres of Bombay Docks and reduced
twelve ships to scrap iron. White-hot metal from the ship’s plates fell
on Bombay a mile from the ship and a million pounds of gold
disintegrated.
During the war an English entertainment group called ENSA
started visiting hospitals and giving concerts for the troops and they asked me
to join them. They’d seat me on a piano and tell me to sing. From 1938, I
sang regularly for Aunty Hilda’s Children’s Hour on All India Radio,
and I can remember singing Over The Rainbow at the Bombay Town Hall when the
movie Wizard of Oz first came out. I must have been about ten
years old.
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Maxine Steller singing with Fred and Larry Steller of the
Broadway Boys band..................Picture from 1940's
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In 1945 the campaign for Independence had been stepped up and Anglo-Indians
(born of British or European parents in India) started thinking of where to go
when they were asked to quit India. A Catholic priest (Father Dalton of
St Mary’s School, Mazagaon) lobbied for the Andaman Islands in the Bay of
Bengal. He started the Britasian Club and put on shows encouraging young
people to attend. He hired a band called the Broadway Boys, seven
talented young musicians led by Fred Steller, who were very popular. One
day Father Dalton got in touch with my father and asked him if I would sing at
the next show. I said I would but needed a rehearsal with the
pianist. Shortly afterwards, Fred Steller and his pianist, Billy Cooper,
turned up at our house and my association with the Broadway Boys and the
Steller family began.
